2.1Society, needs and wants, language

In Aristotle’s Politics (Πολιτικῶν) or Plato’s Republic (Πολιτεία), the founding texts of political philosophy, we (or I, at least) can read further that human society emerged historically, i.e. chronologically, ontogenetically, on the basis of human needs and wants. The manifold “necessaries and conveniencies of life”, as one of the fathers of Political Economy, Adam Smith, will call them in a later age, are provided by various kinds of labour performed in a division of labour, which in turn, with the multiplication and diversification of means of “subsistence, conveniencies and amusements” (Smith), engenders the practices of trading, both within a community and without, i.e. with other communities. Human being itself is thus conceived as, in the first place, needy, and society would thus be based on the satisfaction of need as a kind of large scale household or οἶκος, albeit that this ‘household’ is not a single unit under a unified organization, but consists of a web of enterprises or ‘households’ connected by exchange according to certain customary rules.

Thus we have in Plato and Aristotle already an economic explanation of human society and its genesis which dovetails neatly with sociation based on language as a means of communication dedicated in the first place to enabling and facilitating the acquisition of what is necessary and convenient for living, starting with those putative anthropological constants, food, clothing and shelter, and conveniences relegated to second place to be had only once needs have been satisfied. It would seem that language in an elaborate form, embedded in the vital practices of exchange, specifies the human species as a social animal that employs language, in the first place, to satisfy need and thus survive. For common sense, for anthropological and evolutionary theories, and even for empirically based philosophy, we thus have, apparently, a cogent and ‘reasonable’, even ‘indisputable’ ‘explanation’ of society and man as a needy ‘social animal’.

2.2What is λόγος?

But what is language, what is λόγος? Can it be thought as a means of communication? Of course it can, but is this the essence of language, i.e. what it is? What does it mean for human beings to have the λόγος?

The λόγος as speech enables beings to be addressed and thus called to presence, presenting themselves in their ‘looks’ (εἴδη) to the understanding mind. Beings present themselves as such to human awareness, and humans, in turn, can address beings in their self-showing (as in ‘the sun shows itself from behind the clouds’) through language. Such self-showing as phenomena and addressing by language are intrinsically prior to any communication among humans that may take place and constitutes its very precondition of possibility. The more originary phenomenal meaning of λόγος, as Heidegger often points out, comes from λέγειν, meaning ‘to gather’, ‘to glean’. In order to be beings and show themselves as such, beings gather or collect themselves into the defining outline of the view or look they offer of themselves for the sake of human awareness in which they come to stand in understanding to be understood as such. Beings’ self-showing and human understanding of them as beings belong together, i.e. they depend upon each other and are in that sense the same, equivalent, identical.15 They are of one ilk.16 The sight or look or view of beings is a self-collecting gathering into a standing presence by virtue of which the being’s well-defined outline as or qua a being can be understood and then also be addressed by speech. Understanding is prior to speech. Since Plato and Aristotle, as what beings show themselves as beings, i.e. ontologically, is called their ἰδέα or εἶδος (both words derived from the Greek verb ἰδεῖν meaning ‘to see’), their view that is open to view, their look and looks that human beings can see by virtue of the mind’s understanding. To break up this belonging-together of beings as such and human understanding is sheer folly, but this is precisely what the modern mind does.

How things in the broadest sense show themselves is how they are or at least seem to be, both of which are modes of being, self-presentation. The selfshowing of beings of themselves as themselves (as the Greeks say, their ἀποφάνσις) is what and how they are in truth. Truth lies primarily in the self-showing of phenomena, and only secondarily in the λόγοι or propositions about this self-showing. But this self-showing can also be distorted, deceptive, obscured or even totally occluded for human awareness, which means that then things are not in truth what they seem to be. Their shining is deceptive. There is then a difference between things as they are in their truth, i.e. their full unconcealedness, as they show themselves of themselves as themselves, on the one hand, and illusion, on the other, in which the self-showing is obscured. In showing themselves illusorily, things are playing tricks on and mocking human awareness (from L. illudere: ‘to mock, trick, deceive’). Things can even pretend that they are not there at all. They are then out of sight, invisible or forgotten, in oblivion. Or they can show themselves as that which they are not, i.e. as something else, thus pretending, under false pretences, to be something else. Or they can show themselves only partially, incompletely, deceptively, obscuring the view of other important aspects. For modern subjectivist thinking it is strange, at least in English, to speak of things showing themselves, but this is merely the prejudice of an entire age whose thinking proceeds foolishly from the ‘self-evident’ preconception that it is always under-lying (i.e. sub-jective), internal, subjective consciousness that directs itself intentionally toward external objects.

