Foreword

This new edition of my social ontology, first published in 2008, appears with a new title and subtitle: Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking core phenomena of political philosophy. The new title is meant to demarcate the distinctive character of this social ontology from the social ontology that has recently emerged as an interest in mainstream analytic philosophy and social science. Whoness names a socio-ontological concept of human being itself in society. It cannot be defined in a couple of sentences, but has to be unfolded in a conceptual development, starting from the inconspicuous and apparently trivial distinction between who and what, which are not merely linguistic features, but phenomena that show themselves in their own right. Recent mainstream social ontology should be properly named a social ontology of intersubjectivity, for it tacitly presupposes as unquestionably given that human being itself is to be understood as the subjectivity of the conscious subject with its intentionality. This conscious subject remains a what, a res cogitans or ‘cogitating thing’, even when it is given a psychological identity. Intentionality itself is the directedness of the subject’s consciousness toward its object that is represented in consciousness. The social character of this subjectivity is then supposed to be captured by the collective or group nature of this intentionality: a shared directness of the intentions of subjective consciousness in the plural.1

As far as I can see, there is no attempt whatsoever made to conceptually develop and ground this conception of social human being. It remains simply one of the argumentative -ism positions within analytic philosophy, viz. “ontological individualism”.2 Nor is there any attempt to deal with the anomalies of an ontology of intersubjectivity embedded in presumably the most serious attempt at such an ontology, to wit, that of Edmund Husserl. There is no grappling with the question of the ‘inter’ in intersubjectivity,3 but rather an ontologically naive presupposing that this ‘inter’ is obvious and needs no interrogating. The individual is assumed as an individual subject without any attempt to explicate the subjectivity of this subject, its individuality or the sociality of this presupposed subjectivity as intersubjectivity.4 Thus this new mainstream social ontology (one could say: shamelessly) skips over its most crucial foundational questions. This leads to the new subtitle of the present treatise.

The “rethinking” in the subtitle indicates this inquiry’s character as a work demanding of the reader a willingness to think through in a connected, conceptual way the phenomena that are presented consecutively. This way of proceeding stands in stark contrast to scholarly works or social-scientific studies in which concepts are quickly introduced in brief definitions that presuppose that they are ‘always already’ understood without further ado, so that the phenomena in question are merely talked about rather than being thought through. Conventional studies do not demand a rethinking and re-vising enabling the social phenomena to present themselves differently from their initial, preconceived looks, namely, as phenomena pertaining to the whoness of sociating human being.

This deficiency is related to the naive preconception of ontology itself, in which there is no appreciation whatsoever of the ontological difference that characterizes all ontology (albeit of whatness: essence, quidditas) since its inception in Aristotle’s Metaphysics as the investigation of τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄ́ν, i.e. of beings qua beings, of beings simply insofar as they are beings. The ᾗ (‘as’ or ‘qua’) in this classic formulation of the ontological difference is the apophantic as sayable in propositions because Aristotle locates truth in the λόγος, i.e. in propositions, 5 which can be either true or false. The hermeneutic as, by contrast, derives from the disclosive truth in understanding of the phenomenon in view itself, which is per se pre-linguistic, although articulable in language. The apophantic As is at work already in Plato’s determination of language as λέγειν τὶ κατὰ τινός, i.e. saying something about something, addressing it as such-and-such. Correspondingly, the hermeneutic As names the circumstance that we humans always already understand all phenomena, even the most apparently trivial, that come into view as such-and-such, even prior6 to articulating this understanding in language, i.e. in propositions of any kind. Such understanding may well be also a misunderstanding, but it must be kept in mind that every misunderstanding is also a misunderstanding. The phenomena themselves can also show themselves deceptively, i.e. without full disclosure.

With Aristotle, the leading determination of the being of a being as such is its οὐσία, meaning literally ‘beingness’, but traditionally translated as ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ (quidditas, Wassein, whatness). The ontological difference is that between beings grasped in their ostensibly naked, ‘ontic’ facticity — as all modern natural and social science, in its entrenched ontological naivety, self-deludingly presupposes it does — and beings understood explicitly in their mode of being, that is, in the way they present themselves to the human mind as the beings they are, to be understood as such. The as is italicized to underscore its character as hermeneutic, interpretive. Beings are ‘always already’ understood, i.e. interpreted, in their beingness as such-and-such, and this interpretation is always historical within a given age. This hermeneutic as interposes itself between beings and their beingness, i.e. in the ontological difference that is everywhere denied and suppressed by all modern, positivist science, both natural and social) as well as by its hand-maiden, analytic philosophy.

