Metapolitics and the Essence of the Political
The Pre-Political
We shall enter a discussion here about the political and philosophy, in the aim of what we call metapolitics, in order to understand the standing of politics and philosophy, and our standing within them. However, the words “political philosophy,” “politics,” “political,” and “political theory,” as well as the political as such, seem foreign to us, some affairs that go on in academia and only carry weight in higher education institutions and their dry technical textbooks. These words don’t have any nearness to us. We may see them in headlines or media about a presidential matter or unrest which may or may not be in our immediate vicinity, but their meaning has been lost or they’ve become connotative of something negative and something to be avoided, which in its course can cause us to become complacent and complicit, in our avoidance and negligence. Because of this, we want to bring these words out of the far stretching fog of remoteness and into clear nearness.
The reason for the loss of meaning and shortsightedness of these words is twofold. One is, like we said, they’ve lost their relevance to us. The second is that the political is something which is already fundamentally the nearest to us that we seem to have lost sight of it in its immediacy. Just as how every forest vanishes the moment we are amidst the trees, so too does the essence of the political.
The political isn’t something we engage in every four years or when local or State candidates are due for reelection. The political isn’t something we vote on every few months relating to budgets or bills. The political in its essence and everyday application doesn’t even touch a scientific theoretical analysis of what a State is or conceptions of its modes in a democratic or authoritarian regime. These things which we call “the political” rely on the condition of the possibility of something else which is in the first place earlier, that is, more fundamental, more originary and basic. The essence of the political isn’t itself a politics. Speaking strangely, the essence of the political is itself pre-political. The word “pre” here meaning something before, earlier. This something which is before, earlier, prior, already being there, is called the “a priori” in philosophical language. So then, the pre-political is the a priori political, something which was already there earlier or before. What’s this “before?”
To begin with, traditional Western philosophy, in its attempts to precisely analyze the human being with its theoretical schematizing and its tendency to make its subjects an object in order to be objective, has taken the human being as being any other sort of object that exists out in the world, and has isolated it and removed it from its world. The traditional way of philosophizing is to take the human being as some kind of consciously thinking biological something or other, whether as a rational animal, organic machine, or substance. Traditional philosophy, metaphysics, has viewed the human being purely as an objective scientific and theoretical subject with objective properties. While the human being is a conscious biological organism with objective scientific properties, this mode of analyzing seems to have missed what is most essential about the essence of the human being.
The human being has an understanding of being which gives intelligibility to it and its world. This understanding of being which gives structure to the world and the people in it, with their roles and social practices, is inherited. This inheriting we call “thrownness” in fundamental ontology. We always already are “thrown” into a world that already contains significance and structure, pre-made relations and ideologies. We’re already thrown into a now, a present, with goals and events pertaining to it, with a past and view toward the future. Whether it’s simply walking through a door or preparing for a future event, we’re always already “ahead of ourselves,” thrown into a project. The term “project” here is a technical term in our philosophical language. We are thrown into projects and we project ourselves as thrown throughout our world. As thrown, we project ourselves in and with the world, what we call being-in-the-world. As a thrown projection, we live in the world—we’re at home in it, we dwell within it. As a thrown project, we’re always already ahead of ourselves, already at our future destination, through the present, on the basis of a past.
We aren’t alone within the world and our ways of being in it. The world is a with-world. We co-inhabit the world with others: dwelling with them, dealing with them, caring for them, living with them, loving them, hating them, healing them, and killing them. We relate with and to others, ourselves, and the world.