2.3Opinion: Holding things and each other to be (whatness and whoness)

Human beings, in being open to the self-showing of beings, hold them to be such-and-such. They hold an opinion or view about things according to how they seem to be to human understanding. In expressing an opinion or a view and thus in addressing things and calling them to presence, i.e. to mind, for oneself or others, human beings can either be deceived by appearances and express the view in accordance with the illusion, or they can express a view that diverges even from how things seem to them. This latter is the phenomenon of lying. Lying, to be sure, is one kind of communication first enabled by the self-showing of beings as such to human awareness. Things are then addressed not even as they seem to be to the speaker, but are re-presented to an other as something else.

The Greek word for ‘opinion’ and ‘view’, but also ‘illusion’ and ‘appearance’, is δόξα. Δόξα (from Gk. δοκεῖν ‘to seem’) is thus not only the appearance, view, sight or look which things present of themselves in their self-showing, nor is it only how things seem to be for human awareness, but it is also how things are held to be by human views or opinions (Dafürhalten). There is thus a double view or perspective: beings offer views of themselves as beings, on the one hand, and, on the other, they are held to be such-and-such in the view of human awareness, whether individual or collective, such views’ being capable of sharing.

There is a further meaning of the Greek word, δόξα, which is not merely another lexicographical association, but indicates an interconnection among the phenomena themselves. This signification is ‘reputation’ or ‘fame’. For, it not only holds true that things show themselves of themselves and as themselves to human awareness, but that human beings, too, willy-nilly put themselves on view to each other’s view in sharing a world. Human beings show up as such for each other, presenting a view of themselves to each other. Whereas things show themselves to human awareness as what and how they are in their whatness, humans show, display and present themselves to each other’s view as who they are and how they are in their whoness.

Whereas traditional ontology investigates the beingness of beings focused on things, thus on the whatness of whats, social ontology is called on to think through the whoness of whos, and not merely the subjectivity of subjects (conceived as a kind of whats), as all ontology in the modern age, starting with Descartes, has done, and as all modern science, in its simple-minded ontological naivety, implicitly continues to do. As human beings, humans are always somewho17 and not merely some-what or something. This is a phenomenon and mode of being sui generis constituting the proper dimension of human sociation, and demanding its own socio-ontological concepts and phenomenological thinking-through, as will be slowly unfolded in the following chapters.

In being somewho or other, humans also present themselves to each other in a certain definite appearance, look and view. Showing themselves off as who they are is what humans do in presenting a face or mask to themselves and others which makes them a person (from persona and πρόσωπον for ‘face’, ‘visage’, ‘mask’, ‘outward appearance’). They pretend, and must pretend, to be who they are. The view is never describable merely in terms of something resembling a physical appearance, but indicates who the person is in the community in question, i.e. in the ontological dimension of sociation. Pretending to be who I am to myself must also not be confused with the self-consciousness of a subjective consciousness that (not who) in being conscience of any object is simultaneously conscious (i.e. literally: co-knowing) of its self’s being conscious of the object, hence a doubling of consciousness or co-knowing. Who someone is shows itself as reputation or standing in the broadest sense, which covers also all deficient and negative modes such as the ‘invisible view’ of anonymity and obscurity. Whoness as a mode of being is therefore always already social, involving others in their opinionated holding you to be who you are.

2.4Showing oneself off as somewho

Fame, which is a certain, pronounced, highly visible, form of reputation, comes from the Greek φάναι ‘to speak’. Fame is how people speak about another as somewho, thus defining who they are by power of word-of-mouth. This speaking about somebody is only possible because each person shows off who they are in view of others’ perceptive and cognitive awareness. The being of a human is a who-being, a whoness, i.e. “that which makes a person who he is”18, which is how somewho puts him- or herself on show. Human being as social being is essentially showing-off, self-display, self-presentation, including pretence. Whoness is therefore from scratch a relational mode of being between and among whos, lacking the substance of the lead ontological concept of whatness, viz. οὐσία, substance, essence. And how does the whoness of somewho present itself to view at first and for the most part? It shows itself at first and for the most part as what people are customarily occupied with and take care of in their daily lives, in how they habitually lead their lives, i.e. as an occupation or vocation. The view which persons offer of themselves is first and foremost their occupation which others understand, i.e. they show themselves as what they do habitually in the intermeshed, diversified network of activities in a division of labour that contributes to the fulfilment of needs and desires in the community in question. Thus, the view of a stockbroker, a newspaper seller, a bus driver, a builder’s labourer or a housewife is offered to the view of others — and also to themselves, as a self-understanding, self-image or identity that is an average understanding and self-understanding of who one is in a general, third-person averageness of where one belongs in social standing, even one’s ‘social station’. One identifies one’s self as belonging to a certain occupation on offer in one’s world.

