Being in Conscience: A Theory of Ethics 1648895336, 9781648895333

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
A Theory of Conscience
The nature of evil
The enhanced conscience
Subjective and objective time and place
Distorted worlds
Functional worlds
Inner-worldly temporality
Inter-worldly temporalities
Planetary functionality
The conscience-centric approach of economy
God as conscience
A philosophy of the future
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Being in Conscience A Theory of Ethics

Lambros Philippou American College, Cyprus

Series in Philosophy

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Contents Introduction Chapter 1

A Theory of Conscience 1.1 The traces of a generative process 1.2 The islands of functionality 1.3 The islands of functionality as ontological formations of the will of the being to evolve 1.4 The roots of conscience 1.5 The ontological manifestations of conscience A. Guilt B. Forgiveness C. Parrhesia 1.6 Conscience as a generator of values

Chapter 2

The nature of evil 2.1 The subjective evil 2.2 The collective evil 2.3 The survivability of evil 2.4 Confronting collective evil 2.5 Conscience before evil 2.6 Evil and its relation to reality

Chapter 3

The enhanced conscience 3.1 The living subjectivity as the live root of the functional models 3.2 Being in enhanced conscience 3.3 Being in enhanced conscience as a temporal leap 3.4 Being in enhanced conscience and the sphere of moral response 3.5 The survival of enhanced conscience after its death 3.6 The remembrance of the enhanced conscience

Chapter 4

vii 1 1 7 7 11 14 14 16 20 24

27 27 30 33 36 38 39

41 41 43 45 46 48 50

Subjective and objective time and place

55

4.1 The singular movement in time 4.2 Corporeal harmony and disharmony 4.3 The existential conditions 4.4 The rhythm of the daily life

55 56 57 58

4.5 The subjective biorhythm 4.6 Intersubjectivity 4.7 Objective time and space 4.8 The enduring aura of life 4.9 The rhythmic harmony of the world

Chapter 5

Distorted worlds 5.1 Multi-rooted distortion 5.2 The reflective deficiencies 5.3 The production of distortions 5.4 Distortions 5.5 The subjective and common time within a distorted field 5.6 Movement and time in a distorted world 5.7 The instrumental public time and the subjective places of silence 5.8 Zones of anomy and zones of justice 5.9 The indecisive confrontation between anomy and justice 5.10 The degree of functionality of a distorted world 5.11 The conscience of the distorted world 5.12 Sparta as an archetype of a distorted world 5.13 Crisis and the revolution of the subjectivities 5.14 Collapse and the dialectic of correction 5.15 Distorted material and the diffusion of islands of resistance

Chapter 6

Functional worlds 6.1 The subjective and objective time in the functional worlds 6.2 Existential conditions 6.3 Participation - The field of functionality operates as a regulating body 6.4 The conditions of rhythmic harmony 6.5 The timely correction of distortions 6.6 Fast-paced rhythm 6.7 The functional depth 6.8 The conscience-gram of the functional world 6.9 Athens as a prototype of a functional world 6.10 Change – the process of accumulation and divergence of functional models

Chapter 7

Inner-worldly temporality 7.1 Divergence

58 59 61 64 66

69 69 70 70 72 73 74 76 77 80 81 82 82 83 84 85

87 87 88 90 92 93 94 96 97 99 102

105 105

7.2 Corporeal functionality and temporality 7.3 The subjective mental world and temporality 7.4 The roots of temporal divergence 7.5 The effect of temporality upon the functional field 7.6 The antagonism among the modes of temporality 7.7 The mutation of temporality 7.8 Functional leap and qualitative time 7.9 The silent change in the lapse of time 7.10 The revolution of the everyday life

Chapter 8

Inter-worldly temporalities 8.1 The distinct traits of a worldsphere 8.2 Temporality as the borders of a worldsphere 8.3 Modes of contact among zones of worldly temporality 8.4 Functional convergence 8.5 Functional distance 8.6 Collision of temporalities 8.7 Cooperation of temporalities with functional affinity 8.8 Cooperation of worldspheres separated by a functional distance 8.9 Cooperation between distorted worlds 8.10 The communicability of a distorted world 8.11 The functional tide 8.12 The art of speeding up a worldly temporality 8.13 The zones of lost time

Chapter 9

Planetary functionality 9.1 The formation of planetary functionality 9.2 The unfettered flight of consciousness as a source of planetary functionality 9.3 The corporeal functionality as a source of planetary functionality 9.4 The technological impetus of planetary functionality 9.5 The monitoring attributes of planetary functionality 9.6 Planetary functionality and planetary conscience 9.7 Planetary functionality as the new motor of evolution 9.8 Functional inequality as a democratic inequality

105 107 109 109 111 112 112 113 115

117 117 118 119 122 122 123 124 126 126 127 128 129 131

135 135 136 136 139 140 142 144 146

9.10 The global yardsticks for a functional convergence 9.11 The evolution of planetary functionality

Chapter 10

The conscience-centric approach of economy 10.1 Economy and the functional field 10.2 The invisible hand submitted to the functional field 10.3 The minimal and the strong state 10.4 Functional economy 10.5 The great philanthropist as the offspring of the functional economy

Chapter 11

God as conscience 11.1 The identification of God with conscience 11.2 God 11.3 God as a fixed creative divergence 11.4 God as the functional time 11.5 God as the future of conscience

Chapter 12

A philosophy of the future 12.1 The zones of lost time 12.2 The nomadic nature of conscience 12.3 Functional time 12.4 The future as the future of conscience 12.5 Politics as a mini game in the functional dialectic 12.6 The functional chain and being-innothingness 12.7 Storing up the functional leaps 12.8 The ethical limits of the functional dialectic

148 148

151 151 155 158 160 163

169 170 171 173 174 176

183 184 186 187 188 190 192 195 197

Bibliography

199

Index

207

Introduction Humans, beginning with the Greeks, have long been caught in the problem of the relationship between the Heraclitean evolutionary flow of a world governed by justice, and the Socratic ascetic upon the subjective conscience. In other words, the relationship of the subjective microcosm to the cosmic microcosm. Two fundamental questions have been posed pertaining to the subjective position in a flow of forces that are beyond its grasp. Christianity inserts itself in human historicity by registering the problem and by arresting the motor of human evolution. Universal love, forgiveness and sympathy are institutionalised as marking points toward the future. Still, this did not offer a solution to the problem of subjective conscience and cosmic evolution. Hegel’s attempt to throw the subjective consciousness into historical progressive evolution was less successful. It is much later, with British philosophers, that ethics and Darwin’s evolution are brought into the picture. But still, such analyses did not escape from extremities, racism and eugenics. I believe fundamental questions have not been addressed, nor have they been solved. In this book, I am trying to answer these fundamental questions: What is the root of the moral sense and how does it connect with reflection? What is evil? How does subjective conscience root itself in the objective world? Why are some worldspheres functional and others dysfunctional? Why does human thought incline towards universality? In this analysis, I use concepts pertaining both to biology and to general ideas on how change is effected. I believe philosophy cannot proceed without the aid of many disciplines, amongst them biology and sociobiology. Thought, as E.O. Wilson has argued through his term of consilience1 – the unity of knowledge – has much to be gained by inscribing itself on an evolutionary plane. Evolution is in the nature both of humans, institutions and of history. Grasping its dialectic is enormously beneficial for human thought to understand the world. In the first chapter, drawing from Arendt’s connection of conscience with selfreflection and sociobiology’s argument that humans have an innate moral sense, I develop a theory about conscience. I specifically argue that conscience is a distilled essence of the subjective and objective collective human experience inscribed both within the corporeal structure and that of the worldly composition. The examination of conscience’s productive and evolutionary movement is analogous to the development of humans in the

1

See E.O. Wilson (1999, p. 12).

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Introduction

historical process. Nevertheless, while conscience is embedded in the corporeal, mental, common and reified world, its dialectic relationship with the functional field is blurred by theoretical and ideological schemes that are considered autonomous, each obeying time-specific practices and historical conditions. In the second chapter, on the basis of my theory of conscience, I analyse both subjective and collective evil. In the third chapter, I examine the presence and the role of enhanced conscience in human historicity. In the fourth chapter, I examine the movement of the subjective consciousness within the field of intersubjectivity, objective time, and place. In the fifth chapter I approach the problem of distorted worldspheres, arguing that distorted worlds have an undeveloped functional depth and are regulated by a mode of temporality that nurtures distortions. In the sixth chapter, I develop a theory about the synergy of forces that make a world functional. I maintain that functional worlds have reached a stage of functionality that is based on the intermingling of the subjective and collective conscience that are deeply rooted upon the functional field. In the seventh chapter, I examine the inner-worldly temporality, the rhythm that regulates the reflective process within a worldsphere but also the degree, the speed and the quality of the divergence from it. In the eighth chapter, I examine the interaction of worldly temporalities. Each worldsphere is positioned on a different scale according to the developmental stage of functionality it has attained; a scale that defines the functional distance or functional affinity with other worldspheres. Functionality is the primary force that regulates, monitors and directs the mode relationships among various worldspheres. In the ninth chapter, I examine the creation and force of transworldly, planetary models of functionality. Planetary conscience sets the new parameters for survivability and transcends the functional model that governs a nation-state. This functional model concerns the survival of the planetary world, serving as the new yardstick in the assessment of claims of functionality and constituting the new motor for progressive evolution. In the tenth chapter, I argue that humans identify the idea of God with the properties of conscience, and that the idea of God lies not in the past but in the future. I moreover argue that we can only think of the future as the dialectic process of conscience. In the eleventh chapter, I examine economy from the point of view of conscience and rehabilitate the “autonomous” economic game within the functional field. In the final chapter, I argue that the motor of evolution can be no other than the functional dialectic.

Chapter 1

A Theory of Conscience

1.1 The traces of a generative process As Arendt remarks, the ethical genius of Socrates is identical to the documentation of the dialectical movement of conscience.1 Socrates subjects himself to a constant division, and within the disparity that ensues, locates the essence of human existence. Socrates does not equate thought and thinking activity.2 Thought belongs to the figurable ontological world, to those things that have been frozen and cannot be unfrozen. However, these things – which we have done and are connected with our being – are not identical to us, though we carry them within ourselves. We constantly become the creative divergence of ourselves. It is to the actualisation of the split between thought and the activity of thought, between tangibility, visibility and the invisible mental world, to which we might assign this notion of an endless production of conscience. My words, my thoughts and my acts belong to the past. They have been confiscated and are held in public space and time. The thinking activity operates within an invisible mental time and space that does not share the spatio-temporal attributes of the common reality; rather “thinking annihilates

1 Socrates refers to a divine, supernatural sign (daimonion) in the form of a voice that restrains him from doing something but never dictates to him what to do, see Plato (Phaedrus 242e; Apology31d; Theaetetus 151a). Socrates says: “I would rather suffer wrong than do wrong” in Plato (Gorgias 469c). Arendt (1971) examines whether thinking activity, or reflection, is correlated with conscience. See also Arendt (1990, pp. 87-90). Jaeger (1947, p. 76) calls Socrates’ daimonion “an instinct and not the voice of knowledge.” Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics) also relates virtue with a contemplative life upon the truth. Hegel (2004, p.269) calls Socrates the “inventor of morality” in the sense that he goes beyond the “customary morality” of the Greeks and connects morality with selfconsciousness. 2 Socrates refers to a “talk that the soul conducts with itself about whatever it is investigating,” Plato (Theaetetus 190a). Arendt (1978, p. 185) comments that “it is this duality of myself with myself that makes thinking a true activity, in which I am both the one who asks and the one who answers.” Smith (2002, part. 3, ch.2, par. 32) expresses this duality as the tribunal of “the supposed impartial and well-informed spectator, to that of man within the breast.” Castoriadis (1997, p. 158) says that to put oneself as an object of examination “implies the possibility of scission and internal opposition.” Hegel (1977, p. 34, par. 55) says that “having its otherness within itself, and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the simplicity of thinking itself.” See also Kojѐve (1980, p. 39); Jung (2003, pp. 77-78); Shaftesbury (2000, p. 77); Sorabji (2014, p. 12).

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Chapter 1

temporal as well as spatial distances.”3 The thinking activity reopens and reexamines my reified self from the perspective of its own composition, which is under constant energy. Both what has been done and a process of its revision coexist within me. That which has been pursued are my acts and thoughts that have been locked into the unaltered nature of the common time. What is occurring at a certain moment belongs to an external reality. It is part of the flowing temporality of thought that is activated when it distances itself from the public time. It is displayed as a reaction and response to the need for a mental conception and a practical positioning that is posed by the external-to-self environment. This need is effectuated by the fact that thought becomes reality and its functionality is enlightened. This imaginary relationship with the world is bound together with my reified thought and the testimony of my actions. And because words are never identical to the things they endeavour to address, these residues of meaning and these orphaned islands of disparity actualise anew my thinking activity. Arendt’s account confines itself to pointing out that the absent reality is represented within the mental time by virtue of imagination with the aid of remembrance.4 Therefore, the field in which I attempt to synchronise my being with the world is reconstituted by reflective time. But one may ask, what is the nature of this field? This field is generated by a supervisory entity, a universal drive of thought5 which, as such, does not take the form of ontological schematisation. In this analysis, conscience will be called a drive because it has all the properties of the concept of drive in the Freudian sense; it cannot be dissolved, it cannot be checked and it cannot be silenced. It has also been generated by forces that exceed the powers of ontological thinking and its limited lifespan. It is the power of forces and energy upon ontological figures. This entity drives thought to scrutinise the ontological formations it employs

3

Arendt (1978, p. 85). As Arendt (1978, p. 51) put it, “thinking is not only itself invisible but also deals with invisibles, with things not present to the senses though they may be, and mostly are, also sense-objects, remembered and collected in the storehouse of memory and thus prepared for later reflection.” Castoriadis (1997, p. 159) calls this “radical imagination.” As he points out, “reflectiveness presupposes that it is possible for the imagination to posit as existing that which is not.” See also Bergson (1912, p. 94, p. 124); Spinoza (1996, p. 110); Locke (2008, book.II, ch. XIX, par. 1); Dewey (1933). 5 Freud (2003, p. 24) calls conscience a “special censorial entity” in the psyche that scrutinises everything and owes its existence to the embodiment of the prohibitions of society (super-ego) that supress the ego. Freud clearly rejects a human ethical impulse that drives us towards perfection; hence his stance towards the Christian commandments for universal love and forgiveness, see Freud (1962, pp. 56-57). Jung (2003, p. 11) on the other hand, refers to universal unconscious predispositions, that have the form of instincts – which other animals have too. As Bergson (1977, p. 161) remarks, “intelligence is kept under observation by instinct.” As de Wall (1996, p. 87) points out, “moral sentiments came first; moral principles, second.” 4

A Theory of Conscience

3

in order to address an external reality. My reified acts are reconnected again with reality and their conformity is re-examined. The constant flow of the external world is imperceptible through ontological schemes, except in the form of an ontological arrest of a flowing process which will always remain as such.6 As Bergson remarks, perception “marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended.”7 Therefore the measurement of my reified self against the flow of the external world, by means of a thinking activity irreducible to ontology, reveals fractures in my attempt to connect with the inner-worldly sphere on an ontological and practical level. Reflection, that is, the thinking of the fixed aspect of the self in light of a renewed response to the functional field – the sum total of the shifting external reality in which environment, culture and nature are indissolubly linked and with which corporeal subjectivity converses by virtue of processing its signals for correction – brings about a disequilibrium. The drive of thought is now undertaking the task of restoring, reviewing, modifying and bettering the thought. Through the reconsideration of the relationship between the frozen self and the functional field, the need for modification and correction appears as an imperative. This unfreezing of the frozen self and its reconnection with the flow of reality has no end.8 Arendt argues that conscience – the compulsive inner force that demands to do or to avoid doing something, regardless of the risk that the external environment may present – is the by-product of this reflective exercise within the splitting of the self.9 The questions that arise from Arendt’s account are: why

6

Spinoza (2004, p. 202) calls the external environment “nature,” and believes that it exceeds the laws and the power of human reason. Darwin (1985, p. 133, p. 189) calls the external environment “natural selection,” while Bergson (1946, p. 89) refers to this reality as a “a universal mobility,” a “tendency and consequently mobility,” fully perceived only through intuition. Durkheim (1995, p. 209) calls it “society”, Jaspers (1971, p. 18)) calls it “encompassing”, Luhmann (1990) calls it “environment”; Lefebvre (1991, pp. 416-417) describes it as “trial by space” wherein everything from ideologies to institutions undergoes a test and questioning. Wilson (1980, p. 284) understands culture “as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices.” In this analysis it will be called a functional field, wherein – with all the exteriority to natural and cultural consciousness it relates to – it develops a dialectic-conversational relationship in space and time. The functional field has the capability to synthesise the whole and to inform consciousness about both its own functional stage and its products. For an account that presents biology and culture as intertwined, see Richerson and Boyd (2005). As they put it, “culture is neither nature nor nurtured, but some of both (2005, p. 11). 7 See Bergson (1912, p. 278). 8 Arendt (1958, p. 171) points out that “the activity of thinking is as relentless and repetitive as life itself.” Moreover, she considers a concept “something like a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze whenever it wants to find out the original meaning” (1978, p. 171). 9 As Arendt (1978, p.180) remarks, “if there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects.” Thus, Arendt considers that Socrates’ moral statements are by-products, a moral side effect of the experience of thinking, “although he did not start his enterprise

4

Chapter 1

is conscience the by-product of the activity of thought? Can we elaborate further on the mechanisms that produce conscience and the constitutive parts of conscience itself? What is the relationship of conscience to existential conditions? What is the relationship of conscience with human corporeality? What is the relationship of conscience to time? What is the relationship between conscience and its biological history? What is the relationship between conscience and the functional field? Departing from Arendt’s account, I endeavour to develop a theory conscience. Conscience is not solely the by-product of a reflective exercise, yet the act of reflection is one of the tools of its generation. For this reason, it is important to further elaborate on the connection between reflection and conscience. Thus, we must distance ourselves from the singularity of the moment in which a reflective exercise occurs, and link conscience to an accumulative growth that assimilates and unites a mental and mood-wise web to become a condensed essence. The production of conscience is a by-product of the distillation of the sum of the human experience. It is the essence of being that is composed of both the reflective disposition and the web of what Heidegger calls moods. According to Heidegger, there is no perception without a mood, a state of mind that conditions and accompanies its understanding. As Heidegger says, “Dasein’s openness to the world is constituted existentially by the attunement of a state of mind.”10 Thought and perception become spiritless when we do not have them at our disposal and we do not actualise the moods that its perceptions presuppose. We truly understand when we are endowed with the existential conditions the words address. This existential field, by being part of the sphere of our being, is accumulated and fused, and is attracted to affiliated ontological schemes and forces. It is ruled by a compulsion to build them in

in order to arrive at them” (1978, p. 181). Butler (2006, p. 310) calls conscience an “approving and disapproving faculty.” Heidegger (1962, p. 319) defines conscience as a “call”, an “appeal to the they-self in its Self; as such an appeal, it summons the Self to its potentiality for Being-its-Self, and thus calls Dasein forth to its possibilities.” Kant (1996, p. 189), referring to conscience, talks about a dual personality, a double self within the self. He remarks that “this original intellectual (since it is the thought of duty) moral predisposition called conscience is peculiar in that, although its business is a business of a human being with himself, one constrained by his reason sees himself constrained to carry it on as the bidding of another person.” Durkheim (1995, p. 266) remarks that “although our moral conscience is part of our consciousness, we do not feel on an equal footing with it. We cannot recognise our voice in that voice that makes itself heard only to order us to do some things and not to do others.” 10 See Heidegger (1962, 177). Hume (2007, book 2, part 1, sect.11, par. 7) connects sympathy with the impression, feeling and sentiment of the affections of others. See also Hutcheson (1728, treatise 2, sect. 5, p. 261); Butler (2006, p. 75); de Wall (2006, p. 6). Smith (2002, part. 1. Sec.1. ch. 1., par. 10) notes that we sympathise because we experience a state of mind, and Mills (2007, p. 24) says that conscience is connected with feelings of love, sympathy and so on, though he believes it is not innate, and moreover, is not present in all people.