As we said, we’re always already thrown with and into the world with others. We say that the world is pre-given. We already understand the structure of the world and the relations within it, although initially and for the most part, not explicitly. We have an understanding of the world that’s prefigured, which gives us significance and the mattering which gives the world cohesion. This works in the background of our social practices—non-explicitly, covertly, inconspicuously—hidden and concealed from our everyday way of seeing. Surely, if we were to be confronted with the pre-givenness of the world in our everyday dealings with it, our projects, it would withdraw itself from us and would cease to be authentically a world for us. The explicit presence of beings would be obtrusive to us. The smoothness and cohesion of the world in its significance, its structure, and its meaning lie, in a sense, in the world’s concealment from us—the concealment of its explicit meaning of being, its essence. In a way and, at first paradoxically, for the world to authentically be a world, it must conceal itself from us. The pre-givenness of the world is concealed, hidden, and cut off from explicit seeing, being something that is itself an earlier, a before. That the world is pre-given—and its pre-givenness—is concealed. And yet, it’s in this unsightedness and hidden concealment that the authentic essence of the world or, as we say, the being of the world, lies. We meet again with this “pre:” the prior, the earlier, the before, the a priori. Again we ask, what is this “before?”
We said that we wanted to bring “the political” into nearness, as its meaning seems to be lost to us, far off into the irrelevance of academia. At the same time, we said that the political is the nearest to us and, as a result, it’s become out of focus. We said that the essence of the political lies not in politics as such but in something more fundamental, something earlier, something before. The essence of the political resides in the pre-political. But this earlier, this already sooner, is something which isn’t explicitly seen or noticed, just as we witnessed in the pre-givenness of the world. This pre-given, the pre-political, is something which is hidden and concealed from us.
Fundamental Ontology: In the Footsteps of Heidegger
To ask about this pre-givenness, this a priori, this state of already being there prior, is to ask about being. Fundamental ontology is philosophical investigation into the nature of being. Fundamental ontology’s first and basic aim is to raise the question of being and its intelligibility: what is the meaning of being and how is it understood? But we don’t mean here “being” as another being among beings. We explicitly differentiate and partition here being from beings. Being isn’t itself a being. This difference between being and beings is called the ontological difference.
We note here that the word “beings” is a technical term in our philosophical language, and it doesn’t necessarily mean beings as any sort of living being. “Beings” means anything at all which exists in some way or another. Beings are the subjects which become the objects of theoretical or scientific knowledge and investigation. The word “beings” is basically equivalent to the word “objects,” but for historical reasons in the realm of Western metaphysics, we don’t use that term. This is because, among many other things, Western metaphysics has culminated, starting with Descartes and developing through Kant, in a “transcendental” schema, wherein the things which exist in reality, in the world, have become represented as “objects” which exist in the mind of a thinking subject.
The development of Western metaphysics consists in a very long and slow trajectory of a certain objectification of objects. The things which exist in reality became things that were apart from us and stood out against us as “objective” things having an extracted and independent existence from us. This developed into res extensa with Descartes, meaning the extended thing. Res extensa, the extended thing, is a thing as a body (object) which is extended in three dimensions in space and one in time. It’s distinct from the thinking subject, the “I-think,” res cogitans, which isn’t an extended thing. This is the origin of all so-called problems of mind/body dualism (or monism). The thinking subject as the I-think was further problematized as to what kind of substance the mind consisted of and how exactly it related and interacted with the body.
This transformed through Kant, where the thinking subject became a subject of reason which had representations of things existing independently in the world as objects. Extended things developing into objects represented as representations, sense perception as datum to the mind, to the thinking and reasoning subject, meant that we couldn’t know objects as the things they are in themselves. Things in themselves are cut off from us, as, according to Kant, we only know them by their appearances. And so there came to be a subject-object gap. Objects are transcendental, cut off from our genuine knowledge of them. This became known as German transcendental idealism.
The project here in its thinking of the things which exist in the world, and the human being, gets its footing from, and is essentially the same as, the project of thinking belonging to German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The project here is entirely against the way of thinking of traditional Western metaphysics, and we depart from it in a destruction of it.
It’s for this reason that Heidegger, in his development of fundamental ontology (inherited from his teacher Edmund Husserl [1859-1938] who founded the field), wanted to avoid certain words like “objects,” because to think of “objects” is already to think of things as they’re thought about in Western metaphysics, and we want to avoid its pitfalls of thinking. The things that exist in the world are called beings. They become objects and entities under a thinking which objectifies them—an objectification of objects. This thinking itself is a particular understanding of being. Understandings of being are interpretations of beings, and this understanding of being unconceals, discloses, reveals, beings themselves—in their being. And it’s the being of beings the project here attempts to question and bring to light, and our relation to being.