The view offered is not and cannot be conceived as a view open merely to sensuous perception, since whoness is not originarily a sensuous category, but is embedded in an understanding of human being itself as whoness per se within a shared, social world. Furthermore, self-identity is always a matter of how someone habitually lives, and is not a merely psychological self-image represented within consciousness, i.e. within an ‘interior’ representational imagining of who one is. Such self-identity is always a reflection of oneself in the mirror of how I live in the world, understanding the practices I habitually practise, i.e. identify with, as my own. Such identity with oneself is therefore always a reflection in a basic sense of the word, ‘reflection’, as a ‘shining-back’. The view or look of an occupation is how the who in question comes to stand and show themself, at first and for the most part, in a standing within the community and, accordingly, how they are spoken about in the view of others. In this stand they are held to be who they are — in a δόξα. The δόξα is on the one hand the defined, definite view into which they are gathered and offer of themselves and, on the other, it is who they are held to be in the view or opinion of others in a reputation whose element is the medium of the spoken λόγος for a speakingabout, including a gossiping-about.

It is therefore not only things that show themselves in their being to human beings in their whatness that can thus be addressed, but also human beings themselves, who show themselves off and present themselves reciprocally and mirroringly to each other in their whoness, and that, as has been shown, at first and for the most part, through their quotidian occupations. This self-showing, self-display, or presentation of a view to view, is indicated also in the medium or middle voice of the Greek verb ἀποφαίνεσθαι, which means not only ‘to pronounce a judgement or provide an account’, ‘to speak, to judge’, but also ‘to show something of oneself’, ‘to present oneself with one’s abilities to view’, ‘to show off’ (Benseler). The active mood of the same verb, ἀποφαίνειν, means ‘to bring something to light or into view, to disclose, announce, present’, ‘to declare to be’ or ‘to appoint as’. The verb is thus both phenomenal and phenomenological, i.e. it signifies firstly bringing something to light or showing oneself off in a certain light (φῶς, φαίνειν) or view (ἰδέα), and secondly it indicates that the bringing to light also takes place in the medium of the λόγος, of speech uttered in sentences about somewho.

The Greek experience of the being of beings is that of their being gathered into a delineated stand or ‘look’ and showing themselves as beings in the light of human awareness that is bound to these sights in understanding, which are thus addressable by speech. Awareness (the Da, the mind, the psyche in the Greek sense) is the open clearing19 in which beings can come to light as such. The clearing is the open, three-dimensional temporal clearing in which beings presence and absence, occurring as occurrents and occurrences, and into which the categories of beings as such — as thought through in the long tradition of ontology from Plato and Aristotle through to Hegel’s Logik — are inscribed, thus allowing a world to shape up and define itself for understanding. Humans share this temporal opening with each other and therefore can address for each other the self-showing of beings’ looks. This is what is commonly called communication, which is a communication or exchange of views on beings’ looks. Communication is therefore not an originary phenomenon, but is only an essential consequence of the ontological self-showing of beings qua beings; communication is a sharing with each other of the views which beings, human and otherwise, present of themselves as who and what they are. In particular, humans too show themselves and show themselves off in the light of awareness to each other in their whoness. This sharing of awareness of beings in their being and the mutual showing-off of humans to each other in their stands as somewho or other is the fundamental enabling dimension of human sociation within which all kinds of practical dealings with one another can take place. Human sociation is enabled first of all by the openness of being itself, i.e. the 3D-timeclearing, within which beings can show themselves as something and human beings can show themselves off as somewho. Since this openness is a 3D-temporal one, the showing and showing-off are a presencing and absencing in the temporal clearing that is not tied to a linearity or successiveness, but can be, and usually is, the mind’s hopping-about freely hither and thither through its three dimensions.