A Theory of Conscience

5

order to find a refuge in them; the disposition of the layers of the moods we have inside us form a bridge that leads us to the order of the external world and to other subjectivities. The proclamation of an existential condition before us may pass unnoticed if it does not energise the thrust of the moods that have produced it. Our subjective connectivity with the objective world is based on a mental and existential web that helps us to detect its various manifestations and to align ourselves with them. To understand the generation of conscience, we must first analyse the relationship between thought and the structure of moods. If words and things, ontological schemes and existential moods, are mismatched, why then is conscience considered a by-product of this orphaned scheme? Clearly, the time of fixed thought is distinct from that of the activity of thought. Likewise, the life of an ontological construct is not to be found within it, but in the depth, the duration and the configuration of the existential conditions that built it. However, the time of conscience is neither that of the activity of thought nor that of existential conditions. Therefore, we need to trace the mode of temporality that regulates conscience. Strictly speaking, we cannot trace the movement of the production of conscience, or what I call “islands of functionality.” This is because they are autonomised processes that are divided, each time, by the mechanisms that produce them, both within and outside the self. The web that is comprised of reflective exercises and existential moods produces, and is produced by, a field which does not obey human-made adjusted laws of time and space. It has been generated by biological time – through which the individual retains a mode of relationship with a spatiotemporal dimension that eludes its own faculties. As Darwin points out, “certain actions, which we recognise as expressive of certain states of mind, are the direct result of the constitution of the nervous system and have been from the first independent of the will and, to a large extent, of habit.” 11 This field constitutes what the human being, throughout its biological and historical existence, selects to be permanently spirited without being liable to the laws of the existence of any ontological formation. The human being is flooded with reflective and existential experiences. These experiences are not autonomous but depend on an internal, corporeally generated distilling faculty that

11 See Darwin (2009, p.69). From Darwin’s remarks, it seems that there is an intertwined web composed of states of mind, reflection and conscience. As Darwin (2009, p. 336, note 6) maintains “the result of all the facts I have mentioned is that the senses, the imagination, and thought itself – elevated and abstract as we suppose it to be – cannot operate without arousing corresponding feeling.” For a discussion of perspective taking and of attributing mental states to others for the point of view of neurobiology, see Churchland (2011, pp. 135-156).

6

Chapter 1

endlessly extracts whatever it needs for its construction. This faculty detects what it perceives as functionality and sustainability. This field autonomises from both consciousness and the existential conditions, building a repository of models of functionality. When consciousness is called on to construct its ontological and practical orientation within the world, it employs tools from this functional pool. When something is judged to be a conscience-yielding element, it is correspondingly absorbed by the field of conscience in order to construct the functional network for which it is destined. This very element, from the moment it becomes part of conscience, loses its distinct identity. The identity loss is immediate, because the field of conscience continuously supplements a core that is irreducible to the elements that form it. While this core discharges whatever it stores from its spatio-temporal and ontological dependencies, it places it in its own autonomous processes. Therefore, when an island of functionality is placed within this core, it is ordered in a mapping of models of functionality that is under energy. It supplements and verifies existing models of functionality; that is, whatever the human being has crystallised from the whole of their experience. The functional zones are those within the human being that survive time. They can be neither obliterated nor forgotten; they maintain a corporeal-like presence. Neither consciousness, reflection, nor being can retain a durable presence, but can become easily uprooted from their source. Only conscience has this property of being a permanent presence. Being in conscience excludes falling into instrumentality. Aristotle notes that, “no function of man has so much permanence as virtuous activities.”12 We cannot be uprooted by our conscience. While we can be betrayed by our memory, we can never be betrayed by our conscience. The core of conscience is in itself autonomised and operates according to its own processes of restructuring and accumulation, which are related to the models of functionality that it constructed. These models obey a communicative network: one part informs and adapts in relation to the others, and this interaction itself manufactures models of functionality. Therefore, the field of conscience forms its own productive mechanisms which, in turn, reposition, supplement and augment it. This process is irreducible to consciousness and belongs to a different energetic field within the human which extracts models of functionality.

12 See Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1100b). Heidegger (1962, p. 319), by situating the being-guilty before conscience, says: “Conscience summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the ‘They’.”

A Theory of Conscience

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1.2 The islands of functionality What, more precisely, are these islands of functionality? Islands of functionality are the outcome of the autonomous composition and enhancement of the residue of functional meaning, which is the result of the intensive juxtaposition of thought, reason and the functional field. The islands are built through the detachment of meaning and its elevation to another state of maximum proximity whereby actual reality and its mental conception reach a coincidence that cannot be altered by the flow of the time. Thereafter, meaning no longer resides within the imaginary field because it has accomplished its mission – which is that of the closest approximation of the thought and object. The relationship between the mental sphere and actual reality attains such a scale of refinement that any divergence is impossible to detect. This means that thinking cannot operate any further, and thus gives way to a different conscience-registering process. At this point reflection ceases; words penetrate reality and vice versa. The meaning is absorbed, compartmentalised, and fixed by the zones of functionality that settle in the being. The islands of functionality emerge from the accumulation of meaning at the moment when the distance between words and actual reality is lessened to such a degree that the possibility of the duration of their existential and mental relation is erased. The intensity of this approximation creates a semblance of the functional islands, which absorb the newly-formed material that is discharged within the entire zone of conscience. The functional islands are created by a crisis and, therefore, out of a series of corrective responses to it. Their main trait is their durability, continuity and viability. By sustaining their juxtaposition with the external reality, they reveal their ontological endurance. Therefore, what cannot survive the movement from one point to the next and cannot be attested to by the worldly sphere, cannot become a model of functionality. The reflective ascetic is moved by the predisposition to construct sustainable mental schemes. But what can be viable needs to be functional as well. That is, the communicative condition must not raise doubts about itself but, instead, should provide a lasting mental and existential possibility for its synchronisation. The islands of functionality, through condensation of the essence of human experience, attract the subjective population by actualising within themselves the mental and existential material that is necessary for their adjustment to the islands of functionality. 1.3 The islands of functionality as ontological formations of the will of the being to evolve The islands of functionality are formations that result from a being’s resolute, organic will to survive. The human being has an internally-mapped orientation

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for its own biological and social survival, resulting from the bio-rhythmic equilibrium and its recognition that manifests itself in this very equilibrium. As Lefebvre points out, “long before the analysing, separating intellect, long before formal knowledge, there was an intelligence of the body.”13 These mutable parameters of survival14 have deep biological roots, just as the compulsion to build and rebuild conscience is biologically rooted. They are the guidelines that determine an organic form of conscience; that is, cooperation, altruism, goodness and love. The human corporeal structure is itself the product of the evolution of a corporeal conscience that has transmitted its energy and effectuated conscience as a specific entity. There is no gap between biological and social evolution; rather there is an intersection of their moral systems. E.O. Wilson’s15 sociobiology, although it

13 See Lefebvre (1991, p. 174). Spinoza (1996, 40) points out that the human mind “should be understood by the union of mind and body.” Kant (1996, p. 13) remarks that “human choice, however, is a choice that can indeed be affected but not determined by impulses.” Schopenhauer (1966, p. 16, p. 245; 1969, p. 326) notes that the human body is the objectification, the representation and the visibility of the will. Freud (1991, p. 105) hypothesises that there is “an organic basis for the mental event” that needs to be examined. Castoriadis (1997, p. 179) refers to “corporeal imagination”; as he argues, “the body is already imagination, because it transforms external shocks into something.” From the perspective of neurobiology, Churchland (2011, p. 30) affirms that “brains are organised to seek well-being, and to seek relief from ill-being.” 14 P. Thompson (2002) describes these parameters of survival as “fitness-enhancing” for a specific population. See also Richards (1986, p. 272); de Wall (1996, p. 207); Sober and Wilson (1998, p. 150); Krebs (2011, p. 27); Axelrod (1984, pp. 136-139) and Kitcher (2011). I include utilitarianism in the moral theories that contribute to the definition of the parameters of survival of a moral community. See specifically Sidgwick’s (1981, pp. 199216) analysis where he attempts to reconcile intuitionism with utilitarianism. As Mill (2007, p. 15, p. 44) remarks, the principle of utility prescribes the association between one’s personal happiness with the happiness, interest or security of society. See also Aristotle (Politics 1253a); Spinoza (2004, p. 298; 1996, p. 126, 138); Locke (2008, book I, ch. III, par. 5); Shaftesbury (2000, p. 192); Hutcheson (Treatise 2, sect. 1, 211; 2008, p. 141); Durkheim (1992, p. 24;1995, p. 209); Piaget (1948, p. 204). 15 E.O. Wilson’s (1978; 1980, pp. 278-279, 1984, p. 56, 1999, pp.197-228) attempt to correlate sociobiology and social sciences is at least as troublesome and sometimes as problematic as Darwin’s (2004, pp. 194-230) endeavour in some regards. For a critique of E.O. Wilson, see Kitcher (1984); Ayala (1987); Singer (2011, pp. 64-86). For different accounts of sociobiology, see Richards (1986, 2013); Alexander (1987); Thompson, P. (1999, 2002); Ruse (2012, pp. 175-177; 2019); Petrinovich (1995); de Wall (1996); Sober and Wilson (1998); Boehm (2001, pp. 129-272); (Hrdy 2011) and D.S. Wilson (2015). Cultural evolution sets its own rules of morality that surpass those of biological evolution, see Dawkins (2006b, pp. 200-201). Nevertheless, morality has a deeply programmed predisposition, and this must be taken into account. Hegel (1977, p.377, par.622) points out that moral self-consciousness is not “in earnest with the elimination of inclinations and impulses, for it is just these that are the self-realising self-consciousness.” As Bergson (1977, p. 273) formulates, “since these dispositions of the species subsist, immutable, deep within us, it is impossible that moralists and sociologists should not find it necessary to take them into account.” For an analysis that seeks to accommodate some basic axioms of biology, see Fukuyama (2011).

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offers insights and general outlines for cultural evolution, does not go far enough – given that we can clearly delineate the forces that mark the evolutionary path towards the human – as Kitcher points out.16 It is here argued that these evolutionary forces are correlated with a conscience that acts as a force of dissociation with our past and reconfiguration of our future. In this sense, cultural evolution cannot ignore the findings of biology, since they are bound together by shared schemata based on the operating of functional selective pressures. As Richerson and Boyd argue, “to ask whether behaviour is determined by genes or environment does not make sense.”17 There will always be an organic bridge between the two, whereby the biological foundation of the parameters of survival is adjusted to the achievements of historicity, even if these are experienced prior to their historical appearance. Social pathologies experienced initially as pathologies of the human being and the adjusted moral system begin with both and concern both. The prescription for mapping the parameters of survival remains intact within the human being, and establishes and re-establishes the link with human historicity, which consists, in fact, of an enrichment of the functional field that includes it. That which is transformed and does not remain inert are the parameters of survival that modify the moral system that is continually adjusted. I see Darwin’s theory of human evolution as a process whereby morality changes through conscience-building.18 What results from Darwin’s theory is that human evolutionary processes are driven by a will for the growth of conscience, in effect, the motor of human evolution. There is a force at work; namely, ethical selection. This very fact allows us to consider morality, as does

16 Kitcher (1985, p. 165) encapsulates the problem of sociobiologists when dealing with human nature as follows: they “propose to use their premature generalisations about animals as the bases for grand accounts on human nature.” 17 Richerson and Boyd (2005, p. 9). As they put it “every bit of behaviour (or physiology or morphology, for that matter) of every single organism living on the face of the earth results from the interaction of genetic information stored in the developing organism and the properties of its environment.” See also Tomasello (2019, p. 312); Dewey (1930, p. 10); Wuketits (1986, p. 199); Peters (1999, p. 421). 18 In my analysis I reject social Darwinism, that is, the survival of the fittest, as it is advocated, (at least at some points), for example by Spencer (1904, p. 475). As Huxley (1893, pp.6-7) remarks, civilisation established moral codes that punish the traits associated with the struggle for existence to an extent that they become defects. In doing so, what he calls “ethical process” encourages those who “are ethically the best” (33). Richards (2013, p. 38) stresses that “not only did Darwin construe natural selection as producing moral creatures; he conceived of natural selection itself as a moral and intelligent agent.” See also Ruse (1999, 2012, pp. 168-169, 2017, p. 50, 149-150, 2019, pp. 148-149); de Waal (2006, pp. 16-17); Krebs (2011, pp. 40-50). This is one aspect of Darwin’s theory that Nietzsche (2008, pp. 13-14, 59) completely ignores.

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de Waal,19 as an integral part of human nature that is subject to an evolutionary perspective. Darwin believes that humans have an innate conscience that grows through reason and experience;20 thus, we can infer that conscience is not only biologically grafted but is also the motor driving evolution towards human intelligence. As Trivers points out: “Given the psychological and cognitive complexity the system acquires, one may wonder to what extend the importance of altruism in human evolution set up a selection pressure for psychological and cognitive powers which partly contributed to the large increase in hominid brain size during the Pleistocene.” 21 This very fact situates humans on a different evolutionary path from that of the animal, and explains human moral genius, and – that which puzzles evolutionary biologists – altruism. From a Freudian perspective, selfishness – the subjective closure within the existential sphere that receives only whatever serves its selfpreservation and severs its relationship with objective reality – is experienced as a psychosis, a dysfunctional orientation towards the world that leads to marginalisation, illness and death.22 Consequently, it seems that a continuity between biological morality and its social modification regulates both the

19 de Waal (1996, p. 13). As de Waal (1996, p. 117) says, “people would never have developed a conscience had their minds been preoccupied with the reproductive calculations that fascinate evolutionary biologists.” 20 Darwin (1985, p. 135) remarks that natural selection “in social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community.” Darwin (2004, p. 83) further points out that human mental powers “have been chiefly, or even exclusively, gained for the benefit of the community, and the individuals thereof, have at the same time gained an advantage indirectly.” Therefore Darwin (2004, p. 121,144) differentiates himself from Mills’ utilitarianism when the latter doubts the existence of innate moral feelings. See also Richards (1986, p. 270); Thompson P. (1999, p. 476). 21 See Trivers (2002, p. 47). Along the same lines, Singer (2011, p. 6) argues that: “Ethics probably began in these pre-human patterns of behaviour rather than in the deliberate choices of fully-fledged, rational human beings.” Boehm (2001, p. 198), supporting the thesis that egalitarianism shaped human nature, remarks: “Egalitarianism would still have had more than a thousand generations in which to do its work on human nature.” In agreement with Boehm, de Waal (1996, p. 161), notes that: “It is safe to assume that the actions of our ancestors were guided by gratitude, obligation, retribution, and indignation long before they developed enough language capacity for moral discourse.” Kitcher (2011, p. 74) suggests that the “capacity for normative guidance was an important step in the transition from hominids to human beings.” See also Kitcher (2014, pp. 3336). Hrdy (2011, p. 11) remarks on ethics as an evolutionary force: “At some point in the course of their evolution, our ancestors became more deeply interested in monitoring the intentions of the others and eager to share their inner feelings as well as their mental states.” See also Damasio (2003, p. 160); Tomasello (2019, p. 275). 22 Freud (2003, p. 4) remarks that the paraphrenic “really does seem to have withdrawn his libido from the people and the things in the world without replacing them with any others in his imagination.” Castoriadis (1997, p. 17) points out that “this person has created once and for all his own all-encompassing and totally rigid interpretative system and nothing can ever enter this world without being transformed according to the rules of this system.” See also Bergson (1912, p. 227); Jung (2003, p. 65).

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human being and the social sphere within the inner-worldly field. Before its social manifestation and incorporation in human institutions, conscience has been already imprinted and codified within the human corpus, which obeys the same organic laws. The corporeal spatio-temporal storing machine produces a new entity that resembles it in its compulsion for spatio-temporal storing in the form of islands of functionality. The short-term organic survival and habitation of the human being in the worldly field is unlike the ontological manifestation and historical direction of conscience, which wants to survive the short human lifespan. Spatio-temporality has been processed and transformed by its insertion in the field of presence, and therefore concerns only the long-term survival of a network of practices and words in a temporal dimension that exceeds the human one. Conscience, by serving as a spatiotemporal storing device, survives the understandable anxiety of the subject over the unavoidable coming of its own death. 1.4 The roots of conscience Conscience is a compulsion that is biologically rooted, and in cultural evolution it is served and augmented by self-reflective consciousness.23 It may be the product of the combined effects of corporeal, psychic and mental structure that formed a plane of energy that regulates the entire human being. This compulsion monitors and coordinates the internal human sphere. As a unifying force of the human organism, it annexes feelings and mental habits, which become transfigured as functional ingredients. Conscience is neither conscious nor unconscious; it is the merging of the world within and the world without.24 It is the organic bridge that procures a balanced relationship

23 Spinoza (2004, p. 203) says that to search for good and avoid evil is a law “so deeply implanted in the human mind that it ought to be counted among eternal truth and axioms.” See also Hume (2007, book 1, part. 3 sect. 10, par.2); Shaftesbury (2000, p. 179); Hutcheson (1728, treatise 2, sect. 1, p. 220; 2008, p. 131) and Butler (2006, p. 48). E.O. Wilson (1978, p. 32; 1980, p. 278) hypothesises that altruism and compassion towards relatives and general “human social behaviour rests upon genetic foundation.” See also Trivers (2002, pp. 34-38). Richerson and Boyd (2005, p. 215) argue that tribal social instincts that allow cooperation within larger groups have also a genetic foundation. Bergson (1977, pp. 56-57) develops the same position, emphasising that morality does not have its foundation or origin in pure reason. Darwin (2004, p.136) attributes the strength of social instincts of humans to reflection: “Man, from the activity of his mental faculties cannot avoid reflection: past impressions and images are incessantly and clearly passing through his mind.” Spencer (1904, p. 32), along the same lines, connects a developed sense of justice with “a stretch of imagination.” For an attempt to further develop Darwin’s account from the perspective of moral psychology, see Krebs (2011, pp. 226-232). For an account that addresses these issues from the perspective of neurobiology, see Churchland (2011). For an account from the perspective of evolutionary anthropology, see Hrdy (2011). 24 Freud (2003, p. 24), in contrast, remarks that, “whereas the ego is essentially a representative of the world without, of reality, the super-ego is contraposed to it as advocate of the world

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between the human and the world on the basis of a conscientious binding. It is a constantly evolving and distinct entity based on a biologically produced compulsion to distil what, in the long run, is functional. This drive transmits its energy and gives content to thinking, but the rules guiding it are totally different from those of reflection. Conscience utilises thinking in order to be informed by the processes that take shape in the functional field.25 Thereafter it processes the acquired information by granting it a specific conscientious content, which is sent back to thought as condensed functional prescriptions that can be assimilated ontologically. The most unique attribute of conscience is its corporeal-like compulsion.26 It likely was created by the energies and forces of the body that, at a certain point, were differentiated and disengaged but that did not abandon their original place. Since conscience is a product of the effects of corporeal functionality, it also harbours the property of these effects by being oriented towards corporeal-like fixation. Conscience is the only non-physical entity in the inner self that wants to be a body, to be stabilised and retained as a functional achievement. As such it directs all the effects of corporeal functionality. Conscience appears to simulate the evolutionary process within the mind, substituting biological parameters of survival with the parameters that favour the growth of conscience. The human body lives out its life in a compressed time, within the limited lifespan afforded to it. We bear all the effects of the spatio-temporal dimension of the past within our bodies.27 Because the human body has a temporal frame, it requires a level of worldly functionality so that effects can be developed. That is, it needs an environment that condenses functional time through the storing up of the benefit of the work of preceding generations upon which the human material is cultivated. Despite what we as humans may think, the disproportionate functionality between the human body and the functional

within, of the id.” For a critique of Freud’s understanding of conscience, see Prudence (2004, pp. 356-358). The origin of conscience relates more to what Jung (2003, p. 2) calls “collective unconscious”, an inborn deeper layer than personal experiences, and which “constitutes a common psychic substrate of suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.” 25 In this analysis I draw many concepts – such as fixity, differentiation, variation, adaptability, modification, mutability, divergence, accumulation, preservation – from Darwin (1985, 2003, 2009). 26 Kant (1996, p. 159) calls conscience, “the inner judge”, a “natural predisposition of the mind” that one has the duty to cultivate. Darwin (2004, pp.137,139, 680), calls conscience “ever-present instinct” and “ever-enduring social instinct.” Bergson’s (1946, p. 164) analysis of intuition with regard to the inner self pertains to the operation of conscience: “There is at least one reality which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own person, in its flowing through time, the self which endures.” 27 As Spinoza (1996, p.72) says: “The body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind wonders at.” See also Sidgwick (1981, p. 32) and Lefebvre (2004, p. 9).

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field leaves the human almost underdeveloped. Only through a relationship with actual reality can human material be balanced. This worldly historical functionality compensates for the lack of the energy of all the successive forces that impinged on corporeal functionality. Each one of these forces in its own way provides the groundwork for the development of the human material. Thus, the functional field being speeded up with the products of the human world-building activity is something anticipated by the condensed biological time of the human body. The historical world, with its architectural ordering, its tools, its values, its stories and its laws, resembles and responds to the condensed time nourished within the human body.28 The latter needs a crowded, fast-paced world that can drive the human material towards an effective binding with the actual reality. The human was never destined to live in a desert. To develop the human from its infancy we need to intensify the effects of the functional field so as to match up with the affective environment of the human body. That is, we need the configuration of circumstances similar to those that shaped us in order to attain a level of advancement and grow even further. The human world carries traces that built the human, and only through their effects can the human be developed. The human carries within himself the history of his relationship with the functional field. This deepest entity of the human tries to reconnect with the functional field through birth, but it needs time, space and a learning relationship with the actual reality. It is through his reconnection with the functional field and the subsequent establishment of a conversational relationship with it that the human develops and grounds himself in the actual world. As a matter of fact, by one’s birth, conscience gradually re-establishes its root within the functional field and its development depends on how well this is grafted upon the human material.29

28

As Lefebvre (1991, p. 405) remarks: “The genesis of a far-away order can be accounted for only on the basis of the order that is nearest to us – namely, the order of the body. Within the body itself, spatially considered, the successive levels constituted by the senses (from the sense of smell to sight, treated as different within a differentiated field) prefigure the layers of social space and their interconnection.” 29 Hrdy (2011, p.113) remarks that this link is firstly established through the love of the mother for her child. This maternal emotional responsiveness is anticipated by the child and its highly important for its mental and emotional development. This development is also served by multiple caretakers that enhance the child’s ability for intersubjective communication for cognitive abilities. For Hrdy, the alloparents and cooperative breeding have contributed to the course of human evolution. See also Tomasello (2019, p. 25); Langston (2001, p. 175).