The denial of the ontological difference with its hermeneutic as leads to recent mainstream social ontology’s naively presupposing the validity of its own implicit unexamined pre-ontological preconceptions and prejudices. This is not a matter of an innocent oversight, nor is it a conspiracy, but is the outcome of the consummation of Western history in modern scientific knowledge, both natural and social, that is fixated on controlling movement and change of every conceivable kind. For this scientific way of thinking, history has already reached its end-point and has ostensibly closed in closing off the philosophical questioning still possible as long as the ontological difference remains historically open. For it is only within and from the ontological difference that the historical (re)casting of an alternative hermeneutic As can be even conceived and thus undertaken.

In the present historical time of the modern age, the interpretation of thingly beings (whats) is unquestionably and self-evidently as objects, the very opposite of their interpretation in Greek philosophy as ὑποκείμενα, i.e. as subjects. Their beingness in the modern age is their objectivity vis-à-vis subjective consciousness within which they re-present themselves as objects. With Descartes and Kant as the most famous representatives of subject/ object metaphysics, we have inherited explicitly developed and minutely thought-through ontologies of the objectivity of objects as essential parts of their respective metaphysics of the subjectivity of the subject. The beingness of beings, the objectivity of objects, the subjectivity of subjects all emerge from the ontological difference which they interrogate and which has since been forgotten and repressed by modern mainstream philosophy. The other part of metaphysics, from its inception on, has always been the ‘theological’ investigation of the supreme being, no matter whether this supreme being is conceived as a god, or God, or the idea of the good (Plato), the idea of the fair (Aristotle), the highest good (Kant), the Absolute (Hegel), the will to power (Nietzsche), or whatever, whereby the beingness of beings (as idea or οὐσία) is often conflated with, and regarded simply as, a being (τὸ ὄν). All metaphysical thinking is thus bipartitely onto-theological, and the two parts are often confused.

A representative of recent analytic social ontology may now well say that this is all very interesting for the history of ideas, but is hardly pertinent to social ontology in the context of modern science, both natural and social, which has cut all theological ties. But is this really so? Even, and especially, when analytic philosophy and science eschew any consideration of the ontological difference, even when superficially readopting the term ‘ontology’ as long lost metaphysical child, they are both deeply embedded — whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not — in the ontology of subjectivity. They both also have a tacit ‘theological’ orientation, namely, toward the absolute will to effective power over all kinds of movement and change, both natural and social, which relies on the beingness of beings being pre-ontologically conceived as whatness. This hidden god of modern science, the will to effective power that has been covertly at work in all ontology since Plato and Aristotle, is all the more effective and its hold is all the more insidious for its being covert, for then it remains conveniently beyond questioning. Therefore it comes as no surprise that both analytic philosophy and modern science vehemently ward off with all available means any attempt to reopen the ontological difference, finally closed off through the rise of positivism, to reveal the hermeneutic as through which all beings are interpreted and understood in their modes of being in the present age. The hegemony of the modern scientific way of thinking has established its hold ubiquitously. For instance, why is it that average, everyday understanding will accept everywhere, even in the media, mention of space-time curvature as a proven ‘fact’ of mathematized physics, whereas reference to the ontological difference is met everywhere with stares of blank incomprehension?

Recent analytic social ontology baldly posits collective (or group) intention of will as its starting-point, thus revealing obliquely its commitment to the will to effective power, for this collective, willed intention aims at some kind of realization, i.e. a change, in the world proceeding precisely from this collective will. The “building blocks” (Epstein 2016) of the social ontology are said to be collective, willed intentions, whether it be the intention to achieve an intended goal or the collective intention to set up a given social institution such as a university, or the collective intention expressed in an agreement to set up the norm of a certain social convention. For instance, money itself is purported to be instituted by such a collective willed intention. The building blocks of the social world are thus conceived as proceeding from the individual will of individual subjects of consciousness collected in some way into a collectivity of conscious will. The ontological intentionality of these collective intentions is not explicated, unfolded or grounded, but taken for granted ‘as read’. Given that each individual consciousness is purportedly enclosed somehow in a subjective interior, how is a collectivity of will at all possible? The question is not even posed by recent mainstrean social ontology.

Nor is even the subjectivity of the individual subject explicitly unfolded, but taken as a given obviousness. Indeed, recent social ontology is content to muse over such “social facts” (Epstein 2016) of group intention, etc. and their relation to other given facts, invariably expressed in propositions, i.e. statements (λόγοι), resulting ostensibly in explanations “about the way the social world is built” (Epstein 2016). For this recent analytic social ontology, a social fact asserted in a proposition is grounded ontologically in terms of other facts explaining why the social fact asserted actually exists. Ontology is thus reduced to grounded statements of existence, without ever asking what existence itself means nor about differing modes of existence, such as that between who and what, or between the individuality and collectivity of subjects.