This was the task of Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and Time (1927). In order to gain an understanding of being, to find out how it is that an understanding of being is possible, Heidegger thought, we have to investigate the being who, in its being, has an understanding of being—that’s us, the human being. The human being who has an understanding of being we call Dasein. From German: “da,” meaning “there,” and “Sein,” meaning “being,” Dasein means being-there or existence. For Heidegger, the being of the human being is understood as existence (being-for-itself) by way of temporality. But this understanding of temporality isn’t at all what we think of in our everyday conception of time: that time is a continuous sequence of counted nows. In a rigorous investigation of the historical idea of time, Heidegger finds a radically different interpretation of time which constitutes the fundamental structure of the human being and which gives rise to the regular idea of time. It turns out that, for Heidegger, an understanding of being is only possible through this more originary, fundamental conception of time: temporality, finitude.
Existence and temporality. Being and finitude. A finite human life. Human existence and existence as a whole are able to be interpreted and have meaning, not on the basis of the way that time passes as a sequence of infinitely counted nows, but on the basis of our essential finitude as inexplicitly experienced temporality. The being of a thing is possible on the basis of its being held by existence. Our ordinary understanding of being interprets this as objective presence: something having its presence as being held by existence through time as something that passes with the ticking of the clock: presence. But this, the being of a thing being possible on the basis of its being held by existence, its presence, means the exact opposite of our ordinary understanding of being as time as what passes with each moment.
Being held by existence means the possibility of being on the basis of the temporal, finitude. Temporality in its finitude means the way in which temporality temporalizes itself. It temporalizes itself through a unitary threefold structure of past, present, and future. These three structural moments of temporality are the three essential dimensions of time in which we as the human being, Dasein, are the “in between” between birth and death, the way in which we are “stretched along” the in between.
As in between, Dasein is the most “outside itself” in its transcendence of itself. Per Kant, all objects exist external to and outside ourselves, and we can’t have any proper knowledge of them in themselves because we only have knowledge of them on the basis of their appearance to us. What we perceive as an object in the world is only a representation, a representation of representations: the image we see as “tree” is merely and only sense perception interpreted by our minds, consciousness, feelings, and biochemical processes: a representation. We don’t know a tree in itself, but how it appears to us after a filter of biological and mental processes. All objects are essentially cut off from us in a subject-object gap, a transcendental gap. But this way of representing hasn’t caught sight of what is most transcendental or what is most outside, or a more fundamental conception of what transcendence is or being the most outside. As we said, we depart from this traditional way of representing which has ruled Western metaphysics since its inception.
Dasein itself is the transcending. As this transcending, Dasein is what is most already outside itself. But this says nothing of the ordinary conception of Kantian transcendence, only that we transcend Kant and Western metaphysics in a sundering of this relation to being. Dasein transcends itself in its thrown projection of itself into a world, into a present, on the basis of a past and an orientation to the future. Dasein is already ahead of itself, has leaped ahead of itself, as attaining its future possibilities and ways of being for itself. Its past hasn’t gone by as what has passed or lapsed, but has-been, and Dasein has a relation with its past in a way which makes it fundamentally historical. In this transcendence of itself in its relation with past, present, and future, as what is the most outside itself, as the most out-standing, standing outside itself, Dasein is most properly ecstatic.
This structure of transcendence in its standing out, being beside itself, we call ecstatic temporality. Temporality temporalizes itself in three modes of ecstasis: the ecstases of past, present, and future. Time understood as temporality, finitude, isn’t a linear sequence of counted nows, but enclosed. As the in between of its birth and death, Dasein transcends itself in temporal ecstasis where, in light, relation, and interpretation of its heritage—its having-been—its future possibilities come to be in a silent anticipation, resolution, and choosing, on the basis of its present, where it’s confronted by the public everyone, “the they,” “the one,” what we call das Man, where it can fall into inauthentic being as “one does” or take up its own authenticity.