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1.5 The ontological manifestations of conscience A. Guilt The sense of guilt is the most aggressive ontological form that conscience’s energy produces.30 It attacks the being aiming at correcting it. The sense of guilt occurs against thoughts, but mainly against our actions. This struggle within the being is made possible because of a plane of forces wherein each different layer unfolds on the basis of a different model of temporality, and there, they communicate. Our reified self concerns thoughts, words and acts that have been materialised. It has been detached from the spatio-temporal attributes of being and, after being frozen, it has been absorbed by public space and time. It is attributed to us as our identity, being subject to scrutiny, approval, rejection, testimony and remembrance by our external environment. The activity of thought is the invisible fluid movement of thought, our non-recognisable self that is somewhere else than taxonomised by the external environment, and at this place it attends reflectively the constant flow of reality. In this imaginary field, our reified self is rescued, revived and subject to endeavours of correspondence, examination and judgment. And whereas our reified self has been documented by the past time, the two other models of temporality, those of thinking activity and of conscience, reposition it in the present. Guilt is produced when the actualisation of our reified self through the activity of thought commences its processing by the zones of functionality. The reified self always anticipates the dynamic character of thinking and of conscience. The new informational flow emerging out of reality sets in motion the models of functionality that inspect the reified self on the basis of their own reconstituted autonomised laws. The crisis of conscience erupts at the moment when the zones of functionality transmit to thought the inconsistency of the reified self with the models of survivability that conscience builds.31 Thought in its turn transfigures this asynchrony ontologically, and juxtaposes it against the ideological net in which

30 See Smith (2002, part. 2, sect. 2, chap. 2, par. 3). Freud (2003, 125), by rejecting conscience as a drive for higher moral values and declining to examine ethics in general, attributes disproportionate importance to the feeling of guilt emerging from the prescriptions and the critical entity of the super-ego. As he remarks, “the ego’s moral and aesthetic tendencies are the driving force behind repression.” Freud (1962, p. 76) makes it clear that he considers conscience “the result of instinctual renunciation.” See also Nietzsche (2008, pp. 44-48). 31 Darwin (2004, p. 138) says that humans often feel remorse, shame, and regret when they gratify their own desires at the expense of other men. In this case one “will consequently resolve more or less firmly to act differently for the future; and this is conscience; for conscience looks backwards, and serves as a guide for the future.” See also Wilson (1980, p. 58).

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the reified self has been sealed. This juxtaposition gives way to a communicative interplay between the three fields, which begins from the first to the last and vice versa. Guilt is exactly the product of the correction of the self within the imaginary field, of the construction of another self that does not bear the remembrance of what has been done and cannot be undone. Then that which is no longer part of us, but has been assigned to us, our self from which we want to distance but cannot, sinks us into guilt. This lack of self-affirmation, the anxious unfamiliarity with our past, aims at recomposing the rhythmic harmony between the ontological thought and the injunctions of the conscience. It is a cathartic process generated by the renovated self against the reified one. Regret is possible because now we should not have done, said, and thought all that we have. Guilt is the painful by-product of a correction transmitted either by the functional islands that have not informed thought to act accordingly, or by a need that the functional field later transmitted to the activity of thought in order to be ontologically registered. The occurrence of a crisis of conscience, the bottomless ocean of guilt, exists first of all because of a structural inefficiency of our islands of functionality that allowed the performing of the regretful act. In this case, the actualisation of these islands is weak for it has not been pursued in a timely manner, so as to invest ontologically the thought before the wrong act to be committed. The activity of thought then, through the recurring imaginary repositioning of the absent self in the sphere of the functional models with the aid of the functional field, enforces their activity. It equips them with the residues of functionality in order to incorporate them in their own course of development, supplementing in this way their functional core. In this sense a crisis of conscience is preceded by the actualisation, reshaping and progress of the functional models.32 In this way, the reformation of the self after a crisis supplies, informs and supplements the functional models. It is because of this that the feelings of guilt can strike us overwhelmingly at an unexpected and remote time from the particular context of our act that has been inscribed in common time and space. When the reified self is arrested and frozen by the calendar time that is always subject to oblivion, the activity of thought decouples it from its spatio-temporal bindings. The zones of functionality that are always under energy constantly renew themselves. As a result, at any time, even if it is temporally remote, the

32 Heidegger (1962, p. 32), drawing from Nietzsche, proceeds to explain the being-guilty not in terms of lacking something but on the basis of primordial being guilty, “the existential condition for the possibility of the ‘morally’ good and for that of the ‘morally’ evil – that is, for morality in general and for the possible forms which this may take factically.” In this analysis, being-in-conscience precedes any form of being or a “wanting to have a conscience”, and conditions it. Thus being-guilty means being in the process of adhering to the functional models.

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qualitative evolution of the zones of functionality informs the thought ontologically, which in its turn desperately starts its silent cry, because it cannot undo what it has done. This unbearable pain and endless sorrow produce the fusion of human energy whereby the way we deport ourselves would have not occurred, unless we felt that we could not undo what we have done. That is, unless we go through a crisis of conscience. B. Forgiveness Forgiveness is also itself an ontological product of the energy of the models of functionality. Arendt remarks that Jesus Christ introduces the ontological interposition of forgiveness within the historical field, disrupting thus the predictable moral codes of the Greeks that could not escape the model of action – reaction.33 The prevailing Greek moral system is regulated by the calendar time of the reified self. What exists is what has been arrested and fixed by public time and its auxiliary public gaze. It is with the latter that the subject is identified, and it is on its basis that an action is measured. Therefore, the only way of action appears that of intervening upon the living self, which is identical to the reified one, and its subsequent repositioning in the external reality.34 Action for the Greeks refers to a temporal chain that the reified self builds, without being able to release itself from the type of temporality that governs this temporal chain. Your infliction of harm against me is what exists. I myself react by inflicting damage on you. You respond similarly, and so on. The tyranny of the calendar of temporality and the blurring of the activity of thought that moves along the lines of a different spatio-temporal articulation are absolute. Jesus Christ, as Arendt says, disrupts this natural model of response that is based on the dominance of public temporality.35 Not reacting means that I do not act within the terms of the temporality calendar that have been imposed on me. On the contrary, if seen from the perspective of linear temporality, I act from the beginning, from a zero-degree point. But what does this actually

33

See Arendt (1958, p. 238). See also See Nietzsche (1984, p. 66). Kant (1996, p. 208) says that punishment of a crime is pursued only by a court and not out of hatred. It “is therefore a duty of human beings to be forgiving.” 34 It is Socrates in fact who introduces to the Athenians the concept of forgiveness that they do not quite comprehend. On this see Jaeger (1947, p. 135). As Socrates says, “we ought not to even requite wrong with wrong, as the world thinks, since we must not do wrong at all” in Plato (Critias 49c). Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1133a) conceptualises the dominant Greek ethics. Sentencing to death was common to the Athenian constitution and shows a tendency and familiarity with putting someone to death as an act of punishment through corporeal erasure from the field of life. 35 As Arendt (1958, p. 241) notes, forgiving “is the only reaction which does not merely react but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”

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mean? I shift my position from the field of temporality to which the act committed against me belongs, and I proceed to attune with the ontological guidance of the energetic effects of the functional models. It seems that I start from a zero-degree point, but in fact I depart from the accumulative point of the perspective of viability that has been constructed through the processing of everything that I can be aware of by conscience. The need to ask for forgiveness comes out of the transformation of my being after the crisis of conscience. My spatio-temporal and existential differentiation from my reified self and the breaking of my bonds with it does not intervene ontologically into the mode of temporality in which it is arrested. None can testify to the process of my transformation. On the contrary, my reified self lives within the testimony, remembrance and traumas that it has inflicted upon others. By asking for forgiveness, I ask to intervene in the field of the temporality calendar and enter the mechanisms of memory of the other in order to inform them. I ask to make visible the invisible side effect of conscience upon my being for my materialised self is preserved and rescued by the presentations of the other. It is upon this fixed representational sphere that I address myself in order to weaken or, if possible, to convert the mode of my collective reification into the worldly field. When I ask for forgiveness, I actually want to intervene in the type of my representation by the others, and since I know that this type of representation is subject to varying fields of temporality – that is of frozen, subjective and functional time – I ask them to erase from their memory the certain configuration of my being from which I have liberated myself. I have the will to lift the burden of my reified self in order to unfold my remoulded being. If the common reality of materialisations envelops my being into a spatio-temporal field, then I do not have space and time to move. The latter will be charged to such a degree with the testimony of others about me that is solely derived from the common participation in the public time, and as a result my new materialisation will be superseded by the previous ones.36 Granting forgiveness to the other is an autonomous and spontaneous act. It is not dependent upon an external call or entreaty. Its temporal appearance – immediate, untimely, or late – is related to the qualitative status and the evolutionary differentiation of the functional models that govern the human being. When I am hurt by the words and deeds of the other, at the same time the functional plane is actualised. It is on the basis of its idiosyncratic formation in time and place that the treatment of this trauma is pursued. Forgiveness

36 As Arendt (1958, p. 237) says, “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”

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comes out of the spatio-temporal reification of a hostile act as I experience it and its subsequent placement into the type of temporality of the functional models. When I forgive, I do not necessarily erase from my memory the act of someone against me by using exclusively the tools of the mind. The type of temporality to which this act belongs to does not permit me to do so. The mind has neither the autonomy nor the temporal perspective to do this because it is submitted to conscience, which has different attributes. When an act is directed against me with its spatio-temporal limits entering the governing rules of the functional zones, it is also processed for its functionality. As soon as its short run and unviable perspective is testified to, the effect that this act had on the models of functionality is transmitted ontologically to thought in order to orient my act. An act against me prompts the ontological formation of the energy of the functional models that have been actualised by it. While I am receiving on my body and thought the side effects of a spatio-temporally frozen act, simultaneously the functional models respond by procuring the formation of ontological tools that equip thought. Against the act of someone that has specific spatio-temporal properties, I then project the ontological response that has been affected by the functional models. Initially, the spatio-temporal grounding of someone’s act is imposed on me and inflicts a spatio-temporal damage on me. Thereafter, by appealing to the energy of the functional models, I shift position spatio-temporally. What is imposed on me is the dominance of the functional models upon the specific traumatic act.37 Being moved by the ontological interventions of the functional models, I act on the basis of the positioning of this act within them. Under the energy of this, this act disappears for it does not serve the functional storing compulsion of conscience. What remains from its processing is the strengthening and restructuring of the functional models. By forgiving, I adopt at the same time the thought of the other, I correct it inside me before she/he corrects it her/himself. I think on behalf of her/him and I transform ontologically her/his thought as I have experienced it. The forgiveness of someone is aided by the perspective I acquire after the imaginary representation of the wrongful act has been situated within the horizon of viability shaped by the models of functionality. From this point of view, this specific act has fulfilled its mission in my representation and thus its habitation in it does not serve any purpose. The dominance of the models of functionality over it weakens its remembrance and hence it serves no functional purpose any more. This is the meaning of forgiveness: I cannot move on the chain of materialisations that you impose on me, because I already move

37 As Spinoza (1996, p. 141) says, hate “is increased by being returned, and on the other hand, can be destroyed by love.”

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along the lines of the temporal mode of the functional models whereby the specific act is filtered through an extensive field of viability. I cannot be withheld in the temporal horizon of the reified self. Instead, I appeal to the long-term perspective of the functional models through which the specific act does not exist. As such it is processed only by the mechanisms of sustainability and viability. And after it is considered as such, the subject which is the agent of this action is left in its spatio-temporal field. In my turn, I am synchronised with the existential horizon that the functional models prescribe to me, and I act anew as this act has not been conducted. That is, I am governed by a longterm horizon of functionality from which my act always departs, in sharp contrast to the point in time that has been imposed on myself by hurtful acts. I do not interrupt the production of the functional models; neither do I suspend their dominance over the manifestations of the reified self. And because I release myself from the temporal model in which the act of someone against me belongs, I always begin anew the perspective of the functional models: I forgive. Both the short-term movement of revenge and the long-term functionality of forgiveness appear as such because of the injunctions of the functional models that are joined in and annexed by conscience.38 Revenge occurs because of a temporary dominance of the type of temporality in which our fixed words and acts are contained. In this case the temporal horizon of conscience is absent. Revenge is an intersubjective inflicting of damage, possible only because of the absence of the activity of thought that would be aided by the ontological articulations generated by the functional models. As such it does not have an ontological mission as far as the constructive process of the models of functionality is concerned. Revenge not only does not serve this developmental process, but also promotes the dominance of the dispirited public time and place. This dominance creates a spatio-temporal suffocation that only the temporality of the functional models can resolve. Forgiveness is an ontological construction aiming to liberate what has been appropriated by the field of materialisation. Without forgiveness there would not have been empty time and space for action. By clearing the spatio-temporal field from the hegemony of the temporality of materialisations and, it being expropriated by conscience, forgiveness restores the relationship and qualitative difference between the three fields of temporality. It exclusively charges the spatio-temporal field with the effect of models of functionality and ends its misappropriation by the instrumental model of functionality. Through forgiveness, the predominant

38

For an approach on forgiveness and revenge from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, which treats them as universal features of human behaviour, see McCullough (2008).

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operation of the functional models in the net of ontological mechanisms and its original place in orienting mental and actual models are reaffirmed. Only an act that is constructed by the perspective of the functional models can survive the network of the chain of viability. On the contrary, the circulation of an act from the perspective of the temporality of the reified time cannot withstand the criteria required by this interconnected circulation and communication. C. Parrhesia The Greeks, though their prevailing moral system was confined within the mode of action – reaction, are the first who proceeded to articulate and cultivate conscience-generating mechanisms.39 In fact, Athenian democracy was based on the institutionalisation of the accumulated islands of functionality generated by a firm grounding upon a reflective attitude towards the existing arrangement of reality and the reflective energy that this yielded. Foucault, in his experiential penetration into the Greek thought, isolates the concept of parrhesia.40 Parrhesiazesthai is an ascetic practice with which one aims at harmony between, on one hand, what one is thinking and saying and, on the other hand, what one does. This will to bind one’s words and deeds aims at the formation of a mode of being that is based on their best possible synchrony. The being-in-parrhesia establishes and cultivates a process of coadaptation between words and deeds that does not abandon the relationship for any reason. The result of this interconnection between words and deeds and the attempt to minimise their distance displays values that depend on its presence and absence, respectively. Sincerity, authenticity and frankness are by-products of the exercise of parrhesia. Hypocrisy, sophistry, and dissembling are by-products of its non-actualisation. But what generates the impulse for parrhesiazesthai? We should apply here the previously articulated theory of conscience and treat parrhesia as both conscience-yielding and as a manifestation of the effects of conscience. The practice of parrhesia is not autonomous or based on one’s will. It owes its activity to the actualisation of the conscientious impulse that seeks to establish an unimpeded conversational relationship with the functional field. The subject strives to give ontological figurations to this impulse. Parrhesia consists

39

Both Arendt (1958, p.198-199 and Castoriadis (1991, p. 160) place great importance on the relationship between democracy, self-institution and self-reflective activity. 40 In this analysis I employ the positive meaning the Athenians attached to parrhesia when it was problematised. As Foucault remarks: “The parrhesiastes prefers himself as a truth-teller than as a living being who is false to himself (2001, p. 17). The great parrhesiastic figure is Socrates: “He can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords exactly with what he thinks, and what he thinks accords exactly with what he does” (2001, p.101). See also Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1127b25).

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of one of the many ontological forms that the models of functionality take, and it aims at their actualisation and improvement. It is an exercise upon the possibility of the thinking – object approximation, a trial and error attempt taking place in a monitoring reality that aims to fix and arrest the functional ethical quality. The functional models compel thought to transfigure them ontologically. Their subsequent ontological fixity generates within the subject the impulsion for crafting a mode of being that is in harmonic relation to them. On the other hand, because the functional models are irreducible to ontology and moreover are submitted to the effects of the constant energy and reformation of the functional field, this practice begins always anew. That is, the subject must always readjust to the functional models and accommodate its disposition accordingly. The parrhesiastes never dismiss the ontological injunctions of the functional models. On the contrary, they display a stand of uncompromising consistency with them. Neither act nor thought are able to supersede the network of models of functionality that dwell in the being. As Socrates says, “it would be better for me to have a lyre or a chorus which I was directing in discord and out of tune, better that the mass of mankind should disagree with me and contradict me, than that I, a single individual, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict myself.”41 Parrhesiazesthai as a movement to conform to the injunctions of the functional models, smothers and sharpens the communicative relationship between the three fields of temporality, in the framework of which, the temporality of the functional models is the regulative force. The parrhesiastes wants and tries to harmonise his words with his acts. He is predisposed to dissolve any disharmony between the two, for the very reason that in his being neither is absorbed into its own temporality. A communicative bridge is operating within him wherein the functional models supply ontologically the thought which in its turn orients action. To do what you say means to respond to the ontological injunctions of the field of conscience in which one is anchored. With the parrhesiastic practices, the autonomy of the temporality within which the words and deeds are contained is being debased. This connection between the two fields of temporality is dependent upon the field of conscience. The constant compliance with the ontologically converted injunctions of conscience is both the rule of the governance of its being, and that which directs the parrhesiastes as the point of departure and as the point of arrival.

41 See Plato (Gorgias 482c). Kant (1996, p. 183) points out that “insincerity is mere lack of conscientiousness, that is, of purity in one’s professions before one’s inner judge, who is thought of as another person when conscientiousness is taken quite strictly.” See also Sidgwick (1981, pp. 312-319); Spinoza (2004, p. 185); May (1983, p. 59)

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The parrhesiastes, through his conscientious exercise, facilitates the unimpeded energy of the functional models by trying to scrutinise and dissolve any island of instrumentality that inhabits the being. What I am saying but I do not do, and what I do despite what I say is, for parrhesiastes, due to the autonomisations of temporality and the separation from the active field of the family of temporalities that act as mechanisms for the production of conscience. By examining the congruency between words and deeds, he traces distorted acts or thoughts which have not yet entered the process of ontological conjunction with the field of conscience. Every parcel of thoughts, words, and deeds that partitions itself from the complex of the mechanisms of conscience acts in isolation; it assumes a mechanical character and is not directly linked with the functional repository. Such thoughtless islands that do not carry the effects of conscience create a sealed block. Through the retracting of their traces, the parrhesiastes aims at the broadening of the territory of the functional islands within the human being and the subsequent dissolution of the islands of instrumentalism that prompt to it arrhythmia.42 The parrhesiastes speaks and acts without fear and is defiant at any cost. Why is he overwhelmed by a will to say and do something, and why can’t he withstand the silence and inaction? Silence, that occurs when saying what you are thinking and doing what you are saying incurs a danger, is necessitated by the absorption of being by the short-term temporality of the public time. One who remains silent is one who does not ontologically join the injunctions of the cells of conscience. This silence may as well fit itself within the horizon of the temporality in which our words and deeds are encapsulated. However, within the horizon of temporality of islands of functionality, remaining in silence signifies that the compulsion of conscience becomes loose and its contact with the other fields is of a low intensity. The parrhesiastes on the contrary, cannot step up from proclaiming what he thinks in the public sphere. This is because he proceeds along a different level of temporality in which the reigning role of conscience is unfettered. Within this field, the possible consequences that are measurable by the field of common temporality are arrayed within the autonomous dialectic of conscience. Within the laws of conscience, the implicated danger and fear, as the precautions taken about individual safety and survival, have a secondary importance. It is the functional models that have a living dialectic of a movement of qualitative development and historically vitalise the world. By installing itself at their perspective, parrhesiastes goes against the laws of the public sphere and is aligned with the long-term dialectic of functionality. The fearless bravery, to say what you are thinking, is shaped and effectuated because of a subjective immersion into the

42 This

term has been borrowed from Lefebvre (2004, p. 20).