All these questions would require reopening the ontological difference that is held so tightly closed in the present age, one could say, ‘for dear life’. Instead of sticking with a social phenomenon to closely look at, i.e. intuit, it itself, it is replaced by a proposition asserting such-and-such, whose existential validity is then explained in terms of other propositions expressing other facts. In this way, the gaze is averted persistently and consistently from the phenomenon in question itself, ostensibly with ontological intent. This is hardly what counts as ontology in the long and rich tradition of Western thinking since Plato and Aristotle. To talk of “collective intentions” in any genuinely socio-ontological sense requires at the very least an ontology of intentionality itself as an aspect of the ontology of subjective will which, in turn, is an aspect of conscious subjectivity. Such ontology of subjectivity and objectivity has to be explicitly laid on the table for close scrutiny. It is woefully inadequate to simply assume the factual existence of “individuals” as conscious subjects and argue for a position of “individualism”. What mode of social being is an individual in modern society? What mode of social being is collectivity in modern society? The individual is not a bare social fact, but itself a certain historical kind of what I call ‘sociation’. This socio-ontological interrogation as to the individuality of the individual is expressly taken up and unfolded stepwise in the body of this inquiry, along with the question of ‘collectivity’, i.e. the sociating of a We. Such interrogation is only possible because the present inquiry is not oblivious to the ontological difference and does not blithely skip over the crucial, simple, but fundamental questions.

Let us now set out on our way (for those of you wanting to come with me) to make way, thinking through a phenomenology of whoness in order to see anew, reinterpret and thus recast core phenomena of political philosophy, including critical social theory and the critique of capitalism. I regard this hermeneutic recasting of socio-ontological phenomena as a crucial task of philosophical thinking in our age for the sake of the next historical age in which philosophy has relearned to see the ontological difference and, prior to that, has learned to see the 3D-temporal clearing that enables the ontological difference. The present age is that of the consummation of Western metaphysical thinking which has culminated in positivist modern science, both natural and social, that is (not without motivation) wilfully oblivious to its own ontological underpinnings. Analytic philosophy’s raison d’être is to serve faithfully as ancillary to modern scientific thinking. Its covert mission, more or less unbeknowns to itself, is to keep the lid on the ontological difference to prevent any hermeneutic interrogation of the beingness of beings in our own time. This is very different from the historical situation during the transition from the medieval to the modern age when the crucial philosophical task was liberation of the mind from the grasp of Christian theological thinking, for which philosophy was ancilla theologiae, to establish the modern metaphysics of willed, conscious subjectivity with its intentionality, starting with Descartes, who posited the self-certain ego as the ontological bedrock that continues to serve unquestioned, albeit tacitly, as such for all modern science. This Cartesian positing has cast us moderns into a certain, seemingly unshakeable and immutable, hermeneutic cast of mind that has long since become blind dogma, just as Christian theological thinking was the dogma of the medieval age.

The other prong of the transition from the middle ages to the modern age is that from feudal to bourgeois-capitalist society, which was accompanied by the political philosophies announcing and positing the free individual subject and the entire problematic of social and political freedom that has come powerfully to the fore in recent centuries. These influential original political philosophies (say, those of Hobbes and Locke), however, lack solid socio-ontological underpinnings, remaining mired in an ontological naivity. The free modern subject was somehow assumed to be the conscious ego-subject posited by Descartes, but its social nature has to date never been laid out in an explicit social ontology. The present work undertakes to do just that. Whether this message (Capurro) will one day get through? The core of this social ontology is one of sociating movement, a kind of movement sui generis I call mutually estimative interplay to be strictly distinguished from the sole kind of movement whose ontology has hitherto been worked out (originally by Aristotle), which is one of effective causal movement tied down to one-dimensional linear time, i.e. productive kinesis. For all its talk and analysis of political power and political power plays, political philosophy has never thought through an alternative ontology of sociating movement adequate to the phenomenality of social power, nor has it even ever felt to need to do so.

Interplay is therefore a crucial concept in the present inquiry, in a way the equivalent to the concept of value in Marx’s dialectical theory of capitalism in Das Kapital (which will turn out to be intimately related to the ontology of sociating movement). On the basis of the concept of interplay, the phenomenon of freedom can be approached as a characteristic of the sociating movement of interplay thus showing, among other things, that all freedom, if it is anything at all, is social freedom and also that all freedom, for better or for worse, is a power interplay. Of which, much more later in this study.

You must not forsake the ship in a tempest because you cannot rule and keep down the winds. No, nor you must not labour to drive into their heads new and strange information which you know well shall be nothing regarded with them that be of clean contrary minds. But you must with a crafty wile and a subtle train study and endeavour yourself, as much as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily and handsomely for the purpose; ... Howbeit, this communication of mine, though peradventure it may seem unpleasant to them, but can I not see why it should seem strange or foolishly newfangled.

Thomas More Utopia Book I

ME, Cologne, June 2018