The people and things which make up the world don’t lie outside us in a subject-object gap. The people and things we encounter are right there along with us in being-in-the-world. We get along with them in the existential constitution of ecstatic temporality. They’re rooted and grounded with us, in Dasein, in ecstatic temporal existence. We encounter them in unconcealment, in a disclosure of the whole of the world, in being-in-the-world. They aren’t cut off from us, but are always already there, prior, in the pre-givenness of the world. Not the farthest from us, but the most near to us, as what has already priorly been given.
All this happens in the “clearing,” “the there,” the clear opening of being. The clearing as the clear opening of being, as in a clearing in a forest in which the light from the sun shines through an opening of trees and clears a lighted place in the grass. This open clearing, “the there,” the “that it is,” is that opening of being in which beings are disclosed, unconcealed, and revealed, and are allowed to come to presence within themselves. Beings stand within the light of being.
Ereignis: The Event of Appropriation
This disclosive clearing and open region in which the whole of the world is revealed and unconcealed is the happening of being itself occurring in its event, the event of appropriation, Ereignis. The happening of being in this disclosive and appropriative event is the essential happening and occurring of truth, aletheia. The activity of the event in its allowance of beings to come to presence is the simultaneous activity of the character of unconcealment and disclosure within truth as aletheia. The whole of the world is disclosed with meaning and intelligibility, belongingness and bindingness, and a sense of ownership, or “en-owning,” in which you are appropriated into the world as belonging to it and owning it, and it belongs to you and owns you. The event of appropriation in its character of gathering and drawing, appropriating, the whole of the world into the event as a sense of meaningful owning, enownment, endowment, and belonging is the meaning of the worlding of the world: the meaning of the world in its being, in the allowance of the world to be a world.
The world is able to be a world in its ability and activity of worlding, which means the breaking out of being into its event of opening and clearing, the event of appropriation as Ereignis, the happening of truth, aletheia: unconcealment, disclosure, revealing; the bringing-forth of the world in its being-brought to us. Ereignis is the event of the occurrence of truth. This is the essence of being. But we mean “truth” here in a more originary sense, as aletheia, meaning unconcealment. Truth isn’t fundamentally correctness, but unconcealment, which is the condition of the possibility of correctness. Beings in their world have to first be brought forth to us as being what they are in order to then be able to formalize conceptions of correctness or incorrectness, that this particular being isn’t as it appears and, in being incorrect in its false appearance, discloses falsehood.
The human being as Dasein, in its essence, is a world discloser. Dasein is the being who, in its being, has an understanding of being. It has an understanding of being on the basis of ecstatic temporality—its ability to always be ahead of itself, taking up its possibilities of being, on the basis of an inherited past, and projecting as thrown in a present. As the ahead-of-itself, Dasein transcends itself, into its possibilities of being for itself.
But this disclosure on the basis of temporality is a disclosure of finitude. The authentic human as Dasein discloses itself as a finite being who is already undergoing the activity of dying. As finite, Dasein is self-closed, essentially, within its temporality. The structure of finitude, existential temporality, is not linear as an indefinite sequence of counted nows, but is essentially enclosed. As enclosed, by being self-closed, a peculiar circle, Dasein is bounded (and bound to the earth). But this self-closedness isn’t one in which Dasein remains closed off. On the contrary, Dasein is also at the same time essentially self-open: a bounded ring.
The Soulfulness of the Soul: What is More “Spiritual” Than Spirituality
Dasein is bounded as self-closed as being limited, bounded, by its finitude—by its birth and its death—in which it always leaps ahead and catches up with itself in its encounter with the fact of its having been born and its future death. But in this encounter, authentic Dasein remains self-open within its boundedness. It’s self-open for its future possibilities of being and open to being. Dasein is essentially open as self-openness within its bounded structure of self-closedness. Dasein is its own “there” and is open to “the there,” the free and open region of the clearing of being. As bounded self-closedness, as being finite, Dasein is already given to itself and given over to its bounds, its origin. From its bounds, Dasein is already given to itself as the possibility of the action to begin. In beginning, in the authentic activity of taking hold of itself in anticipation and resolution of its future, Dasein begins as being underway.