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mechanisms of this long-term dialectic that goes beyond the limits and the laws of human survival. Therefore, to remain silent means to suspend the ontological intervention of the functional models and to stay undisturbed at the level of the short run dialectic of the field of common time. To do this does not serve in any way this long-term dialectic whose roots transcend the historical time. The disclosure, exposure and annihilation of hypocrisy are the existential aims of the parrhesiastes.43 Hypocrisy appears as a result of the de-assembling and automomisation of the invisible sphere of thought from the visible sphere in which words are announced and acts are displayed. When I say something different from what I think, and when I do something different from what I believe, I am a dissembler or a hypocrite. I interrupt the consistency of thought with its ontological and existential manifestation. In this case, the field of thought and the field of action work as two close spheres where the only form of continuity that can bind them is that of a technical dependence. This is the only way that they can appear interdependent to those who participate and testify to my intervention within the common reality. Why does one become a hypocrite? The hypocrite does and says things that he does not mean; he does not carry them within his thought. Since his thought remains occult, he is oriented by the laws of the materialised time. He misguides our representation about him through a continuity managed by his own deliberate intervention in the field of visibility. He can act cunningly because the field of the time of materialisations and its long-term dialectic autonomises and acquires its own laws. What is said and committed before the others is detached from the activity of thought that only the subject experiences and from which it cannot hide. Hypocrisy is tolerable to the subject, because he can manage its flow and the continuity of its manifestation in the public sphere, and, in doing so, adapt to the expectations and claims of the many. In relation to the other two fields of temporality that concern the being, the temporality of the public field and the rhythm of our interventions in it is instant; it is reconstituted ritualistically at a point in time that precedes it and is followed by an absence. Only the activity of thinking upon thought and the field of conscience can absorb this structural absence. None, except we ourselves, has a panoramic view of our interventions in the public space and, moreover, only we can keep present these interventions. So, in this type of temporality, what is uttered and what is done, from the time it occurs, is frozen; it exists only within the laws of the public world. Since it exists only as such, the

43

As Arendt (1978, p.37) notes, “the test applying to the hypocrite is indeed the old Socratic ‘Be as you wish to appear’, which means appear always as you wish to appear to others even if it happens that you are alone and appear to no one but yourself.”

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empty space between our withdrawal from the public sphere and our next intervention in it is covered only when we manifest ourselves again on the basis of an instrumentality of which we are the coordinators, simply by following the established continuity that it builds in itself mechanically through its own rules of unfolding. The parrhesiastes cannot pretend that because he aims to dissolve the traces of instrumentalism inside him, that is, the autonomisation of the calendar temporality and the products it provides. By virtue of being into the actualisation of the mechanisms of production of conscience, the parrhesiastes is guided by the temporality of the activity of thought and the zones of conscience. He always acts before himself and in so far as he is in harmony with himself, he says and does something. Hypocrisy has no reason of existence for him, because there is not an autonomised frozen time and place. Everything in him is liable to conscience with which he preserves and refines a direct link. Not only does he surpass the rules of the time of historiography, but he repositions it within the web of the mechanisms of production of conscience that he serves. Because of this, there is not dead time in his presence and absence in the public space and time. His deportment in it is moved by the ontological conformity to the activity of thought and the models of functionality from which he departs and to which he returns. In other words, the parrhesiastes is not absorbed by the instrumental temporality that shuts off the energy of conscience. On the contrary, by intervening with his own laws, he submits it to the dialectic of production of conscience. He departs from the active production of islands of functionality in order to introduce its ontological formations to the reified world. He never loses sight of a conscientious disposition in the world, thus deregulating the laws of the unanimated temporality. 1.6 Conscience as a generator of values What is the relationship between moral values and conscience? Moral values, like magnanimity, justice, love, prudence, generosity, and care of the universal are modes of being. There is a “bank of conscience” always at work which is an undivided whole wherein functional models reside and from which they cannot detach. In this sense, Plato and Aristotle are right in arguing for the unity of virtues.44 These models are not independent, but they form a functional kinship. They inform one another; they adjust to one another and they are always at work enriching the whole that becomes something different from its

44 Both Plato (Gorgias 507c) and Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1130a5-10) advocate the unity of virtues. For Plato is the “form of the good”, and for Aristotle “the whole of virtue” is justice. See also Hutcheson (2008, p. 132).

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constituent parts. The intersection of functional models procures the cohesion and development of this functional whole. In real life, the models depending on the specific circumstances that call for an appropriate response appear as values, as a canalising of the appropriate functional reservoir into ontology that releases itself as a configuration of a specific value. For example, magnanimity manifested in specific circumstances and recognised as such is a value that relates to many other values, such as justice and prudence. What binds and unites these values is that they draw from conscience, hence their affinity. What also enriches them is, again, conscience – which is always at work. These values are the ontological expression of conscience in actual conditions in which they participate, insert and reinsert themselves. In its turn conscience reabsorbs them and constantly recomposes itself. Thus, there is a common origin of values and genealogical affinity. Values communicate with one another, rely upon and support one another. Therefore, there is always a balanced manifestation of values in a human being. One who is generous would be equally magnanimous and one who is just would be equally prudent. Equally, conscience, innate as it is, subjects human passions, impulses, the Freudian super-ego and other destructive instincts.45 Within the subjective psychic economy conscience is the most powerful force that debases destructive forces and establishes a psychic equilibrium. The supremacy of passions over the human is the result of them being unaffected by their processing and amelioration by conscience.

45 Butler (2006, p. 58) states that conscience should be “considered as a faculty in kind and in nature supreme of all others, and which bears its own authority of being so.” See also Smith (2002, part.6, section 3, par. 18).

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Chapter 2

The nature of evil

The subjective evil manifests itself with acts of aggressiveness, cruelty and harshness that aim to damage a subjective corporeality or a homogeneous group that is conceived as external. The merciless gaze of a being-in-evil is created by a dysfunctionality that owes either to a weak conscientious impulse or to the neutralisation of the mechanisms for the production of conscience. This lack is escalated with the – natural for it – movement to torture or annihilate the other’s corporeality. The human body becomes the field where the evil unfolds itself, which exists by taking away whatever one treasures. 2.1 The subjective evil Evil exists because of what Plato refers to as an absence.1 Evil concerns a very low grade of development or in some cases the resurfacing of rudimentary forms of previous existence that find their way into the subject.2 So the evil exists because something else is absent, and in its place the autonomised model of temporality of frozen time dominates the human being. What is absent, however, is the internalisation of the stage of functionality that a worldsphere has attained on the basis of which the ethical sphere is measured

1 Socrates says “for no wise man, as I believe, will allow that any human being does wrong voluntarily, or voluntarily does evil and dishonourable actions” in Plato (Protagoras 345e). See also Plato (The Laws 731c). Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1150b 30) says that “vice is unconscious of itself.” Arendt remarks: “A good conscience does not exist except as the absence of a bad one” (1971, p. 418). “He who does not know the intercourse between me and myself in which we examine what we say and what we do will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to give account of what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can be sure that it will be forgotten the next moment” (Arendt, 1971, pp. 445-446). See also Arendt (1978, p. 179). Spinoza (1996, p. 180) also connects evil with the absence of divine love: “The more the mind enjoys this divine love, or blessedness, the more it understands, that is, the greater the power it has over the effects, and the less it is acted on by evil effects.” Hegel (1977, p. 472, par. 780) calls evil a “self-centred being-for-self.” See also Butler (2006, p. 311). 2 Kant (1996, p. 149) says that “the basis of great crimes is merely the force of inclinations that weaken reason”, but he does not accept that humans have an evil predisposition. On the contrary, a human being as a moral being “can never lose entirely his predisposition to the good” (1996, p. 210). For more on Kant’s view of evil, see Garcia (2000).

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by virtue of mechanisms that detect praiseworthy and blameworthy acts.3 That is, the evil mind is lacking the human models of functionality and has not been modelled upon the web of processes with which they are associated. The beingin-evil has been completely absorbed by the temporality that concerns the interval that is needed for an act to be committed. Before, beyond and after this act, there is nothing for the evil mind from which it can qualitatively differentiate itself. The temporality of the materialised thought per se, being disjoined from both the activity of thought by virtue of imagination and the condensed functional models, develops its own mode of development. On the basis of this model, a mechanical field is constructed whereby the frozen time imposes its own rules that the evil mind internalises.4 In order for one to think, plan and, ultimately, inflict damage on the corporeality of the other, one should move on a rigid sphere that can make this possible. In this case, this sphere takes over the place of conscience. Inside the being, the frozen character and experience of the common world passes immutable. Therein, a monolithic linear department is constructed comprised of frozen thoughts and acts that are employed to direct thought and action. In this sphere of mechanical thoughtlessness5 prevails the model of storing, sharpening and actualisation of an act similar to that which has been experienced. Moreover, an autonomous process is dominating, according to which the distorted frozen thoughts have manufactured their own model of survivability on the basis of a core that identifies the survival of the subject with their own imposition. This core, after being created, creates its own mode of development that is internalised through the damage and disappearance of the

3 According to Spinoza (2004, p. 202): “In reality, that which reason considers evil, is not evil in respect to the order and laws of nature as a whole, but only in respect to the laws of our reason.” See also Spinoza (1996, p. 136); Williams (1966, pp. 254-255); de Waal (1996, p.183). Huxley (1893, p. 23) says that universal history teaches us that “evil stares us in the face on all sides.” Plato (The Republic, 608e) says: “I call anything that harms or destroys a thing evil, and anything that preserves or benefits it good.” Darwin (2004, p. 140) says that evil in moral communities arises when self-interest overrules social instincts. See also Shaftesbury (2000, p.172); Krebs (2011, pp. 93-94); Boehm (2001, pp. 214-216). As Thompson. P (2012, p. 250) remarks, evil is “behaviour by an individual that destabilises the group on which that individual’s own survival depends.” Thus, evil acts against the cohesion and prospect of survival of a closed ethical sphere. 4 As Castoriadis (1997, p. 160) argues, “and of one cannot imagine something other than what is, every ‘decision’ is only a choice between possible givens – given by life as it existed beforehand and by the instituted system – which can always be reduced to the results of a calculation or some form of reasoning.” See also Bergson (1912, p. 198); Ramsay (2000, pp. 9-10); Garrard (2002, pp. 330-331). 5 Arendt (1964, p. 28), referring to Eichmann, notes that “his inability to speak was closely related to his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” Thus, as Arendt proceeds to clarify, “it was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.” (p.135).

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corporeality of the other. The evil mind is mobilised by a model of survival whose range covers the complex of stereotyped thoughts and acts. Ultimately, the process of this complexity pertains only to its own survival. Each time the evil mind commits an act of savagery, it reveals the substratum on which this act is based. By internalising and reproducing the active field as that wherein act revolves around imposition, ordering, and erasure in the frozen time, reality is conceivable and is formed, created, and recreated by instant acts against other acts, but mainly against the other’s corporeality. This distorted field carried within the evil mind is related to whatever exists through its own invasion in the public time and space and by which it is governed. The evil mind intimidates, rapes, mistreats, and kills, because these acts minimise the chasm between the instrumental field and the external world, that understands itself as a conflicting field wherein a set of frozen acts superimposes itself on another set of frozen acts. In its attempt to bring the external world closer to the field of instrumentalism by which it is governed, the evil mind destroys it, and in so doing, believes that it governs it. Since what exists inside it are only mechanical connections of dispirited thoughts, it exists only by acting, and in doing this, it always violently bridges the gap between itself and reality. Violence is the means that the evil mind employs in its actions because it is the structure of the perseverance of the existence of the distorted field in which it belongs. From the moment that only self-sufficient and autonomous acts exist in the world, their sequence creates inside it an imaginary reality according to which everything corresponds to an act to which it responds; in acting, it materialises this act that previously existed in the imaginary field. If the external world is controlled by the subject through the latter’s interventions that are based on a rigid model of action – reaction, the violence by means of which the evil mind reveals itself in the world constitutes the passageway to materialise its distorted imaginary field. It kills others because, by effacing them, it destroys any trace that can impede its unfolding in time and space. The evil mind kills the agent of an act or someone who displays defiance because for him this is identified with the act or the resistance itself. The murder, therefore, appears in the field that it moves as the final solution. In this way, it proceeds by destroying its external world in order to sustain the distorted field of temporality in which it is encapsulated. As soon as the evil mind commits a cruel act, it abandons it in the oblivion of frozen time. As it introduces itself in the world through its violent deportment, likewise it withdraws in the silence of the field of instrumentalism to which it belongs. The act that it has pursued exists for it only for the time that was required to commit it and while it was committing the act. Since it is conducted, the act does not exist for it. And since for an evil mind an act

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disappears at the moment it is concluded, it once more introduces itself into the world through another act that serves only itself. That is, what occurs for the evil mind is not revitalised inside it through imagination; it cannot continue to exist by being transformed into psychic or mental terms. On the contrary, it is left in the spatio-temporality of the reified world as it occurred. Frozen as it is, it passes as a mechanic model of reaction in the distorted field which is actualised when another act is preparing to throw itself into the mechanisms of reification. This mode of acting, being left to the laws of its existence, exists as a committed act for the evil mind. And because of this, it is forgotten as an event. In this way, the merciless acts of the conscienceless mind succeed one another in time in an autonomous and disconnected state without any qualitative differentiation between them. Similarly, the difference between the distorted field and the act that has been undertaken exists only at the moment when the cruelty has been committed; that is, at the moment that the evil mind materialises the imaginary model of response that is nourished within. Then it identifies itself with the mechanic field; it becomes in itself a potential act. This reflective defect of the evil mind prompts it to act for a moment that vanishes when it is concluded. And since it disappears, the next time is the moment of existence for it. These acts, being enclosed as they are in themselves, and being absorbed by the rules of temporality to which they belong, allow the evil spirit to exist repetitively when it destroys. Therefore, the end of an act designates for it the recession into the sphere of nonexistence. The evil spirit is a hostage of the law relating to the commencement of an act. Each time it acts, it further fortifies the seal of the instrumental field around itself. Literally, it is nourished by destruction and, if it fails to destroy, is in danger of vanishing. 2.2 The collective evil The collective evil is conducted by a social group that defines its own internal field by marked terms in order that those who are left out receive its aggressiveness.6 The collective evil is the ossified seal in which a social group is entrapped and is joined by a network of instrumental beliefs. In this case, the dispersed root of instrumentalism is deeply entrenched in the institutions and the ideological sphere of the social group. Being multiply sealed ontologically and institutionally, it is conveyed and recycled at a fast pace in the spatio-

6 As Thompson (2012, pp. 251-252) points out, “aggression by one population against another falls outside the gambit of ethical judgement.” See also Darwin (2004, p. 141); Spencer (1904, p. 207); Freud (1962, p. 61); Arendt (1966, p. 227; 1964, 73); Bergson (1977, p. 234); Richard (1986); de Waal (1996, p. 30); Hitlin (2008, p.116-118); Sterba (1996). Following Kitcher (2014, p. 71), one can also say that evil is associated with the problem of limited responsiveness that lies at the core of the ethical project.

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temporal field in which it is classified. The speed of the proliferation and the quasi-group character of the collective evil are due to its sealed codification. On the basis of it, a mode of temporality is constructed that homogeneously binds the participants, since it passes in an unadaptable and homogenised manner from one point of the communicative chain to the next.7 It is not interpolated by its insertion into the field of a multi-locular subjective imagination in which it would be subject to a spiritualised process and facilitate creative divergence through an antagonism of independent social and political forces.8 The collective evil is based on a generalisation of the sphere of unthought, the nascent stage of the reflective faculty, whose massive character develops a corresponding impulsion for superimposition on the environment that is robed in its energy. The latter exists for it only as something that needs to be subjugated by fixed systems of beliefs, to be conquered or destroyed. That is, the collective evil takes time and space hostage, and regulates it by cleansing any divergent production. The occurrence of the collective evil is correlated with the view of the social group as an indivisible body wherein the subjectivities as its constituent members feel sorrow and happiness in respect to the stage of the materialisation of its institutional and ideological apparatus which motivates and serves.9 Each member of the collective evil personalises the limits, the development, the damages that are inflicted on it, and the rules for its survival, which are all aggressive by their nature. The place of the unhindered circulation of the axioms of the sphere of the collective evil is the place where it is reified. In this field, the edifice of the collective evil creates supporting blocks for its sustainability, expansion and dominion. Those who participate in the closed sphere of the collective evil become its organic members and carriers. Necessarily, they are not the object against which it discharges its aggressiveness. The collective evil is diffused and is anchored in each of its constitutive subjectivities that separately contribute towards its cohesion. In their turn, these subjectivities assume that they are represented per se by it. This results in the safeguarding and delimitation of an institutional and ideological place in

7

In this case public time, as Heidegger (1962, p. 218) says in a different context, “lives at a faster rate” than an existentially grounded understanding. See also Jung (2003, pp. 6871). 8 As Spinoza (2002, p. 241) remarks, “the most tyrannical governments are those who make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right over his thoughts.” 9 Arendt (1966, p. 323) remarks that “totalitarian movements are mass organisations of atomised, isolated individuals.” These individuals display loyalty and selflessness towards the state’s goal because they have been deprived of all other social bonds that tie them to the common world. In this way, they lose any sense of private morality. See also Jung (2003, p. 154); Singer (2011, p. 111); Popper (2013, p. 103); Aron (2017, p. 292, 349); Damasio (2003, p. 163).

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which the subjective conscience suspends its actualisation in order for the living body of subjectivities that compose it to act as such against the external environment. Those who are left out of this collective body are those who incur its hostility. Its external environment, which does not assist its mechanical deportment and the consolidation of its distorted axioms, comprises the field of the unravelling of the collective evil. For the collective evil, the external environment is a foreign body that is not permeated by its instrumental seal, and therefore as a body by which it feels threatened. The external world and all the subjectivities that compose it become a dehumanised thing that the mechanic laws cannot handle. This thing then, is traumatised, destroyed or murdered because as an externality to the collective evil, neither serves it nor can procure its safety from it. The collective evil is an indivisible and compacted collectivism that considers itself to be a world closed within the sphere of the evil. In a similar way, it identifies the external environment and the subjectivities that inhabit them. So, each member of the collective evil, by placing itself at its service, damages a world or a subjectivity that does not belong to it. In its sphere, the pain, the tears, the life of those who live outside and beyond the field it controls, simply do not exist and are not recognised. On the contrary, their destruction is legitimised as something that serves the well-being of the collective group. In the name of the interests of the collective group, the subjective evil exits the closed sphere of subjectivity, it is canonised and generalised. As a consequence of this, it is masked as a recognised duty; as heroism and a noble service for the group. The expansion of the collective evil legitimises the subjective evil and vice versa. It authorises it to act out of its sphere; that is, to do what it normally does and insert it into the service of the limited group. In this way, the subjective evil serves the collective one and the latter legitimises and protects the former to the degree that it does not go against it. The same applies to the subjective evil; it introduces itself in the collectivism insofar as the latter does not go against it. At any rate, the collective evil is fed by its dehumanising effects. The collective evil finds refuge in ontological constructs that regularise ideologies, religions, moral systems and justice distributive systems. In this way, it legitimises its nature and delineates the sphere of its immunity. At the same time, it withholds and misappropriates the places of the subjective and common biosphere in which ontological forms of functional models could have been allotted. The ontological spheres codify, classify and organise the structure of the unthought and the instrumental blocks that emanate from it. These instrumental blocks establish a direct eclectic relation with their subjective auxiliaries and vice versa. The collective evil introduces itself into ontological schemes that generate and organise instrumental blocks that are

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rooted in the worldsphere. The instrumental layers concern ontological and institutional supports of cruelty in a constitutive arrangement, where doubt and revision do not infiltrate. These supporting blocks appear as ontological, because they are served by an organised theoretical construction. However, they function in a different way from that of a theoretical model. The cohesion of the collective evil lies is the fact that the active field is consistent with the ontological constructs that legitimise it. It superimposes itself on them and deprives them of their ontological property, which simply confines itself into describing it as it occurs, to anticipate and justify it. The successive forms of the manifestation of the collective evil sustain its ontological sphere and in itself exist because it expects its manifestation on the active field. The ontological sphere of evil regulates its status in relation to its energy on the actual reality in advance. This is the nature of the evil: it exists ontologically insofar as it anticipates its materialisation. Only the latter can retain its existence in the ontological sphere. Differently, its ontological conceptualisation has no meaning at all. So, the collective evil exists through the confluence of its manifestation with its theoretical conception. It is being said and expressed to exist in itself. And it exists as it is being said and expressed. This identification of the collective evil with the actual reality attracts those who have displayed it; those who are absorbed by the active field and who in their turn introduce themselves in its sphere, becoming in this way organic members of it. This insertion of an act into ontology and vice versa, a thing that is a typical trait of the collective evil, renders it self-evident and necessary in the sphere which chooses to find an abode. The collective evil exists as is stated and every manifestation of it seals its collectivity. Therefore, the collective evil puts aside and relegates its ontological institution; it exists only when it exists and attains a meaning only when manifested. The inertia of its theoretical authorisation cannot be compared with the energy of its manifestation. Its complete assimilation by the rules of the active field is the accumulative pattern that the collective evil follows. For this reason, its collectivity stigmatises its environing world with its manifestations and begins to be formed as such through its impulsive repetitive reifications. The collective evil delays revealing its stratified subjective roots. The beast violence is what makes it exist. Hence, its multiplication and endless continuity is the impulsive movement that it follows. The collective evil cannot see itself as a means towards an end, for what exists for it is itself and it cannot think outside of it. 2.3 The survivability of evil The survivability of evil is per definition short-term, because it does not present any claims of functionality. Only that which, despite its own absence can be

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revived in time through a wave of multi-rooted exercises of representation, can accomplish this. That is, only what is overloaded with condensed functional time that can be processed by reflection can raise claims of functionality. The evil is lacking functional time. The depth of its movement and its endurance in space and time is exhausted both by its identification with the duration of its existence and by its manifestation and the absorption of its bearer by the active field.10 What always precedes the manifestation of the subjective evil is the search and the tracking of its bearer who withdraws into obscurity by hiding. No other reaction causes the manifestation of the subjective evil. On the one hand, its carrier is absorbed by the temporality of the active field, and on the other hand, it moves within the limits posed by the functional models that the group in which it belongs has reached. The bearer of the subjective evil goes against the established long run dialectic and the functional models from which he diverges by violating them. The institutional and registered accumulations of the functional models, as the field of conscience of the subjectivities of a worldsphere, are per se points of neutralisation of the subjective evil. The latter proceeds only by virtue of aggressive acts directed against its external environment which are characterised by the singularity of instrumentalism. This means that only one among many acts directed against the freedom of its external environment in order to activate itself could instead deactivate it. In the chain of communicative contact that binds subjectivities, the subjective evil is supported only by itself, and only in an instrumental way; that is, without addressing a widely-shared existential condition. However, what does not respond to nor actualise a fundamental existential condition is sunk into oblivion at the moment of its manifestation. Its exposition in the chain in which in order for something to exist it must be credited with an affirmed functionality is a matter of time. Differently, the world in which it disposes itself collectively tries to detect, correct or isolate it, being seen as a dysfunctionality of its own. The survivability and durability of the subjective evil is preserved only through the energy and bodily health of its subjective bearer. Its manifestation per se means dysfunctionality in a world which is motivated and organised by an installed set of functional models that are constantly tested for the claims of long-term endurance, consent and the adjustability they yield. The models of functionality that the group to which it belongs adheres to, as well as the mechanisms of their production and their temporal evolution, are impaired by the subjective evil. The subjective evil is outside the dialectic of the development of the functional models. From the perspective of the evolution

10

As Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics,1159 b10) maintains, any association based on a shared wickedness is short term.