2.5The openness of three-dimensional time as the enabling dimension within which society is situated

This answer to the question concerning the sociation of human beings in society differs from the traditional answers, which nevertheless implicitly presuppose and take for granted the open dimension of being itself, which turns out to be the open clearing of originary 3D-time itself (cf. previous section), as a given. To think society as such as a mode of being rather than to think about society means in the first place, to think the originary enabling dimension(s) within which what we call society and sociation is at all possible. Traditional explanatory, ontogenetic answers, in terms of beings, to the question concerning the fundamental nature of society refer to the need for humans to congregate and band together to fulfil their needs and wants, the primary ones being food, clothing and shelter, followed by the need to ward off dangers emanating from nature and hostile outsiders. The traditional answer runs, first of all, in terms of needy humans needing each other to fulfil their needs, and is thus given in terms of necessity and cause, in order to survive as merely living beings. Humans thus come, caused by need, to congregate around a pole where they can labour and exchange the fruits of their labour and also find protection against danger of attack from the outside by keeping what is harmful at bay or by warding it off. This is a plausible ontic explanation led by the categories of necessity and cause. But such neediness and the fulfilment of need (which apply also to animals in their struggle for survival) are both situated and are only possible as such within the enabling openness of being (the time-clearing), including its disclosive truth, within which a world comes about and shows up. Need and desire are what they are for human being only by virtue of its existential (literally: out-standing) exposure to being in its 3D-temporality, understanding the world in a certain way, living life within the practices of certain historically established customs and habits, and being affected by the moods of the quivering of the time-clearing.20

To take the apparently self-evident, ontic considerations with which political philosophy has almost exclusively operated in reflecting on the constitution of society and state back into the ground of the enabling dimension of being itself is to ontologize the question of human social being in a way that hitherto has not been attempted. Why? Because to date an ontology of whoness as a phenomenon enabled to presence by the open, manifold dimensionality of 3D- temporality has not been explicitly unfolded, nor even come vaguely into view. It has remained philosophically mute, although inevitably quietly present. Ontology as the investigation of the beingness of beings has hitherto not considered the whoness of human beings as sociating whos. Ontology as we know it has been preoccupied exclusively with beings in their whatness, i.e. in the third person,21 i.e. with things and with humans considered as some sort of thing (e.g. as a being with a body, soul and mind). As we shall see, put in traditional grammatical terms, a phenomenological ontology of whoness will demand that human beings as who they are be conceived in the first place through the interplay between first and second person. These grammatical categories are socioontologically more originary than the relation of first person to third person within which human being has invariably been thought throughout the philosophical tradition. The dimensions of first-and-second-person and first-and- third-person name a fold, a twofold within the temporal clearing for being’s play of truth, i.e. of disclosing and hiding.

Human labour itself is only possible on the basis of human awareness, i.e. human openness and enpropriatedness to the open dimension of 3D-time itself. How so? Because, to be adequate to the phenomena, labour has to be thought in a Greek way, as ποίησις, as the bringing forth of products into presence through human activity. But don’t other animals also bring forth ‘products’, such as birds bringing forth bird’s-nests and bees bringing forth honey? Yes, but in another sense. The specific nature of human labour is that it is activity under the guidance of the fore-seeing, fore-knowing, gathering λόγος. Humans have the know-how of how to bring forth a product which is foreknowingly envisaged before it is pro-duced, i.e. guided forth into presence as something present and hence ready to hand. This know-how is a power or potential residing in knowledgeable human awareness that consists in foreseeing and fore-casting, and in this sense pre-casting, the final product to be brought forth and knowing what transformative steps are required to achieve this end, and what steps and actions have to be avoided and kept in abeyance and absence. Such foreseeing presupposes that human understanding sees both the present and the future ‘simultaneously’, i.e. that the human mind has temporally ‘double vision’, an impossible conception for modern science, since it is fixated on sensuously present data. All potential, all potency, all power, whether reliably, efficiently productive or not, is a ‘simultaneous’ presencing and absencing, where the absencing refers to a future that may come to presence in the present. What is absent is still futural, lacking presence in the present, but nevertheless present as this lack (which Aristotle calls στέρησις). If the past (beenness, yesterness) is also taken into account, then the mind can be seen to be endowed even with temporally triple vision that sees into all three temporal dimensions all at once, and that this triple vision is the precondition for the mind’s seeing movement/change as such at all. With the insight into the 3D-temporal clearing, all movement and change, including social movement of sociation, is conceived hermeneutically as presencing and absencing, instead in the traditional hermeneutic cast in which (1D-linear) time is merely a parameter lifted off movement. This amounts to a radical turn in Western thinking.

An artisan’s or other labourer’s skills consist in being able to perform the various necessary steps of production under the guidance of the foreknowing foresight of the end-product, and to correct the mistakes that occur, so that the initial raw materials and auxiliary materials are finally (τέλος) transformed into the desired product in a finished presence. Plato and Aristotle were the first thinkers to think production in its being as a power or force (δύναμις), i.e. a human ability, guided by the fore-casting foresight of the λόγος.22 Since the λόγος is insight into the gathering of beings into the sight or look (εἶδος) of their defining stand and is thus also the ratio or relationship of human being to being, it can be seen that labour as the labour of human beings depends essentially on humans’ having always already been gathered definingly into the openness to being as beings with an understanding of being.