Dasein always leaps ahead of itself, and so it can come back to itself and choose to either take responsibility for itself or run away from itself in its contrived forgetfulness. As being ahead of itself, Dasein is always and essentially self-open to the possibilities of authentically being itself or inauthentically being not-itself (Nichtdasein).
In whatever way it exists, Dasein exists soulfully. Dasein soulfully expresses itself and the whole of the world by way of its soulfulness of the soul. Within the soulfulness of its soul, Dasein exists in the world and can have the possibility to dwell. But what this says and expresses about the soul is more spiritual than “spirituality.” By way of the soul in its soulful rootedness and groundedness to the earth, Dasein has the possibility to be a steward of the earth. In its stewardship of the earth, Dasein has the possibility to dwell on and with the earth in its free and open plenitude. It has the possibility to cultivate and harvest the earth and its resources.
It can cultivate and harvest on the basis of oikonomia, or economy, but in a sense that is more fundamental to, and the complete opposite of, economy as something to do with financing, money, products and commodities, markets, and financial government activities. Rather, economy in the sense of the management and cultivation of the household as the meaning of dwelling. To be at home, to be in the home and in the role of taking care of it as your dwelling and the sheltering of your family—in the work of cultivation and harvest. This originary sense of economy is rooted to the earth. It means the working of land and the tending to its growth and abundance, on the land with your family, neighbors, and in the warm belonging of a community.
But this sense of stewardship and economy (not political economy) is an understanding of being which is far removed from our current understanding of being, which enframes the earth through the machination and bepowering of technology, which sees the earth as a vessel that holds resources to unlock and harness for the sake of profit and the unabated progress and growth of the corporate. The earth isn’t seen as something to take care of and dwell upon, but something to use and use up, to store up, and to be seized upon and seized up.
The Posthuman and Its Afterlife: Nachdasein
Here, we no longer dwell. We exist as and in what we call here the posthuman (Nachdasein). There’s no longer an earth to take care of, but a concrete corporate jungle which has sterilized and poisoned everything—including people, animals, environments, and habitats.
We’re characterized now, the ones who’ve been struck with this realization of the world in its disappropriation, as awaiting—awaiting for something under the disposition of silence and shock, in a haze of meaninglessness and nihilism, and while faced with the absurdity of time—a new beginning.
Metapolitics and the Essence of the Political
The character of thrownness is itself political: the state of our having been thrown into a world. The world into which we’re always and already thrown has priorly an a priori relation to the political. To begin with, we’ve inherited a capitalist world on the basis of government in a corporatocracy through corporate capitalism. We’re already thrown and disclosed into a hierarchical society consisting of lower, middle, and upper classes. The origin of this hierarchy is the founding and institution of money, reinforced firstly by the State, and then corporations and the ultrawealthy who own them. The State as the functioning and ruling of government exists on the basis of money and its ruling of the whole of society, which is to say, the State exists in order to accumulate and maximize profit for itself, in its own interests under capitalism. Money is the condition of the possibility for the ruling power of the State, and all societal and economic power. Money is the origin of all societal hierarchies. The formal conception of capitalism is privately owned means of production. Private ownership of the means of production is the origin of all capitalist motivations of increase, maximization, and efficiency, which means, the pursuit of corporate profit and greed over human life through the control of money, thereby instituting all socioeconomic hierarchies. All hierarchies are inherently oppressive, and the origin of hierarchy lies in the capitalist understanding of being as an objectification of objects as product and commodity: a transformation and development of the essence of traditional metaphysics as representation, orderability, calculation, objectivity, and machination.