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of the models of functionality, it is already a discarded remnant of functionality and thus, at the moment it is actualised, it is automatically rejected. Since the subjective evil is outside the level of temporality of a worldly sphere, is detected by the web of the institutional and the subjective supporting components of these models that are oriented to constrain and halt it whenever it appears. The reaction of the network of the functional models aims at the suspension of the energy of the subjective evil and the total repossession of the spatio-temporal field that has been withheld by it. It neutralises it through its self-referent force that is directed it against it; that is, by depriving it of its ability to intervene in the active field. In other words, the subjective evil by its nature defines the way of its handling in the active field. The instrumentality of the act is lost in the frozen time and space. It is accordingly faced, through its deprivation, with an inability to act. The social environment in which the bearer of the subjective evil belongs and acts, it perceives and counteracts from the perspective of the stage of the functional models that it manufactures. From this point of view, the goal is the smoothening of its uninterrupted dialectic of development and the implementation of these fields of viability. From the perspective of the evolution of the functional models, the subjective evil has already been discarded by the earlier stages of its development, and hence, it automatically aims to deactivate what is per definition destructive. The destructiveness of the evil and its evolutionary unfamiliarity defines the means that the social environment utilises in its primary attempt to block it. Correction is part of this compounded system of intervention and the mechanisms that comprise it, but not its immediate goal. Its immediate goal is the uniform conformity with the functional models and their uninterrupted mental and institutional progress. This aims at the reconstitution of their generalised regulative energy that serves the survivability of the group of subjectivities that compose it. Hence the bearer of the subjective evil is removed from the functional field, incurs confinement and surveillance so as not to be able to act anymore. Punishment and enclosure designate clearly the nervousness of a social group’s functional models as far as the treatment of the subjective evil is concerned. It copes with it on the basis of evil’s own tools: its absorption by the active field is dealt by means of the clearance of the functional field from the bearer of the subjective evil. The confinement of evil within the dead space of the prison wherein the possibility of violation of the functional models is excluded, designates the restoration of the continuity of its dialectic development, even with the neutralisation of someone who is not a carrier of it.11

11 See Plato (The Laws 855a); Spinoza (2004, pp. 105-106); Arendt (1958, p. 241); Hutcheson (1728, treatise 2, sect. 6, p. 292); (Smith 2002, part 2, sec. 2, ch.3, par. 11). Kant (1996, p.

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2.4 Confronting collective evil The smooth operation of the collective evil is interrupted by the reaction of other collective worlds that are situated outside the closed sphere in which it develops and is reified. The energy of the collective evil is directed against the external environment. For it to exist, it should delineate its external field where it would unleash its instrumentality. The generalised nature of the collective evil multiplies the width of its aggressiveness. But at the same time, it amplifies the exterior models of functionality which act as blocking fields of resistance and neutralisation. The destructive character of a worldsphere that is motivated by instrumental tools activates the functional models of other worldspheres. These worldspheres accrue and codify a value system and an institutional complex on which they base their survivability as well as the common structure of communicative conjunction with other worldspheres. The activity of the collective evil threatens both the survivability of these worlds and the intra-worldly interaction on the basis of convergent functional models. Therefore, the reaction towards the collective evil stems from the widespread distribution and assembly of intra-worldly functional models and their confrontation with it on the basis of axioms of long-term survivability. The collective evil is often isolated from the rest of the interplay of worldspheres. The closure of the collective evil aims both at the minimisation of its energy upon the external environment and the designation of its discontent with the intra-worldly functional models. This is something that conveys the need for its correction. The blocking of the points of exit and contact of the collective evil with its external environment somewhat protects the latter from its destructive effects. However, it does not have an immediate application on the field in which it was enclosed and thereafter being isolated from the other worldspheres. When in the past, a worldsphere was regulated by a different rhythm of temporality, the bordering of the collective evil meant a covert recognition of its sovereign right to destroy the lives of the people who were closed in its borders. The intra-worldly functional models were not dispersed drastically in this worldsphere; simply the latter was credited with a time and space, which afterwards was multiply sealed both by itself and by its external environment.12 Nevertheless, it was pregnant with the perspective of its correction under the spectrum of the illustration and accumulation of its distortions. The course of its dysfunctionality had been already illuminated and attested to long before its actual collapse.

110) says that the state has the right to deport or exile someone (expulsion from civil society) who committed a crime if “it makes it harmful to the state for his fellow citizens to associate with him.” 12 See Arendt (1966, p. 393).

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The energy of the collective evil very often calls for the necessary solution of total intervention.13 This aims at the destruction of the sum of its institutional and ideological auxiliary mechanisms and the release of the space and time that was kept hostage. The collective evil is sometimes faced with the collective cooperation of an assemblage of worldspheres that are governed by shared functional models. Its nature is depicted in the confrontation between functional models and the field of instrumentality. The collective evil connects with the world by destroying it. It then delineates the world within its own active field, which grants it an identity and treats it as a thing. Then it converts it into an expanded field into which it channels its energy, without which definition cannot exist. Therefore, its uprooting from the cosmic field and the rejuvenation of the place it occupied were necessary acts for the continuity of the dialectic of development of the functional models. The beast violence of the collective evil that primarily aims at its sustainability is dealt with the corrective violence that aims to weaken and destroy it as an instrumental component that orients a particular world. The cooperating act of an assembly of worldspheres in uprooting the Nazi regime and the subsequent subjection and institutional reorganisation of this world by other worlds, typifies one of the most powerful interventions in human history against a spatio-temporal field that was seized by evil. It was what Walzer calls a paradigmatic example of a just war that aims at the reaffirmation of shared international values.14 The outcome of the polemical confrontation can be analysed on the basis of war strategies. In fact, however, it is a confrontation between the short-term lifespan of the collective evil and the long-term dialectic of the functional models. The collective evil does not survive and never did. The distress caused to the functional models amplified them further and gave them their, thus far, greatest impetus for mutation. The fact that the violence of evil is met only with violence is a rule that is imposed by the absorption of evil by the active field. It is also a result of the evolutionary distance that separates the functional models from it. In other words, it is incomprehensible to them to such an extent, that they use its own tools against

13 As Walzer (2006, p. 107) puts it, “humanitarian intervention is justified when it is a response (with reasonable expectations of success) to acts ‘that shock the moral conscience of humanity.” Kant (1996, p.119) refers to the “unjust enemy”, which “reveals a maxim by which, if it were made a universal rule, any condition of peace among nations would be impossible and, instead, a state of nature would be perpetuated.” Kant makes it clear that the goal should not be subjugation, but the formation of a new constitution less inclined to war and destruction. 14 As Aron (2017, p. 116) points out, the response to the Nazi regime was delayed. In 1933 Marshall Pilsudski suggested the overthrow of Hitler. As he remarks, “the invasion of Germany by French troops in March 1936 would perhaps have been condemned by world opinion; it would have saved the peace.”

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it as remnants of an evolutionary past from which they have cut off any relationship. 2.5 Conscience before evil Conscience is paralysed in the face of evil, because it does not have at its disposal the tools for its understanding. There, where conscience is active, evil does not exist. The ascending movement of conscience and the descending movement of evil never meet. There is neither any trace of an elective affinity between the two nor an attribute in common. Hence evil cannot enter and secure the attention of the functional models. Conscience is being consulted and directed by the stratified models of functionality that rescue and codify whatever can exist non-instrumentally. That is to say, conscience captures what can intersubjectively fly from the lifeless active field and survive in representation and thereafter is processed and undergoes a long-term progressive mutation. Evil, on the other hand, is the automatic unfolding of an instrumentalism that exists because both the process of the accumulation of islands of functionality and the trichotomisation of time – as the necessary condition for the construction of a condition of enduring presence of conscience – are cancelled. Conscience by its nature is thus paralysed before the instrumentalism of evil and its absorption by the dead temporality. For conscience, evil is incomprehensible because by its very nature it is incompatible with the non-revived thought that retreats in its self-sufficiency. Conscience exists as a reaction and resistance towards the frozen time. Therefore, by compressing and suspending the energy of the other fields, it learns to be hegemonic in order to demonstrate its superiority and uniqueness of the active field. It is because of this that conscience subjugates this temporality, controls and utilises it to amplify its own tools, without allowing them to be autonomised. Conscience and evil are separated by an evolutionary gap. In fact, within the definition of evil, the structure for a scaled development is absent, whereas conscience is nourished by gradual development. Evil follows a pattern of scaled retrogression. Because of this gap, conscience, under the providence of its advancing perspective, considers evil to have been already discarded and devalued before it even demonstrates itself. It spontaneously rejects it because the functional models from which it extracts in order to transfigure them ontologically, have been moulded to block evil and its auxiliary mechanisms. The aversion of conscience towards the evil is impulsive, for the evolutionary perspective it has attained necessitates only an unfettered rejection. This incomprehension of the evil that was brought about by the evolutionary distance of conscience creates nervousness as far as its handling is concerned. Moreover, it renders the subjectivities and the institutions that are oriented by

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it susceptible to the aggressive mania of the evil. Conscience, no matter how hard it tries to be attentive and discuss with the bearer of the evil, is defenceless against its mania; the evil will inflict damage on it or kill it. For evil, generosity is weakness; it is perceived as a state of inertia upon the active field and as a concession of space to manifest itself unhindered. Hence evil exploits conscience. As a remedy to this, conscience creates an analogous mechanism of violence against the violence of the evil. Whereas the violence of evil is self-referential and consists of a fundamental condition for its existence, the mechanisms of violence of the worldspheres that are animated by functional models are hetero-referential. They always refer to the violence of evil and they are utilised for the cathartic clearing of the space from the blocks that evil projects against conscience’s operation and advancement. The use of violence against violence represents the inability of bridging the evolutionary gap that separates conscience from evil. Evil gains the attention of conscience only to the degree that the latter is processing, and prepares ways for its uprooting and the cessation of its energy. 2.6 Evil and its relation to reality Evil blocks the energy of the informing reality and is unmoulded by the history of the effects of its energy as they have been stored in the human corporeality and the democratic institutions.15 So, evil appears as an immutable substance that is incongruent with the actual world. This disagreement articulates itself through its destructive disposition, aiming at bridging its own chasm with reality. In real terms, this concerns the damaging of the well-being of other subjectivities in time and space. Evil is a time- and space-wasting machine that de-spiritualises and dehumanises the world it inhabits. It is in fact deprived of the cherished spirituality of the world as it has been grafted into the human being and as it is nourished through a conversational relationship with the functional field. It lives in a world without spirit; that is, in a world without a registered progressive evolution and communicability. As such it does not converse with the actual reality and remains unmoulded by it. Instead, it releases its own uniformed frozen departments within the actual reality. In real terms, reality has been substituted by the energy of its own internal fixed departments. Thereafter it substitutes reality for itself and plunges into a course that is fed with malevolent calculations and deadly spatial interventions. Evil cannot become part of our functional history, for it cannot annex itself to the functional deposit. It becomes real not through manifesting itself in deeds and words but by unleashing itself on human corporeality. Thus, evil only becomes

15

See Arendt (1978, p. 4; 1964, p. 135).

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real the moment it causes loss and disappearance. It’s the reality of grief and pain that it causes that make it, for a short time, real. The moment it is processed by conscience and empowers its functional deposits, it disappears into oblivion.

Chapter 3

The enhanced conscience

3.1 The living subjectivity as the live root of the functional models The living roots of the functional models always reside in the living subjectivity that is contained within a concrete historical place and time. The functional models that are built within the subjectivity and thereafter are applied in the common world sustain their living power impetus; they are internalised and preserved within the lapse of time by conscience and are actualised and developed by the mode of temporality by which it is regulated. They are generated and preserved, and as soon as they are institutionalised, they are readjusted through repetitive experiential affirmation. Their readjustment is founded on their imaginary consistency within the reality and as a result of their own imaginary reconstitution by the living subjectivity itself. The institutions and the social values accommodate the models of functionality that conscience produces and consist of a response to the need for its materialisation. The social exteriorisation of moral values is the longterm result of the externalisation and interposition of conscience in the common world. However, these models, after being released into the reified world, lose their immediate relationship with the enduring presence; that is, their grounding on entwined existential conditions that is an ingredient of the living conscience itself. Then they have the propensity to be autonomised.1 This tendency of the product of thought to break the link from its generative cause may only be monitored by retaining their organic relation with a group of subjectivities and their constant subjection to the process of the activity of thought. The reified models of functionality cannot animate nor rejuvenate and improve themselves without the direct and constant supervision of the living conscience. On one hand, the institutionalisation of the functional

1

Spinoza (2004, p. 167) talks about the corruption of meaning (religious meaning, ‘dead letter’) due to superstition and disuse that one could only reanimate it through the natural light of reason and self-introspection. He concludes: “From this it follows that nothing is in itself absolutely sacred, or profane, and unclean, apart from the mind, but only relatively thereto.” See also Locke (2008, book. IV. ch. XV1, par. 10-11). Arendt (1958, p. 169) says that “it is always the ‘dead letter’ in which the ‘living spirit’ must survive, a deadness from which it can be rescued only when the dead letter comes again into contact with a life willing to resurrect it, although this resurrection of the dead shares with all living things that it too, will die again.”

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models causes their decoupling from their living bearer and their introduction into a semi-autonomous path. On the other, the reification of the functional models imprints the root of the functional perspective in the common world that surpasses both the limit of the biological survivability of conscience and the solitary reconstitution of the world inside it. These functional models compensate for the biological loss of the carrier of conscience through the preservation of the reified root against which the successive historical bearers of conscience could measure themselves, could internalise and submit it to the living temporality of their own conscience. The realised traces of conscience in the worldly sphere operate as potentially revivable and adjustable perspectives that do not rely on the biological circle of their bearer. They represent an accumulation and allotment of functional models that require a constant, renewed and evolutionary existential relationship with the multiple and collective web of subjectivities that share a social sphere. Whereas conscience is not contained within the reified functional models, the latter are contained in it. The worldly embedded functional models cannot exist without the externality of conscience, for it is the latter that would experience and be attentive to them. On the contrary, nonreified functional models can exist within the unseen conscience. For this reason, the institutional investment of the functional models does not necessarily procure their functional unfolding. The latter may symbolically register the potential energy of conscience. Nevertheless, they can also be subjugated to the earlier stages of the development of conscience and be applied instrumentally, in a retaliatory manner and, as a result, they could ultimately debase the spirit that gave birth to them. Moreover, they can also autonomise themselves: build their own internal rules of existence that would serve their own structural existence and development, thus disarticulating their organic relationship with the living conscience. That is, they can be absorbed by reified calendar time, which renders it the dominant model of temporality that resists its mutation pressured by the temporality of the constant development of the functional models. As soon as this occurs, a trait that is a pathological symptom of thought that becomes ontology and part of the human condition, the institutions derail from their living source. As Mill remarks, “there is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical.”2 They develop a mode of existence which

2

See Mill (1974, p. 129). Bergson (1946, p. 189) describes this pathology as follows: “We place ourselves in the immobile to watch for the moving reality as it passes instead of putting ourselves back into the moving reality to traverse with it the immobile positions.” Heidegger (1962, p. 214) calls it absorption into the “they”, an uprooting where Dasein is, “as Being-in-the-word – cut from its primary and primordially relationships-of-Being towards the world.” Arendt (1978, p. 88) calls it the absence of the invisible thinking activity from the common world. Castoriadis (1991, p. 133) calls the heteronomy: “A self-

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robs the dialectic of the development of conscience of time; they produce lost and unnecessary time. And yet, it is the living conscience that would sustain the functional models that engender the need for their institutionalisation and to instil them ontologically by virtue of matching them with the invisible and silent dialectic of its development. 3.2 Being in enhanced conscience Jesus Christ and Socrates manifest the radical insertion of the enhanced conscience in the field of historicity. As Bergson notes, “The great moral figures that have made their mark on history, join hands across the centuries, above human cities; they unite into a divine city which they bid us to enter.”3 The being in enhanced conscience represents an endogenous materialised subjective mental time and space which inscribes in itself the dialectic of the progressive development of the commonly organised world. It constitutes a present root of a worldly sphere in the future. The most advanced and active root of conscience, which is always disconnected from its institutionalised byproducts, is located within the free subjective spirit.4 The being in conscience is the living subjectivity that moves agonistically and disjunctively within the array of things and ideas that organise a worldsphere. In juxtaposition with the functional models that regulate the external world, it attains a higher scale of conscience.5 The representation of the world and its reflective examination within the enhanced spirit is contained, lived and transformed qualitatively. The external world enters the free spirit through its representation, and thereafter undergoes a corrective reconstitution. The substratum of the existential conditions that it has acquired, in conjunction with the functional models that yield inward ontological formations, make the enhanced spirit another invisible world within that more commonly experienced. In this way, the enhanced spirit is itself the embodied presence of the future in a present in which it lives and from which it is evolutionarily in a more advanced state.

occultation of the self-institution of society.” Lefebvre (1991, p. 415) calls this “hegemony of space”, where institutions or even the state place themselves upon lived experience. 3 See Bergson (1977, p. 68). Bergson connects both Socrates and Jesus Christ with the eruption of the mystical experience in the world. See also Leibniz (1991, p. 41); Jung (2003, p. 64); Popper (2013, p. 104); Arendt (1958, p. 318); Jaeger (1947, p. 14); Dawkins (2006, p. 250) and Kitcher (2011, p. 251). 4 As Spinoza (2004, p. 257) says, “no man’s mind can possibly lie wholly at the disposition of another, for no one can willingly transfer his natural right of free reason and judgement, or be compelled so to do. For this reason government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical.” 5 As Kant (1996, p. 196) says, “it is a human being’s duty to strive for this perfection, but not to reach it (in this life), and his compliance with this duty can, accordingly, consist only in continual progress.”

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The being in enhanced conscience has shaped in its invisible inner world a corrected anti-model of the external reality.6 It is from this inner world that it is motivated. It carries within itself a rectified version of the world, which is demonstrated through its words and deeds and under the energy of which it intervenes constructively. The enhanced conscience has joined the ideological with the real structure of the common world, and thereafter stored the cases of their disagreement. These islands of disagreement between things, problems and crises on the one hand, and discourses endeavouring to respond in an accommodative mode on the other, build a distorted field that a world carries within. The distortions, both by being autonomised structurally and by gaining their own independent course, comprise the distorted fields of a worldsphere that hinder its regulated operation. These are the points where thought and act, despite their demonstrated failure, have not been reopened and informed in a reconstructive way by the formation of new islands of functionality. The enhanced conscience, being responsive to the crisis that creates the distorted fields, has imaginarily discarded and cancelled them as instrumental conceptual and practical islands. The stratified representation of the distorted islands and the attempt for an existential connection with them on the basis of multi-rooted traces of existential conditions that they should contain, leads to a crisis. The latter indicates the need for their imaginary corrective reconstruction. Counteracting the distorted field, the enhanced conscience has devised functional models that dislodge them, bringing about a better rhythmic harmony. In other words, the being in enhanced conscience has imaginarily corrected the external world and deals with it under the ensuing urgency of the need for its real renovating change. A part of the common world that has been proved to be distorted, exists for the enhanced spirit only as something that should change or something that has already entered a process of synchronisation with the processed signals of the functional field. The being in enhanced conscience moves on an inner mental space that has evolutionarily surpassed the temporality of the reified world that contains it. It carries within itself the imaginary correction of the world into which it was thrown and with which it must gradually and creatively become connected. This amorphous corrected version of the actual world creates the perspective by which the enhanced spirit is motivated. The reified world, of which it is a subjective member, exists as something that should undergo the process of mutation in relation to its imaginary correction. The enhanced conscience

6

As Hegel (2004, p. 439) says, thought “involves the Harmony of Being in its purest essence, challenging the external world to exhibit the same Reason which Subject [the Ego] possesses.”