2.6Living well and being somewho – The need to interrogate the tradition

To return to the initial question regarding what it means to think society in itself in its mode of sociation rather than to think about society: to think society as such means to think first of all the open, enabling, empowering dimension within which humans can be human beings as somewho or other and, as such who-beings, can enter into intercourse with one another to satisfy their communal needs, strive to fulfil their desires and share the practices that constitute their customary way of living together. The satisfaction of needs and wants, an economic end, is only one aspect of what Aristotle calls “living well” (εὖ ζῆν), and needs and wants have to be conceived in the broadest sense of all that contributes to a possibility of living well. Society is for the sake of its members living well (which in the fundamental, socio-ontological sense encompasses also all the deficient or opposite modes of living poorly to cover the full spectrum of the phenomenon in question).

Although both Plato and Aristotle thought about society as a way of living together to fulfil needs and wants, and although both spoke copiously about phenomena of being somewho (but not of whoness itself), such as having a reputation and occupation, being esteemed and honoured, striving for esteem, and enjoying an acknowledged social standing (τιμή), and that even as a good of social living, neither explicitly thought through the phenomena of reputation or the love of esteem (φιλοτιμία) as modes of being in a social ontology (which would have meant shifting the ontological focus in a side-step from an ontology of the whatness of beings to that of the whoness of human beings). Nor did they explicitly “step back” (Heidegger) to think through the open dimension of being itself as the open clearing which primordially enables a being to presence as something and a human being to presence as somewho. Needless to say, the long ontological tradition following Plato and Aristotle, too, has nothing to say about the open, three-dimensional temporality of being itself nor did it take on the challenge of an ontology of whoness (but only of whatness: quidditas, essentia, substance). This applies even to the present day in philosophy and also in modern-day social science, which thrives on having banned any question of the ontological difference (cf. the Foreword).

Only Heidegger’s thinking makes the backward leap into asking for the meaning of being itself, thus interrogating for the first time what Western philosophy has always obliviously taken for granted as a blinding obviousness. Hence his thinking opens future perspectives for history by re-opening ancient questions. But even Heidegger’s thinking does not bring the ontological structure of social relations into focus, since it is focused instead on working out and deconstructing the ‘vertical’ ontotheological structure of all metaphysical thinking to uncover the sight of the simple clearing of originary 3D-time which is also the playground for the play of ἀλήθεια, i.e. of disclosing and hiding. Although Heidegger’s thinking provides an indispensable, fundamental ground-plan for the structure of humans’ sharing of the world (Mitsein, Mitdasein), the task of thinking through an ontology of social relations, of sociating movement, in the dimension of whoness in which you-and-I and we can be, presenting themselves to each other as whos, is nevertheless left to us, no matter how much we still need to learn from the tradition, profiting from its many implicit clues and cues. There is a need to follow up, for instance, on Heidegger’s distinction between the Wasfrage and the Werfrage, i.e. the question of what and the question of who, present already in Being and Time and ask more insistently than Heidegger ever does what it means to be somewho in society. To think the sociating movement between and among human beings, the whoness of human beings — of us and you-and-me and them — must be explicitly worked out in ontological concepts so that they are not assimilated, by sleight of hand, to the ontology of mere things, i.e. to whatness, as the modern metaphysics of subjectivity still does.

To pursue the traditional question of how human beings could live well with one another requires, as a fundamental preliminary question, asking who we are as human beings, i.e. whoness as our mode of being — and precisely not the Kantian question, “What is the human being?”23 that puts thinking on the wrong track from the outset. The question of whoness — the whoness of whos as distinct from the traditional whatness of whats — precedes all consideration of why humans sociate or how we should act in social intercourse with one another. The long Western tradition of ethics and moral philosophy has consistently skipped over the ontology of whoness, even though key phenomena such as honour, esteem and social standing (τιμή) or vanity and vainglory (Eitelkeit) have been preontologically clearly in view and a constant theme. But it is the very ontological dimension of whoness that first enables a social standing or vanity, and within which any consideration of striving for individual excellence or of submission to moral imperatives must be situated. We — or, at least, I — need to learn to see what it means to stand as who in the open 3D-temporal clearing for being’s revealing and concealing truth, and to explicitly work out the socio-ontological structure of whoness, in order to even envisage our historical possibilities. This may contribute one day to our “living well” with each other on the Earth.