In the pursuance of money as the accumulation and maximization of wealth and resources, the State has established itself as a global empire and has sought to increase and reinforce its empire. It has done this through imperialism and colonialism (and neoimperialism and neocolonialism) on the basis of capitalism. This is fundamentally a white supremacist project, hence a fascist project. The countries that the State invades and conquers are exploited of their natural resources and production in order to expand the empire and import the natural goods and resources of these countries. Imperialism is the expropriation, stealing, and exploitation of the countries the State invades and their resources. Colonialism is the settling and colonizing of these countries in the aim of uprooting and destroying native and Indigenous cultures for the establishing of the “civilized” and “liberal” (or conservative, as there’s no meaningful difference in the essence of liberalism and conservatism) European way of life. When a country that’s being invaded and exploited wishes to push back against this expansionism, the State, in its interest of wealth and resource accumulation and maximization, will employ things such as coups, which will secure its continued influence and meddling in that country.
At home, the State destroys and uproots Indigenous and non-white communities, above all, Black communities, under its operation of capitalism. The laws that the State writes and upholds are designed to exploit, extract, and entrap these non-white communities. The carceral state exists in order to profit from these communities, in the furtherance of white supremacy, fascism. Prisons don’t exist in the first place in order to keep peace and order in society, but to accumulate wealth through white supremacist policing. Therefore, at its very inception, the State exists in and as white supremacy in a structural, foundational, and systemic way. Fascism, white supremacy, racism, and genocide are systemic. They were already there at the founding of the State.
This is a fact of nature. This is the world we’ve inherited. We’re thrown into the violence and death of capitalism which occurs by the hands of the State. Thrownness as lendingness, in the sense of what has been lent, what has been bestowed in a handing down, discloses us as being enframed and imprisoned under capitalism.
The political isn’t fundamentally what is done in government or at the ballot box. The political lies in a fundamental relation between us as the exploited. This fundamental relation is a form of knowing, of knowledge, but not explicitly. It’s a form of understanding and a way of life. The essence of the political resides in the everyday relation and way of going on in the world. It has to do with the conditions of living and what conditions one lives under.
The essence of the political is seen in the average and everyday way in which a Black person is seen in public. It’s seen in the relation, the comportment, of the viewing and perceiving of the viewing perception on that person. The essence of the political is seen on the manor in the fields and in the dirt in which the Black slave toils. It’s seen in the everyday family matters of the slave owner and his white family and business associates. It’s seen now in the streets and marketplaces in which the Black body is surveilled. The essence of the political is seen in the ways in which society moves under capitalism. It’s seen in the way one is able to go to town in order to purchase a jug of milk. It’s seen in the way one is forced to enter employment and the life that emerges from the lifestyles associated with that employment: what it means to be a laborer or business person or clerk or food provider.
Above all, the essence of the political, politics, lies in the life of the community in its city or state. Politics is about, most importantly and primarily, the polis, πόλις, the “city” or “city-state,” in its politiká, πολιτικά, “affairs of the cities.” The polis means more than a geographic region; not just a place but a community: a collective social body where free peoples dwell together, cultivate, and tend to public and everyday affairs. Not ruled or governed, but instead ruling and governing the earth as careful cultivation and harvesting for the sake of dwelling and living a free and open life in a community of free and open peoples.
Politics fundamentally is about the reclamation of our stewardship of the earth through oikonomia, economy understood radically and fundamentally as the tending to the earth and land for the sake of our dwelling. This is a remembrance and reclamation of our souls in the constitution of what is soulful in the soul. The soul isn’t something that has physical existence or objective properties, but has nonetheless been forgotten, lost. “Lost” here not in the sense of something having been taken away from or stolen, but having been left behind somewhere and so having been lost. For as long as you shall live, you shall not lose your soul, but that the soul has now become something lost and misplaced and thereby having been forgotten. Politics, the political, consists in the reclamation of our souls and our belonging, rootedness, and groundedness to the earth and what it means to truly dwell on and with it as mortal Dasein.
~Das Dasein lebt in Seelenhaftigkeit.~
“[The human being] lives in soulfulness.”