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approaches the world that suffers from its distortions with a corrective disposition. The being in conscience consists of a bridgeable gap under a process between the reified world and its reflective reconstitution. It is the creator of a novel reality and the subject of the generated experience of the gap with the hegemonic reality. This existential living of the gap generates, in turn, a reforming energy that resembles an impulse that aims to narrow the distance between the world that the enhanced spirit carries within and the actual configuration of the common reality itself. This committed orientation towards the reformation of the world, the burden of which a singular subjectivity carries, is attained through the materialisation of the invisible imaginary world and the subsequent dematerialisation of the distorted fields of the reified world. The home of the enhanced spirit is its irreconcilable attitude to change the world after its own reformative change. It is also a point of embarking upon a culture of change that is disseminated and shared among the communities of subjectivities. This imaginary correction of the world does not remain immutable. Successive waves of continuous reflective examination proceed and insert itself in it, thus enriching the functional models. Moreover, the imaginary remoulding of the world within a subjective world or within a community of subjectivities produces in itself its own dialectic of development and progressive mutation. It is made and remade in an imaginary mode, dispersing thereafter its traces within the reified world. Even if this world had been realised, again its corrective anti-model would have been constructed in the future. 3.3 Being in enhanced conscience as a temporal leap The being in enhanced conscience is, in itself, a formulation of a temporal leap in relation to the materialised world of ideas and practices that build the reified world in which it participates. The time that the enhanced spirit obeys is that of the constant production of functional models. This means it retains as always active the relation of dependence and perfectibility between the ontological constructions and conscience. The ontological constructions are always subject to an affective relationship with the mechanisms that generate them. They are not allowed to be autonomised, nor is their own divergent movement that follows the rules of calendar time charged with essential meaning. Because of this, the enhanced spirit inhabits and is directed by a different temporality from the dominant temporality. The disparities of the ontological articulations with the functional field that they aim to address have already been corrected by the enhanced conscience before having themselves been perceived as such and then replaced within the common reality. The enhanced spirit purifies time by tracking and discarding in a timely manner whatever consumes much more time until the functional

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field clearly exposes it as dysfunctional. Only whatever is viable and functional can seize the thought and act from the enhanced spirit. The latter inhabits a future point of time at which the dominant reality, after being disengaged from the temporal divergence of the distorted or inefficient ontological constructions, would proceed progressively. The temporality by which the enhanced conscience is regulated is tuned with the temporal rhythm of the functional models. This rhythm detects and scrutinises only ontological constructions, acts and reactions that possess durability in the temporal depth of viability. The enhanced conscience acts on the basis of long-term survival and is not distracted by the calculations and equilibriums provided by the uniformed mode of time. The enhanced spirit bypasses these calculations, for it has not the distilled rationality of a drive to deal with them. The commands of conscience that point only to whatever is functional have an all-scrutinising scope and cannot be subsided. Since they install themselves in the apparatus of conscience and are being employed as the parameters of its governance, they direct the ideological and the active sphere in which consciousness moves and support whatever is functionally viable in the horizon of the temporality that is created by conscience. The enhanced spirit does not occupy itself with the short-term game that spiritless calendar time fixes. Being consulted in advance about the vanity of the methods and gains that this mode of time would entail as far as its own growth, it refuses to esteem it as such and to be absorbed by it. The enhanced spirit is bound to an advanced evolutionary stage in the temporal horizon of viability. Its synchronisation and endurance at the moment where each process of witnessing and attentiveness in the chain of its deportment in the world are exhausted, and yet, it would manage to be affirmed and survive. The survival consists of its endurance in a temporal depth that is organised only by the functional models, as the polyprismatic witnessing of its harmony both with its words and the functionality of its active and ideological intervention in the reified world. 3.4 Being in enhanced conscience and the sphere of moral response The enhanced conscience transcends the structure of the ethical sphere that regulates the political, social and economic institutions within any single worldsphere. The conscience and the values that it produces transgress the ethical sphere of the closed worlds, which exist as such because they have demarcated the range of the moral response in a spatio-temporal plane. The enhanced conscience exceeds the range of the moral response that is founded on the ordering of the human material upon linear time. The enveloped worlds exist because, historically, politically, socially and economically, they have forfeited the existential conditions and the reflective process and thereafter

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have held them to specific limits that are defined as tribes, races, religions, nations and so on. Beyond this frozen reified field, the moral response is weakened, it is not applied or is employed selectively. And therein begins the extension of the era of instrumentalism that is one of the conditions of the existence of each encapsulated world. The being in an enhanced conscience lives in a universal ethical sphere. As Spinoza says, Jesus Christ “was sent into the world, not to preserve the state, nor to lay down laws, but solely to teach the universal moral law.” 7 National or racial categories are conceived as the limits of the conscience and as the fields that confine the range of its applicability. They belong to a mode of temporality that did not acquire the necessary energy to deliver and sustain a moral system based on the pure attributes of conscience. For the enhanced spirit the moral response is rooted within the shared human existential condition and in the functional models that surpass the categories built by the common public space, frequently legitimising in this way its own inertia. The temporality of conscience and the long-term perspective that is rooted within it, do not recognise a point in time and place where the moral response is put on hold. Insofar as conscience rescued from time and place only whatever is functional and built the dialectic of its own temporality, it cannot be entrapped anymore in the spatial and temporal bondage of the reified order of things. These points are islands of instrumentalism that are possessed by calendar time and as such are incompatible and inadequate when seen under the energy of the conscience. The enhanced conscience has broadened the sphere of the moral response and subjected it to the pure energy of the mechanisms for the production of conscience, rather than to an ontological construction of an ethical sphere that belongs to a particular historical temporality. The being in enhanced conscience harbours a moral sphere of action that is not met in the organising structures of any world, for it breaches the moral sphere of each closed world. It dissolves its limits and reappropriates the desert of instrumentality that exists outside its borders, instilling in them the functional models on the basis of which it redefines ethical behaviour, reaction, cooperativeness and solidarity. Against the ontological constructions that regulate the political and social action and that are considered the impetus of historical movement, the enhanced conscience projects the functional models and the dialectic towards which they advance. The independent movement of the ontological formations of conscience within the historical time obscures and suspends the effects of these functional models. It is detached from them and renders the instrumental time dominant. Being in enhanced conscience acts as a block of resistance towards these ontological disengagements. It

7

See Spinoza (2004, p. 70).

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recomposes them by restoring their communicative link with the functional models. In doing this, it illuminates the lost time: the time that was required in order for the ontological constructions to be reopened by the more powerful functional models and, thereafter, to be seen as their historical manifestations rather than as autonomous processes in which the world was carried, paying the price of the deprivation of its functional life. 3.5 The survival of enhanced conscience after its death The enhanced spirit does not biologically survive the wicked mania. Nevertheless, the revivable traces of its manifestation within historical time do survive. The being in enhanced conscience was marginalised, persecuted and killed many times and in different historical eras.8 The biological existence follows the rules of calendar time; it knows that it is directed towards death. It is from calendar time that both the subjective and the collective evil derive their power. They identify the appearance and the disappearance, the duration of an intervention in general, with the biological participation of the subject within calendar time. And from the moment they remove the enhanced spirit from this mode of time, they assume that they annihilate its inner-worldly effect. Thus, violence and aggressive mania are employed as a means to erase the bearer of the enhanced conscience from the field of biological presence. The being in enhanced conscience reformulates imaginarily a world the traces of which are demonstrated through its deportment in the world. The limits of this invisible world challenge the limits and the rules of the established world. The killing, the imprisonment and the hardship often undergone by the enhanced spirit betray the fear of the dominant system. The creative novelty is counteracted by the established fixity whose immense force is unleashed upon a single human entity. This fixed sphere construes whatever moves beyond the plane of its legitimisation that built itself as an enemy, as a lunacy and an illness that need to be cured through their biological constraint or death so the conscientious divergence cannot be consolidated and infused. The enhanced spirit knows very well, of course, that in its measuring against the auxiliary subsystems of the established world it would not biologically survive. And yet, the enhanced conscience that governs compels it towards confrontation with death itself; that is, to break the chain of instrumentality and say, “not through me.” As Socrates puts it, “a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything, he is doing right or wrong.”9 This is because it knows that the greatest

8 9

See Spinoza (2004, p. 263); Mill (1974, pp. 84-89). See Plato (Apology 27b).

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manifestation of conscience occurs at the moment it fearlessly confronts the mechanisms of death. The moment of the biological disappearance of the enhanced conscience is the moment of its survival, its testing for the passing beyond the biologically limited era.10 For the power of the functional models to be survived, it needs to designate its superiority over the biological survival. It is in the nature of conscience as a distinct entity to survive death and it does so through the effects it releases and not through human biological survival, which does not constitute the basis around which it has been progressively engendered. The compulsion of conscience overrules and dissolves the instinct of survival. The parameters of biological survival are not identical with the parameters of long-term survival that operate regardless of the subjective and exhaustible biological circle. The ineffaceable will to conform with and to apply the commands of conscience as well as the temporality in which they belong are more powerful than the desire of the subject to survive biologically. Consequently, measuring up with death is a victory of conscience over the calendar time. The functional models which rescue from this recurring life only whatever is functional, do not have as a point of reference the biological preservation of subjectivities, but their own endurance and application in a historical depth regardless of any cost. What should live for conscience are the just laws, the institutions that consolidate them and the spirit that is in a mutual communicative relationship of development with them. At the moment in which the enhanced spirit is killed, the power of conscience over the powers of death is also reaffirmed. The common and recognised as dominant will of the subject for survival around which many rules of logic evolve is replaced by the will for the survival of the functional models that were granted by conscience. It is within these models that the spirit that created them survives, in order to be relived by the succeeding generations of spirits that would attain an evolutionary resemblance with it. And whereas the closed sphere, through the elimination of the enhanced spirit, considers that in the short run it is healing itself of a sickness, in fact, the manifestation of conscience at the moment of its death operates as a trace for the long-term cure of this sphere.

10 According to Spinoza (2004, p. 263), an enlightened man who is prosecuted for his opinions, “holds that death in a good cause is no punishment, but an honour, and that death for freedom is glory.” Castoriadis (1997, pp. 170-171) discusses Socrates’ acceptance of death as follows: “In dying, he also saves himself. He saves himself for himself; he saves his image, this being the triumphant return of self-finality in the disappearance of its ‘subject’.” See also Kierkegaard (1994, p. 104); Jaspers (2003, p. 20); Popper (2013, p. 183).

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3.6 The remembrance of the enhanced conscience We remember the enhanced spirit as a latecomer and only after a lapse of time can we proceed along the rhythm of the temporality that created its nonmaterialised world, as well as the functional models that persisted and have been revealed in time.11 The force of the remembrance of the enhanced spirit that generates its eternal absence is created by the juxtaposition of the established world with the imaginary one that itself became, and is displayed, in the historical field. The remembrance of the enhanced spirit leads to a persisting paralytic condition in which there is no place for doubt. It operates as the maximum approximation of the self with its words and deeds, and as an indication of the endurance of the functional models that were distilled to the degree that we are unable to stand on their dichotomy, to distance ourselves from them and devalue them by sinking them in the obscurity of linear time. Instead of this, the historical manifestation of the enhanced spirit and the frequency of its recurring participation in the present operate as an auxiliary chasm with the established reality, which permits us to maintain a distance and not let ourselves be absorbed by it. While we follow the slow flow of time, testing through failures and divergences the claims of functionality that we possess, the remembrance of the enhanced conscience becomes, rather than blurred, even more vivid. Progressively we detect it more sharply in the future since we approach the functional models with which it was possessed a long time previously. This scaling density of remembrance consists of an experiential historical convergence expressed with a genealogical resemblance of a mode of a shaping of the spirit that will take place in the future.12 The living trace of the enhanced conscience from the past survives within the coming future. Our progressive work towards reaching its own stage of development unfolds in the space between the past and the future. The functional models that, in the meantime, we have formed, enable us to communicate with it existentially. The manifestations of its own conscience and its rooting in historical time create the conditions of a genealogical affection with the universally shared mechanisms of production of conscience. It is this organic connection that keeps them alive in the mode of spirit that the successive generations shape. The historical matching of the spirit and its products and vice versa in the

11 As Mill (1974, p. 90) points out: “The real advantage which truth has consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found people to rediscover it.” See also Hegel (2004, p. 270). 12 Hegel (1977, p. 473, par.781) remarks: “The dead divine Man or human God is in himself the universal self-consciousness.”

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future, through the mediation of an evolutionary resemblance, illustrate our own delayed attainment of a mode of temporality that moved it. For it to be durable in the long-term means it was long-term functional. This root that kept it alive sustains the possibility of synchronisation with it. It survived as our own possibility in the future. We sentenced it to death but it is waiting to meet us, after we evolve progressively, at a corner of the coming future and, since we now realise the functional models in which we now partake, to build upon them further. Within the flow of the functional field, the enhanced spirit consists of an evolutionary leap in time. It captures and rescues whatever enters thought and endures death and linear time. It becomes itself essential time, in sharp contrast to the linear time which busies itself with the disused products of the past. This conscientious shaping is revived, affirmed and materialised by the army of the enhanced consciousnesses that follow and that could touch upon its root. This leap in time is made in the name of the long-term functionality that surpasses the terms of the individual biological survival. It frees the human spirit from lost time and energy, defeating thus the slow flow of linear time. In the laws of existence of linear time, in order for functionality to be disclosed, it needs to be tested – sometimes repeatedly – in all of its earlier stages in the chain of time before the rhythmic harmony is to be invented. On the contrary, the enhanced spirit in the idiosyncratic temporality that it achieves rescues the traces of the human presence that are worthy of being remembered. It codifies the accrued experience that waves the fibres of the collective conscience in order to orient the human community and deliver to it something from its lost life. The enhanced spirit lifts in itself the burden for the construction of the longterm development of the collective human presence upon the earth. It reaches a stage of growth, a mode of thinking and acting, whereby the care of humanity becomes its sole aim. It departs from the accumulated work of the collective consciousness that was bequeathed to it and it thereafter internalised, and thereafter lifts the greatest weight for its development and gives it its greatest impetus. The mechanisms for the production of conscience are always oriented towards the attainment of a harmony of the collective group as is perceived each time and which is under the status of expansion. The biological parameter of the fixed individual biological consciousness does not need the mechanisms of reflection. These mechanisms per se constrain it from subjective space and time and operate on the condition that thought should not evolve around working upon itself. The concept of subjective biological survival is founded on timely calculations within an environment that is regulated by the terms of linear time.

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The activity of thought is neither compatible nor can serve the short-term needs of biological survival. For these needs to exist, it requires the regulative power of the functional models to be suspended. On the contrary, the structure of reflective thought operates under the condition of its repetitive representability in time. As such, it cannot exist without establishing a communicative link with the functional field. That which is relived never refers to a singular moment of subjective contingency. The enhanced spirit in its painful confrontation with time, in the aura of which is absent, investigates the keys for a mode of life, which is in compliance with the functional models. In its fusion within the mechanisms for the production of conscience, it becomes even more agonistic, after witnessing the sorrow and pain that occur because of the absence of the functional models from the organisation of the world. By constructing them, a perspective in time is rooted whereby the distortions of the external world would be corrected and social arrhythmia would be regulated. The enhanced spirit, by serving as a repository of these models of functionality, releases the historical field from its wasted life and energy; it subjects linear time to the dialectic of the functional models so as no more life should be wasted. Following the rules of the sluggish flow of calendar time in order for the resolution of some claims of functionally and the affirmation of some others to take place, it would require a delayed divergence accompanied by an enormous cost. The temporality of conscience, however, is by its nature time-saving; it is founded on viability and by virtue of this it introduces in time and focuses its attention in space only on whatever can survive in the long term. The enhanced spirit arrives much earlier at the point at which we will arrive, and it rejects whatever would torment us exhaustively before being degraded. The enhanced conscience becomes itself time, rupture, novelty and qualitative evolutionary divergence from the rhythm of temporality that the dominant reality obeys. Thus, it sharpens the mechanisms for the production of conscience that belong to an advanced stage of consciousness. It is itself the temporal variation on the basis of which the rupture in the unfolding of the calendar time is measured and, moreover, the original place for the correction of a distortion and the reorientation of the world is marked out. The enhanced conscience capitalises on the accumulation of the functional models in the past time. The experience of the past time is reshaped and ordered on the basis of the temporality of the enhanced conscience and the functional models formed by it. It is conscience that struggles to rescue from the past the lost human attainments; the functional roots or mechanisms for the speeding up of a worldly temporality. It is conscience which subjugates the instrumental time and deprives it of whatever parasitically existed without contributing in any way to the documentation of the map of human viability.

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The enhanced conscience becomes time itself because it is qualitatively differentiated from whatever preceded and proceeded, which is now explained in reference to it. Since it consists of a rupture with the dominant reality, it redefines time wherein whatever indicates its existence is rescued; that is, the points in history that announce something more functional. It also itself becomes time because it makes possible the differentiation between an earlier and a later stage of development, setting up as a criterion the qualitative stage of functionality it has attained. It alters time by giving it a faster pace. By doing this, on one hand it decreases the temporal period needed for the revealing of functional models, and on the other decreases the period of habitation and smooth circulation of a distortion within the established world. It makes the world less prone to historical divergences in the duration of which the contact with the trace of the dialectical development of conscience would be lost. In doing so, it intensifies the production of the functional models that aim at becoming themselves the measure for calculating time, understood as edifying the world on the accumulated spirit and essence.

Chapter 4

Subjective and objective time and place

The subjective mental space and time is always situated in obscurity and remains untold within the conception and documentation of the historical, social and political reality. Subjective time and place are not encountered, they do not conform to and are not identical with the external reality. This spatiotemporal dimension is a constitutive part of reality, but it is not actually contained within it. By being irreducible to reality, it consists of a point of rupture and a possibility for its recreation. It is a parallel world with its own real and experienced time and rhythm. This world is not documented, it is not considered as important and essential, and it is absent from the hegemonic analysis and record of that which is assumed to exist. Nevertheless, the reified world is the historical process of externalisation and representation of this silent subjective space and time. This process widens the actual reality and on it is founded essential existential and organic conditions, rendering it in this way multi-prismatic in regards to its content, and multi-rooted as regards its legitimisation. 4.1 The singular movement in time The singular subjective movement in space is a fundamental condition of the human condition. With our birth we have each been assigned the right to possess a fragment of soil, and with our death we release it to those who will proceed. When our bodily constitution moves us in space, we withhold it; we release it on the move or we reside in it for a period of time. The movement of our body in time affects the production of a solitary existential condition that we cannot share; none can bear witness to it nor follow it completely. While we move in space, we penetrate and traverse it instantly, repetitively; or we reside in it with the terms that are determined by the duration and the needs of the human life. But either we traverse it, and at each point we bypass it, it is succeeded by another, or we stay in it for an interval that has a time duration, we are always within place but each time we inhabit a different zone of it. This singularity of the subjective experience and movement in time, when for example we move slowly within an urban square, closed within ourselves, is unassailable. One cannot simultaneously enter with us into the spatial zone we endlessly possess, nor represent our movement in the spatial points. What one can do is to accompany us, follow, succeed, restrain or displace us; and yet we

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cannot be deprived of the singularity of the spatial experience. We are alone in the moment of walking and the moment of the orientation of our gaze. And, because we are alone, we are ourselves a root, a perspective and an interpretation of space. 4.2 Corporeal harmony and disharmony The state of harmony and disharmony of our body is another singular spatiotemporal condition within us. As Arendt remarks, “nothing, in fact, is less common and less communicable, and therefore more securely shielded against the visibility and the audibility of the public realm, than what goes on within the confines of the body, its pleasures, and its pains, its labouring and consuming.”1 The corporeal harmony is regulated by the functional models that have been constructed within the human body itself as a response to the long-term challenges of natural space and time in order for it to live. This harmony within the bodily universe effects the generation of an equilibrium that allows the subjectivity to disjoint itself and participate in the worldly plane with the proviso that it consists itself of an embodied functional model. As for disharmony, this is caused by a bodily dysfunctionality in which the position of a bodily organ is in disequilibrium, bringing about as a result a bodily arrhythmia.2 Therefore the rhythmic harmony and disharmony of the body is an enclosed organic condition that each one of us is required to cope with while being deported and carried away by the rules of the common space and time, which themselves obey another intra-subjective and extra-bodily process of development. It is this harmony and disharmony of our bodies that shapes the experience of the common place and of time and superimposes itself on them in a way that is not taken into account by anyone except for us. The rhythmic properties compose the condition for the perception of common time and space.3 The harmony of our bodily microcosm is the first

1

See Arendt (1958, p. 112). As Lefebvre (1991, p. 384) remarks, “the body tends to behave as a differential field. It behaves in other words, as a total body, breaking out of the temporal and spatial shell developed in response to labour, to the division of labour, to the localisation of work and the specialisation of places.” 2 See Lefebvre (2004, p. 67). Freud (1991, p. 105) clearly states that there is an interconnection between the mental structure and the corporeal structure. See also Bergson (1912, pp. 196-197, 226). 3 In this analysis I borrow the term of “rhythms” from Lefebvre. According to Lefebvre (1991, p. 206), “social practice is made up of rhythms” that invest places and “a powerful unsettling factor in this regard is the practico-social dominance of linear over cyclical repetition – that is to say, the dominance of one aspect of rhythms over another.” Therefore, there is a need for an analysis of rhythms and their accommodation in the public space or the production of new spaces by virtue of their inscription in reality. See also Lefebvre (2004, pp. 15-16).

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experience and necessary condition for the review and evaluation of the harmony of the world. The living power within our body and its compressed functionality, as well as its circulation in the world, is the primordial and unmediated organic participation of our being within the functional field that in itself sets the non-negotiable rules of its operation. The organic universe of us warns, presents visible symptoms, suffers and wills to correct its arrhythmia directed by a commanding will for cure;4 that is, for restoring the rhythmic harmony that retains its functionality. Our corporeal constitution then, this microcosm in which each of us belongs, produces by itself its functional models, and no conception of external time and place can deal with it except by examining its own rhythmic mechanism. Our body does not enter time and place without containing time and place. Moreover, it cannot safeguard its functionality unless the common place and time is adapted by inhabiting its idio-time and idio-rhythm. The laws of the rhythmic harmony of the body which, in their lasting deregulation, remove it from the field of life, tend to construct the external time and space on the foundation of its own functionality. In other words, the human body carries by itself the claim of its accommodation and ordering in the common public space and time. 4.3 The existential conditions The existential conditions and modes in which the human being finds itself consist of another condition for its introduction in the established spatiotemporal field. The existential conditions of poverty, sensibility, love, anxiety, and fear are rooted in the subjective existence and define the limits, the form and the possibility to conjoin the public time and space. These existential conditions consist of joined, inter-fused and immediate experiential material under the composition of which subjectivity is called to enter the commonly recognised spatio-temporal fields. However, they consist of the first yardstick for the perception and assessment of the common spatio-temporal time and place, even though they are invisible to it. Poverty and fear, as well as other existential conditions, prescribe the living subjectivity to find a position in the world whereby those existential conditions that misappropriate the human being would be cured; moreover, those which are rooted in the component materials of the human being will not be put aside, will not be ignored, and therefore do not support the established world of worlds, deeds and institutions. The existential conditions themselves transfer the request for their accommodation and therapy in the common perceptions of time and space. It is only then that the subjectivity is able and willing to participate in it; that is

4

See Lefebvre (2004, p. 20). See also Damasio’s (2003, p. 35) concept of “homeostatic processes” that regulate and maintain the well-being of the body.

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when, each time, this active web of existential conditions is not interrupted by an external world which is organised on a perception of time that is orphaned from its subjective auxiliaries and experiential correspondence. The frozen instrumentality of a world that is torn from that which moves, sustains and forms it, is a world without us. It is a world that frightens the being, which as such permanently resides within an interlaced web of existential conditions. 4.4 The rhythm of the daily life The daily life of the subjectivity defines and its real spatio-temporal arrangement. Daily life in itself is a specific spatio-temporal experience wherein the subjectivities partake separately. Its singularity lies in the exclusive experience of the spatio-temporal field by a multiplicity of subjectivities which, though they can collectively and in combination create and support the common perceptions of time and space, separately represent and occupy a different spatio-temporal experience. As the subjectivity moves within a worldsphere, at the same time it articulates a unique movement and experience. The time of the existential conditions and the time of work, of rest and of encounters are repetitively subject to a plane of entering and exiting. We are always within our spatio-temporal plane, which in itself consists of our essential experiential component as the substratum which occupies thought. This subjective spatiotemporal plane accompanies us each time we enter the established spatiotemporal islands. As we move in the worldsphere in which we consume our limited daily life, we traverse time and space and we enter the spatio-temporal islands wherein we interact with other subjectivities, or we enter the temporal rhythm of the work of production. Our residence in these spatio-temporal islands of the externally organised spatio-temporal field is conventional and of short duration. This residence is pursued only with the condition of a short duration and under the perspective of withdrawal and rehabilitation. We exit and we reenter some of them again. Our habitation in them and the manifestation of our being can be construed as the measurable criteria of our deportment in the world. In actuality, we are annexed to the familiarity of the singularity of our spatio-temporal plane and we traverse the common spatio-temporal field in order to enter its confined web. This daily reality is our immediate experience of the world. Both the entrance and the exit to it are defined by our occult spatio-temporal field, which tends to dissolve the instrumentality of the environing external world by colonising it with its conscientious spirit. 4.5 The subjective biorhythm The subjective dependencies and the conditions of time and space compose the subjective biorhythm. The individual biorhythm is created by the interfusion of

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the sum total of the laws that organise and govern the subjective universe. The subject bears in itself a formatted world that is in itself an organic signification of functionality. It is also a field of constructing rational functional models more liable to mutability than the corporeal functionality. These models endeavour to organise or affect the spatio-temporal islands so as to respond to their dictates. This unseen individual world has its own idio-rhythm: the mechanisms of harmony and disharmony with which it is thrown into the world. This idio-rhythm is the experiential and organic plane upon which the subject is founded in order to refresh the world in such a way that the latter will be adjusted and conform to it, without at the same time compromising this rhythmic harmony of the individual world. The adjustment refers to a functional congruity between the subjective universe and the worldly one, to the degree that the latter responds to the messages of functionality that are conveyed by the former, permitting it in this way to preserve and refine its rhythmic harmony when entering it. The common place should accommodate the spatial experience of the subject and construct spatial islands whereby the map of experiential and organic functionality will unfold unimpeded. The linear time should be injected rhythmically so as to include the subjective idio-time. In a world where the subjective idio-time and idio-rhythm are not visible and do not possess the spatial islands to which they are proportionate, a web of distortions would be produced, prompting the distress and revolution of the subjectivities. This revolutionary mentality is the expression of the ignored claim of the subjectivities to re-enter a renewed worldsphere that will accommodate and rehabilitate them instead of allowing them to evolve irrespective of the functional models or the claims of functionality. The will of humans to become visible in the spatio-temporal field and in this way to reconstitute its invisible universe in the world, is a will for rhythmic equilibrium. It constitutes its own reaction against the symptoms of dysfunctionality and disharmony that the organised reality displays. The subject, having as a reference point its own self as a claim of functionality, experiences them as pathological. Whenever this rhythmic equilibrium is upset or oppressed, the invisible world displays a revolutionary disposition in order to establish its position in the world of visibility and, by virtue of this, to correct it. The subject has been thrown into this world in order to be part of it, and therein wants to preserve its rhythmic harmony; in the case that it loses it, it has the need to be cured through counterbalancing ventures. 4.6 Intersubjectivity The subjectivity in its deportment in the world encounters other subjective worldspheres that it is called by or with which it selectively engages in

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communication. The encounter between two or more subjectivities is a juxtaposition and contact between two or more individual universes, each of which possesses a spatio-temporal horizon and is moved by its idio-rhythm. Positions, opinions, enquiries and existential conditions answer to our spatiotemporal substratum and derive from it. Within the individual universe there is no ontological statement that is not rooted in an existential condition. As Heidegger says, “understanding always has its moods.”5 The moment of communication temporarily interrupts their dwelling in the subjective spatio-temporal universe which, as such, precedes and accompanies every intersubjective communication. When we communicate with another subjective microcosm we proclaim and juxtapose our biorhythms, and at the same time we exit them. The penetration into the biorhythm of the other is impossible during the communication. At the same time, as the intersubjective interval lasts, our absorption by our idio-rhythm is equally impossible. Our biorhythms, though they are absorbed by their singularity, encounter and are congruent with the biorhythms of other subjectivities while the process of communication occurs. Effective communication with another subjective microcosm includes the assemblage and sharing of an existential substratum.6 Mere discursive verbal exchange cannot compensate for this essential communicative condition, for it always lacks the existential substratum to which they are applicable and answerable. Therefore, a commonly shared and experienced spatio-temporal substratum aids the understanding of ontological positions which, in their turn, motivate it. When we communicate, we exchange spatio-temporal experiences. At the same time, however, the common spatio-temporal experience of communication is formulated. The latter contains the record of traces of effects of all subjectivities that are involved in it, but without being reducible to them. The commonly shared spatio-temporal plane allows the imaginary formation and recollection of the biorhythm of the other, for we possess the traces and orientations of some common spatio-temporal experiences. However, failure in communication leads to an inability in tuning into the biorhythm of the other, resulting in the lack of exchange and participation in a spatio-temporal experience. As a result, the claims of

5 See Heidegger (1962, p. 182). Bergson (1912, p. 58) argues: “There is no perception without affection.” Along the same lines, Arendt (1969, p. 64) points out that, “in order to respond reasonably one must first of all be ‘moved’ and the opposite of emotional is not ‘rational’.” See also Damasio (2003, p. 156). 6 As Kant (1996, p. 77) says, as far as sympathetic joy or sadness are concerned, “nature has already implanted in human beings receptivity to these feelings.” Heidegger (1962, p. 205) notes: “Dasein-with is already essentially manifest in a co-state of mind and counderstanding.”

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functionality that are raised in the common spatio-temporal field are not recognised. Conscientious communication and bonding designate the formation of an inter-human bridge on the basis of models of functionality. Successful communication takes place only between two beings in enhanced conscience.7 In this case, the friend becomes a facilitator towards reaching and affirming the functional models, and vice versa. Conscientious communication removes any obstacles, doubts, mistrust and reservation. To encounter a being in enhanced conscience means divesting ourselves of our selfhood and annexing ourselves to the pure aura of functionality it conveys to us. In doing so, an enhanced conscience becomes a world without derivation and a world without distance. We cannot escape the force of its presence through reflective divergence because what regulates communication are the functional models that operate as the reference point of communication. Therefore, having as a point of departure disembodied and disinterested functional models, we begin to form a commonwealth of consciences, a symbiotic zone in the world where functionality stands on firm ground unhindered by instrumentality. 4.7 Objective time and space The objective time and space are composed of a corporeal commonality, codified knowledge, institutions, laws, buildings, squares and technological tools. This spatio-temporal plane, in which to a large extent, whatever exists is defined and revealed, is subjugated to the linear composition of calendar time. The prevailing events, the historical narratives and the political developments form the common reality, which is presented as autonomous and detached from the biorhythm of the subjectivities that animate a worldsphere. The common spatio-temporal plane includes us biologically, but we do not necessarily correspond to it existentially.8 In this linear narrative of calendar time the spatio-temporal planes of the individual universes are absent, and it can be perceived as such for this very reason. In fact, there is a linear historical narrative, political analysis and crystallisation of a causal movement because the individual mental sphere is put on hold and restrained. Thereafter, an instrumental narrative is pursued wherein the events and the developments replace the individual idio-time with a frozen understanding of time and an instrumental use of place. That is, there is a linear historical narrative and the

7 Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1156 b10) remarks that perfect friendship takes place

among people who are virtuous and “and their friendship lasts as long as they are good – and goodness is an enduring thing.” 8 As Heidegger (1962, p. 213) says: “The ‘They’ prescribes one’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees’.” Lefebvre (2004, p .72) says that “everyday life is modelled on abstract, quantitative time, the time of watches and clocks.”

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demonstration of a dominant reality because the individual universe is not included in it. This hegemony of the common spatio-temporal plane over the individual universe assumes that the life of the subjective mental sphere is included and exhausted within the perceived common reality. The latter, however, enters and exits the common spatio-temporal plane carrying its own existential load; it remains there only temporarily, never permanently. As for the common spatio-temporal field, it does not exist without the active forces that render it animated. And when it is sunk into the desert of the distorted instrumentality and breaks off with any accumulative dialectic relationship with the functional field, only the cooperative activity of a specifically shaped mode of being can reanimate it. That is, its calendar attribute is injected by the mental sphere that discharges its products to circulate freely in search of an experiential match. In this way, the common spatio-temporal field features an inherent pathology. The by-products of the activity of thought as well as the claims of organic functionality of the individual universe, are discharged by their subjective bearer with which they have a spatio-temporal bond under the need to be invested with a multiple spatio-temporal bond. Whatever becomes part of the common spatio-temporal field lacks a consistent and direct link with an existential substratum, and therefore raises the claim of its mental and existential endorsement. Hence the functional perspective is founded on the tuning of a worldsphere of subjectivities with it. However, it is from this moment of disengagement of the product from its bearer and creator which calendar time extracts its strength. The latter, rather than presenting a claim of mental synchronisation and mental dependence of the products that disassemble from its field, accrues the orphaned products of the activity of thought in order to arrange and organise the reality.9 As a result, the array of the ingredients that compose the common reality refers to the spiritless knowledge whose circulation and superimposition stems from the fact that it does not undergo a reopening by the activity of thought. Its lack is not supplemented through its subjection to the mental sphere, but instead it deports and makes itself available as self-contained within a field of passive receptivity. Here, where the activity of thought stops, frozen time reigns. By superseding its dominance, it organises the prevailing political and historical narratives. It states whatever occurs only because it ignores, effaces and bypasses the individual idio-time and idio-rhythm.

9 Heidegger (1962, p. 165), within a different mode of analysis, calls this the dictatorship of the “they” the “publicness”, which “is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness and thus never gets to the ‘heart of the matter’.”

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Initially only a commonly accessible thrust of models of functionality – in the first place necessarily being codified and instrumentally conceived – could synthesise the common spatio-temporal field. As such, being supported by the web of institutions, laws and the spatial fields, it is deprived of the investment with existential conditions. The objectification of a thing is not enough for it to be conjoined by a corresponding functional investment of a population of subjectivities that populate an organised worldsphere. This objectification should contain itself and preserve in its reification the traces of the perspective of mental and existential synchronisation with it on the basis of some models of functionality.10 These traces lead back to its bearer, to the subjective world that configured them. In other words, the subjective mental sphere should be able to attune to the hegemonic reality and submit it to its own biorhythms. There is not actually a common spatio-temporal field except when it is liable to and filtrated by the subjective worldspheres. It does not exist itself. It is, in fact, the commonly shared subjective experience that becomes objectified. Despite this, its pathology makes it autonomous from its existential auxiliaries, which it often silences in order to be consolidated. As a result, instead of the common spatio-temporal field being reopened towards its mental support and constantly being renewed by it, it obscures the vacuums of its existential backup. On these vacuums are constructed another history and another reality with which one can connect only instrumentally. Of course, a common spatiotemporal field that does not serve as a functional repository that requires a corresponding ascending development on behalf of the subjective microcosm follows a direction that is unchecked by its imaginary roots and is heading towards a course of distortions. The latter would be corrected by the powerful intersection of the mental sphere itself and by the claims of organic and mental functionality which, each time, will be raised. The depth and the condition of the existence of the public time and place are situated within the individual universe itself. It is the individual universe that constructed them as a dictate of the will for a rhythmic harmony. Without it, the common spatio-temporal field becomes spiritless, for it has not an autonomous and independent course of advancement distinct from the population of subjectivities that compose it. For it to exist as such, it should be liberated from the instrumental pathway in which it is trapped. It should, in other words, contain the mental time and space and its mode of development should be conjoined with theirs. It must be itself the place of reception and hospitality of the subjectivities and the place of their encounter as well. The subjectivities should not be called to abandon their biorhythm in the name of

10 As Heidegger (1962, p. 178) remarks, publicness, “not only has in general its own way of having a mood, but needs moods and ‘makes’ them for itself.”

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an unmonitored instrumentality that encircles everyone without the consent of anyone. The common spatio-temporal field needs to be fused with the constant compulsion of its motor and its primordial principle. The subjective inner reality should be represented and participate in the islands of time and space of the common world. The latter in its turn should be reconfigured and spirited by all those who compose it. In real terms, it cannot exist without them. 4.8 The enduring aura of life The aura of life is that which exists, is preserved and continues to exist irrespective of the appearance and disappearance of each one of us in the field of life. Durkheim refers to a different concept of time that “must correspond to the rhythm of a life that is not that of any particular individual, but one in which all participate.”11 The aura of life is the permanent, intense and refreshed inscription of life in reality. It is that which is not frustrated by our subjective disappearance. It is both anterior and posterior to us as the dynamic aura of life which lives, is sustained, expanded and evolves without being affected by the appearance or disappearance of any of its subjective bearers. Within the institutions, the laws, the buildings and the frozen knowledge, one encounters traces and the modelling of human activity, but not of itself.12 In order for the mental and existential condition to which these traces orient us to be reawakened, there must be a mental and existential synchronisation, an experiential communication and a functional residence in them. The reified world is preserved in us; we consist of one of its innumerable multi-rooted origins from which it extracts life and energy. These multiple origins, through the sustainment of a constant web of imaginary representation, do not leave it to regress into a worldly arrangement that is not under the providence of the aura of life. The squares, the buildings, the machines and the various tools

11 See Durkheim (1995, p. 442). Durkheim (1995, p. 439) refers to an impersonal collective experience and collective thought “which necessarily undergoes a test that is repeated indefinitely. The men who adhere to a collective representation verify it through their own experience.” Arendt (1958, p.55) speaks about a common world, which “is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.” This common world consists of what becomes permanent and durable through remembrance and reification, in which all participate. See also Schopenhauer (1966, p. 358). Richerson and Boy (2005, p. 105) use the term of cumulative cultural evolution: “Behaviours or artifacts that are transmitted or modified over many generations, leading to complex artifacts and behaviours.” 12 Arendt (1966, p. 465) remarks, “the boundaries of positive laws are for the political existence of man what memory is for historical existence: they guarantee the preexistence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which transcends the individual lifespan of each generation, absorbs all new origins and is nourished by them.” See also Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1180a5-35); Castoriadis (1997, p. 6-7, 299, 372); Rawls (1971, p. 285).

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await us as spatial possibilities. They exist only when we activate them. And because the attention towards them and their use is multiply repetitive, it seems that they never cease to exist. It is the inter-crossed, successive and parallel movement of the population of subjectivities that creates a multiple imaginary web that sustains, preserves and builds them, without allowing them to be lost in the oblivion of disuse. The world of instruments that is constructed and supported by the human energy does not exist in itself. It owes its existence to a multiple fuelling, granted by its representation from the human energy that does not leave it to disappear, break or become diseases. In this way, the aura of life is preserved by an intense representability that condenses the past, present and future. The only thing to which a ghost city, deserted and deprived of the human energy, connotes is the disabled traces of the human presence that constructed it. Such a ghost city indicates the breath of the aura of life that retreated, and along with it the subjective blocks of a dead spatio-temporal field. A reified world without life, that is without the permanent energy of the imaginary field that animates and manages the total sum of its things, conveys a death-like experience. A world abandoned by the aura of life points only to that which is absent, its prime cause and power, but also to the only possible perspective of its revival as well. The aura of life is produced by the energy of the inexhaustible imaginary web that preserves the multiple animation of the enduring and stable movement of a world as is manifested through its moral and practical products. It is an enduring condition of representation that never stops, does not attenuate and does not show any vacuums. Through its birth each human gradually adopts the representation of the world by becoming an extra bearer of it. This gives to the world such a depth in its representation that it never becomes idle and never incurs losses. On one hand, this world is renewed by the introduction into it of newly-formed imaginary receptors. On the other, it remains unaffected by the simultaneous and constant disappearance and withdrawal of other imaginary receptors. The aura of life is founded on the multiplicity, the synchronicity and the density of its imaginary receptors. It exists as such because while each one of us carries it inside, it continues itself to exist after our permanent absence without suffering any losses in its intention and developmental evolution. If, under some circumstances, the subjective bearers of a world disappear all at once, the orphaned world of the human products would exist without the aura of life. In such a case, the internal historical continuity of the human constructs would disappear immediately, and the things of the world would point to the absent spirits that created them. None would exist anymore to witness the mode of the disposition of these spirits. The aura of life is never lost because the successive rooting of the world in its subjective microcosms never stops. Within the subjective field of representation,

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the world is reiterated; it gains endurance and is rooted in bearers which, one day, will cease to live. This aura is renewed and replaced, it shifts and alters. The appearance of new waves of representation is linked to the transfiguration of reality. The arrival of a new generation represents the world anew, including within it whatever has been revealed and leaving behind whatever has been abandoned. As Rawls points out, “the life of a people is conceived as a scheme of cooperation spread out in historical time.”13 The disappearance of a generation of representations means the disappearance of the representation of the things of the world that no longer exist. The withdrawal of things is connected with the withdrawal of their representation. Likewise, the appearance of new things is connected to the occupation of the empty space that this withdrawal leaves. In each instance, the world is represented differently because something is lost and something else is born in its every subjective representation and deportment. The aura of life is the inscription of the dialectic of development of the subjective consciousness. Never and at no moment does the aura of life remain static, idle and changeless. Each time, its subjective bearers appear and disappear. Its fuelling is undertaken then by others through their evolutionary maturation and insertion into the worldly field. Moreover, each time the world is represented in a different way, and in each of its representations and imaginary supports, it changes as regards its aura. The retreat and insertion of new waves of representation by the subjective bearers is the condition of the aura of life. As the subjective bearers are refreshed, the aura of life is equally refreshed. The prevailing aura that each time is created emanates from the hegemony of the energy of a generation of representations. The latter, while it retreats gradually, is similarly complemented. The movement of change is firstly inscribed in the aura of life before infiltrating the institutions and the laws. Therein the perspective for the renovation of the world is conceived, before it starts the time-consuming process of its realisation. 4.9 The rhythmic harmony of the world Objective time and space do not possess an autonomous function. The uprooting from their mental and existential sphere brings about an accumulation of distortions understood as the traces of its divergence from the mental and existential web that supports it. For the common spatio-temporal field to preserve and enrich its functionality and thereby not accumulate

13 See Rawls (1971, p. 289). Arendt (1969, p. 82) connects natality with novelty: “Since we all come into the world by virtue of our birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new.” See also Arendt (1958, pp. 9, 177-178); Hegel (1977, p.272, par. 456) and Tocqueville (1988, p. 95).

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distortions, it needs to inhabit in each of its corners the sum of the population of the subjective rhythms so as not to become mono-rhythmic. Rhythmic harmony means that the mental spheres appropriate the real social spheres that are analogous to them. That means that there cannot be a hegemonic time and space. Instead, there should be a harmonious distribution of place and time that respects all subjective and collective claims for accommodation. That is to say, public space should be associated with eurhythmia and not arrhythmia.14 This harmony embraces and organically embodies the traces of all the existential conditions and moods, and each product of its activity automatically is credited with a rhythmic representation. This leads to a synthesis that refreshes its relationship with its subjective bearers and that is, as such, evolved and disposed without producing instrumental regiments. In this way, it attains its own dialectical development that can exist only in itself. Of course, no world is completely included within it. And yet, no subjective world includes the others. Therefore, only the rhythmic harmony of the world can become the assimilatory plane of rhythmic conditions and, by virtue of this, discover or reclaim its healthy equilibrium by accommodating diverse subjective rhythms.

14 According to Lefebvre (2004, p. 16) in eurhythmia, “rhythms unite with one another in a state of health” whereas arrythmia denotes discordance, de-synchronisation “a suffering, a pathological state.”

Chapter 5

Distorted worlds

The distorted worlds possess an undeveloped functional depth and are invested with a mode of consciousness that has been, to a large extent, shaped by the particularities produced by this functional deficiency. Moreover, they are regulated by a mode of temporality that nurtures distortions. These worlds have their own reflective idio-rhythm that engenders a mode of creativity that delays the constitution of functional models. Distorted worlds depict not corrected worlds and therefore worlds which are deficient in moral stratification. As such they are in a state of prolonged crisis, that is, directed towards collapse or correction. 5.1 Multi-rooted distortion The concept of the distortion signifies a multi-rooted web of reasons, practices and institutions that are in an early stage of functionality. This distorted substratum supplies and is supplied by similar practices that the subjectivities moving within it perform. In this way the dispersion of the distorted world is multi-rooted and is supplied by its spatio-temporal sphere. The symptoms of a distorted world are primarily moral deficiencies. This means that the distorted field is deducible by a reflective underdevelopment. The distorted worlds suffer from corruption, violence and systemic injustice. Their reflective mechanisms are in an early stage of development. Thus, the distortions of a worldsphere are the deficiencies regarding the field of functionality that it has cemented. It consists of an evolutionarily less-advanced state that can only be transgressed evolutionarily. A worldsphere is an organism that has at its disposal collective reflective mechanisms that aim to address the functional field. Castoriadis refers to a collective world as a world always in a cognitive closure, stating that “democracy is the project of breaking the closure at the collective level.”1 These mechanisms deliver products which are institutionalised, dispersed, and undergo an evolutionary progressive mutation. A distorted worldsphere

1 See Castoriadis (1991, p. 21). Luhmann (1990) calls this an encompassing self-referential

autopoietic system in closure, Bergson (1977, p. 266) a “closed society”, and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, p.343) worlds with extractive political and economic institutions. In my analysis, a discernible closed sphere is primarily a moral sphere with its own conscience. What is at stake each time, is the sustainability and viability of the functional models that regulate a worldsphere.

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produces its own products that are measured for their functionality and mutability. Its dysfunctionality, therefore, is correlated with the mechanisms of production of conscience that yield collective functional models. 5.2 The reflective deficiencies The activity of thought aims to synchronise the products of frozen thought with the flow of reality. This constant venture to reconciliate the two leads to a constant readjustment and introduces the fixed products of thought into a developmental dialectical movement. The distorted worldspheres are inefficient concerning both the temporal depth of this reflective process and its operation. These worlds have not achieved the subjection of instrumental knowledge to the mechanisms that produce it. As a result, the produced knowledge disjoins the temporality of the mechanisms of the production of conscience. However, any knowledge which disengages from the web that channels it in a movement of progressive development has a propensity to direct itself against the mechanisms that generate this developmental orientation. In the distorted worldspheres, there is a compound of ideas, practices and institutions that have lost their organic relation with the mechanisms of their production.2 Not only have they lost this relation but they are also directed against mechanisms that appear inside or outside them and that aim to reintegrate them into the mechanisms for the production of functional models. For this reason, in such worldspheres distortions are structurally accumulated. This accumulation based on a weak rooting in a conversational relationship with the functional field – which encompasses whatever enters a world – strengthens the functional uprooting. As a result, there appears a rhetorical distant from the functional field to which a whole series of distortions are adjoined. 5.3 The production of distortions The impetus that organises every society is the summation of the reflective mechanisms that are defined by the mode of the relationship they have established with the functional field, both in terms of their accumulated functionality and their direct and attentive relationship with it. Ideas, institutions and artefacts are produced because of the energy of these

2

Castoriadis (1991, p. 139) calls these societies, which are for him the majority of societies, heteronomous: “We find, institutionally established and sanctioned, the representation of a source of the institution of society that only can be found outside of this society: among the gods, in God, among the ancestors, in the laws of Nature, in the laws of Reason, in the laws of History.”

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mechanisms. All worldspheres are endowed with a collective constructive ability. The reflective mechanisms in a worldsphere follow the prototype and the laws of the subjective reflection. Within the flow of reality claims that are prone to join it do emerge. These claims follow a movement of application and reification, becoming thus parts of reality. That is, the worldsphere administers words and things that are subject to a constant exercise of approximation. This attempt to establish an approximating relationship between ideas and things creates a field of testing and examination. This field autonomises from both the words and the things. It comprises the only environment whereby the collective testing and judgment of their relationship is made possible. In other words, it is itself the substratum of conscience-functionality of each worldsphere and it is, per se, conscience-genetic. Within the distorted worlds the substratum of functionality – as is implanted in laws, spatial arrangements and in the moral disposition of the people – is atrophic. Initially, the idio-rhythm of the reflective mechanisms that have been deployed and produce functional models is slow-paced. The successive reflective examinations that occur in a depth of time between ideas and practices on the one hand, and the realities to which they refer on the other, lack consistency and intensity. For this reason, the established models of functionality have not passed through the intensity, repetitiveness and the experimentalism of the improving process of the reflective mechanisms in a depth of time. Since these models have not been scrutinised by the rhythm and the frequency of the reflective mechanisms, their own products would be lacking in functionality. That is, they could not form an efficient web of functional models that would survive in the confrontation between reality and the practices that would be subject to a constant process of improving mutation. This interconnected web of distortions obscures and deflects the contact with the functional field, and conditions thought in regards to both its beginnings and the scale of its improvement. The relevant cohesiveness of the distorted worlds stems from a silencing of the functional field and their shortterm attempt to substitute it with their unfiltered and unmonitored artificial arrangements on which corresponding mechanisms that guard their adjustment to it are being devised.3 The reflective rhythm of the distorted worldspheres conditions an inclination to a retreat to the established order of things. The prevailing reality is created

3 This is what Heidegger (1962, p. 213) calls “falling into groundlessness”, which means “the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own.” Locke (2008, book. III, ch. II, par. 5) says that people “often suppose their Words to stand also for the reality of Things.” Arendt (1978, p. 4) calls it “thoughtlessness” that the “adherence to conventional, standardised codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognised function of protecting us against reality.”

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by the frozen practices and ideas and it is not configured out of the process of their reconstruction and incorporation into a web of functionality. This idiorhythm, which is dominated by instrumental temporality, does not only sustain the process of production of functional models, but also replaces it with the predominant temporality that tends to become a law. This established temporality, however, which deteriorates under the mechanisms of the production of functional models, builds another temporality: one which obeys the self-imposed need for the preservation of the disassociated products of thought. The generalisation of this decoupling and the corresponding endeavour of the subjectivities that inhabit a distorted world to comply with it, occasion a deep-seated route of a stratified and multi-rooted distortion. Since the project of the production of functional models is subordinated to the instrumental temporality, the functional field of a distorted world is not adequately fuelled; it is not discharged and cannot operate as a point of resistance against the distorted chain. It becomes the distorted image of a web of distortions that rob it of its energy so as to become its mirror. This arrest of the functional field is relatively short-term and energy-wasting. Its by-products deprive humans of the conditions that would enhance their developmental potentials. A worldsphere can enervate the mechanisms of production of functionality, but it cannot neutralise the effect of the functional field wherein the long-term sustainability of the reflective products is tested and disclosed. The functional field is the affective force to which the human products are bound, and both their inward and outward configuration relate always to the mode of its energy and the apprehensive relationship of the reflective mechanisms to it. A worldsphere can also ascribe to its products a state of self-sufficiency in relation to which everything should be regulated, but it cannot control or avert the juxtaposition of these products with the flow of a constantly recomposing functional field. For this reason, in distorted worldly fields, there is a discrepancy between the unstoppable flow of reality and the constructs that have been employed to address it. The distance between ideas and modes of being on the one hand and the flow of reality on the other is a symptom of the reflective deficiency of the distorted worlds. These worlds display a systemic weakness in accommodating the functional challenges, the problems and the needs that the flow of reality always presents to them. 5.4 Distortions The perpetuation of the systemic weakness in responding to the flow of the functional field creates distortions. The flow of the external environment is independent of the claims that a world raises about it. It consists of the field in which the tools that a worldsphere invents as an initial response to the

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challenges that itself presents are composed and tested. The flow of the functional field is the spatio-temporal plane that contains whatever is not contained in any ideological system, singular object or complex of tools that a worldsphere has at its disposal. It is the field in which all the tools that a worldsphere creates are correlated and co-adjusted, and in which their synthetic operation is observed. Its relation to the worldspheres takes the form of externality in the sense that it does not depend on the view they hold of themselves nor does it move with the idio-rhythm they obey. Rather, it consists of the field where such inventions are tested for their long-term functionality. One attribute of the distorted worldsphere is the intensity of the disparities it displays. It signifies, informs and conveys the long-term dialectic of correction. But because the distorted field is to a great extent diffused, the effects on the reflective mechanisms are often the reverse. Rather than processing its disparity by means of an affective relationship with the functional field, the distorted worldsphere utilises the instrumental regiments that are accumulated in this field as unalienable laws for its operation. By virtue of this, its verified failure becomes a norm and, as such, it returns to the institutions and the practices and is respectively accommodated. The failures in the functional field return as laws of conformational adaptation within all the branches of the distorted world. This means that both the mode, the subjective spirits and the institutions that have been moulded are congruent with instrumental regiments. After they inject the field of ideas and practices, these regiments create a multi-rooted layer of distortions that retains an autonomous mode of development. This movement detaches from the reflective mechanisms that should have been activated following the flow of information that the field of application and testing of a worldsphere conveys to them. Thereafter, since the collective and institutional resistances are dominated by that over which they should have dominion, this worldsphere is inhabited by a mode of temporality in which the stratified distortions will reach their maturation and can no longer perform as autonomous mechanisms. It is at this point that the distorted world often realises the process of its rehabilitation in the functional field. 5.5 The subjective and common time within a distorted field In the distorted worlds an organic communication and inter-fuelling between subjective and public time does not exist. Both their crystallised orientation, which is ruled by the functional deposit, and their inter-crossing upon the functional field that is the experiential reference point, are concealed. The subjectivities that inhabit the distorted worlds enter and exit public time and space instrumentally. Since the array of the distortions owes its existence and is organised on an uprooted and autonomous temporality which it shares, the subjectivities which are disposed in it in order to attune to its terms and rules

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have to lose sight of the functional models. They should, on one hand, suspend their own invisible reflective mechanisms and, on the other, adjust instrumentally; that is, to incorporate through practical experience and habitual pedagogy the inner rules of the system. This results in another dependency on the stratified layer of the distorted world that is reflected within the mode of the shaping of the living subjectivities that habitually tend to constantly reproduce it. In this way, a reality is created in which the possibility of a functionally-oriented organic communication between the subjective and the public time is put on hold. The subjectivities cannot suspend their reflective mechanisms and thereafter operate fully on the basis of the instrumental knowledge. They continue to produce functional models; they repetitively reflect on the world and on the mechanisms of its perception. This causes, as a consequence, their existential de-identification from the prevailing instrumental public time. This deidentification, rather than directing the mechanisms of reconstitution of the external environment to the public active field, compresses them within the subjectivities themselves. It is not because they procure their consent that the subjectivities conform to the terms of public time. Rather, when they enter the field of public time, they act in discordance to what they believe.4 This bifurcation between subjective and objective time impairs the process of the production of functional models. Moreover, it accrues reflective surplus that creates another, a differentiated imaginary microcosm in which the chasm between words and things is confessed. Hence double thinking instead of frankness is a trait whose employment is required in order for the individual to manage its way through the fixed and self-referential arrangements of the distorted world. 5.6 Movement and time in a distorted world The distorted worlds, as is the case with any other world, are immersed in their own temporality. This temporality concerns both the rhythm of the production of functional models and the autonomous unfolding of the instrumental regimens on which they are based. The time of the established world is the time of the reproduction and repetition of the pre-existing condition. Bergson calls

4

Arnold and Verba (1963, p. 308) call this “an alienated political culture.” The citizens display mistrust towards the political system and the political community, they show disbelief in its effectiveness and they consider it corrupted and unresponsive to their feelings, claims and demands. Aron (1968, p. 135) remarks: “A regime which the people say is bad offers at least one characteristic trait of corruption; it does not hold the allegiance of those it governs.” See also Castoriadis (1997, p. 264).

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this “the substitution of concepts for things.”5 The effect of time ceases to be the marked interval whereby the progressive rupture with the reified reality is evident. On the contrary, it is turned into a field of invention of practices and rules that aid the absorption into the existing world and its unhindered continuity. Within the distorted worldspheres the concept of time is forfeited by the predefined order of things and, as a consequence, an unmodified situation is consolidated that is sheltered by multiple mechanisms. The production of functional models is impaired. The autonomous instrumental temporality delivers products, or favours the durability of products, that serve its own rules of existence. These products supplement and assist the distorted structures. The examination of the products of the distorted world in regard to their functionality is superseded due to the fact that the intersection of conscience with the functional field is not firmly grounded. The reflective mechanisms recede to a degree that their networking is very weak so as to effectively perform the maintenance of the processes of monitoring and improvability of the tools of the world. The latter, being left unobserved and unexamined, follows a trajectory of dysfunctionality that remains intact for a long period of time. In such worlds, the distortions often mature in order for their subjection by and relation to the reflective mechanisms to be restored. The distortions mature only under those conditions by which the idio-rhythm of the distorted world is created and motivated. This idio-rhythm allows the distorted unfolding to be accrued and to follow a trajectory that is in advance a failed one. The maturation of a distortion concurs with the effacement of the complete movement of its materialisation under the weight of the revelation of the degree of its functionality in the field of testing and examination. The maturation consists, in real terms, of a completion of an unnecessary course in order to be conceived as such. Moreover, in order to be defined in this way, it should likewise be perceived by the mechanisms of understanding. When the distortions mature, their state of dysfunctionality is sharply illustrated through a sequence of events. When the distortions mature, they cause a crisis. They exhaust every means of their legitimisation, and they confront the field in which they are applied and function. The functional field is that in which the tools of a world, irrespective of the beliefs it has about them, are tested and checked. Since it is independent of the ideological and institutional frame, it imposes its judgments upon it. In

5

See Bergson (1946, p. 50). Castoriadis (1997, p. 17) calls this atemporal closure: “The state where laws, principles norms, values, and meaning are given once and for all and where the society or the individual, as the case may be, has no action upon them.” See also Durkheim (1992, p. 94).

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these moments of crisis, the relationship of subjection between the distortions and the functional field alters. The failure of the distorted field becomes so sharp in contrast to the flow of reality, that its property to legitimise itself cannot subsist. The lessening of the ability of the distorted world to reproduce itself drives it to an impasse. There is an incongruity with reality, in relationship with which the distortions were built to respond. The distorted world can no longer utilise its tools and, in order to survive, it needs to reform them. As a result, the functional field that has been subjugated to an autonomous movement of a closed sphere begins to dislodge instrumental time. Gradually, through the increase of its density, it empowers the reflective mechanisms which re-examine the tools of a worldsphere in order to adjust them to its own dictates. 5.7 The instrumental public time and the subjective places of silence The place in the distorted worlds is torn between the subjective mental and public time. The rhythmic corporeal functionality, that is, the condensed functional models that are drafted in corporeality, are not appropriated within the public time and place. Moreover, the public space is not the field in which the subjectivities, each time, affirm their properties. Instead, the public place is the field where the subjectivities enter or exit through an act of cancellation or interruption. The utilisation of the tools of the public place which have been formed by the distorted worlds does not demand the reflective participation and negotiation of the organic transition from the mental to the public time. On the contrary, this mode of use and circulation in the common place requires empirical and mechanical internalisation of the rules that have been concentrated due to the autonomous development of the instrumental temporality. This internalisation hinders and suspends the subjective mental time, for the laws of its operation, as well as the products it delivers, are not homologous with those of the common time. Insofar as the subjectivities insert themselves into the objective time, they de-activate the mechanisms for the production of functional models. Their presence in it is ritualistic and lasts only for the time that it is necessary. Thereafter, they immerse themselves in the dynamics of the subjective time that serves as a functional abode. In the public space, the subjectivities are torn, and this dichotomisation renders their participation compulsory. Insofar as this occurs, public time does not constitute the field of either grafting or exercise of the corporeal and the mental time. It spares itself from any attempt to be injected with functional models. Therefore, barriers are raised against its re-composition through the construction of islands of functionality that would appeal to the subjective worldspheres. Since the public space does not constitute a functional threshold of an organic and smooth transition from the mental world to the public time,

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the latter diverges, accrues and develops distinctively, and its fuelling by the subjectivities that comprise it is gradually restrained. As a result, its tools gradually fall into a state of disuse. In the distorted worldspheres, there are unseen underworlds that are silenced and scattered. The mechanical operation of the common place and time creates a value system that is hardwired to a degree that the subjectivities sense that they are unable to challenge, let alone overthrow it. Nevertheless, the subjective mechanisms for the production of functional models are always at work. Thus, the progressive divergence from the instrumental regiment creates a fluid, cautiously-uttered truth that is harboured only by the subjectivities and is not grafted in the common time. The distorted worlds contain within themselves the perspective of their rectification under the status of a silent truth. In the plane of silence wherein the subjective models of functionality have their own protective mechanisms of utterance, an imaginary reformation of the distorted world occurs. This world counteracts the unfolding of distortions. The mental place, by becoming increasingly disaffected, regains the power the reflective mechanisms have over the preconfigured time. The subjectivities cease to follow its distorted route and commence the creation of imaginary corrections. They also build secret underworlds in which they discharge their mental and corporeal functional models. In this way, the mental world begins to disassociate itself from the combined synergy of the conditions that ensure the endurance of the distorted world. 5.8 Zones of anomy and zones of justice In the distorted worlds, there is a loose, weak configuration of the mechanisms that monitor the multiple processes of application of the functional models. A continuously charged and repetitively activated process of observation and tracking of distortions and, consequently a process of timely intervention and correction, does not exist. This reflective, slow rhythm favours the extended and unexamined establishment of distorted constructs. That is, it makes tolerable the sterile and lost temporality that owes its existence to the divergence from the process of production of functional models. In this way distorted pathways are regimented, evolved and applied in a way that they generate a specific shaping of a corresponding spirit that to a large extent serves them. The systemic web of alertness that does not leave a construct to divert from the functional horizon is very weak, for its condition of existence is the alliance of a simultaneous embodied and disembodied existence of a strong complex of islands of functionality that have the providence of a bordered environment. As a result, the distortions detected by the distorted world are delayed and, even when detected, the distorted world does not exhibit the energy of a functionally shaped and governed spirit that would retain them

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consistently in a horizon whereby they would be fully revealed as such. Thereafter, it follows the oblivion of distortions or their temporary remembrance that is again succeeded by the falling into oblivion. For this reason, distorted worlds are positioned at an early stage in the process of assimilation, application and production of functional models and they themselves alternate with a slow pace. In the distorted worlds the laws of beast violence do often operate. The structure of the archetype of the consorting mafia wires itself into the distorted worlds and regulates the mode of application of the interests of various subjectivities. The violence in the distorted worlds is a result of the mode of the temporality of production of functional models. It is the product of the energy of the rudiments of another scale of development of the process for building functional models, which has been fixed and thus remained immutable in a worldsphere of which other islands have produced more improved functional models. The extended residence of distorted constructs in the spatio-temporal field and the reflective defect cement islands whereby the reified knowledge overrides the reflective mechanisms. This reversal of forces manufactures individuals or groups that are devoid of any humanistic moral sensibility and which employ violence as a means to accomplish their goals. The threat, the intimidation and the corporeal torture are the means by which these islands of violence apply. As a result, the absorption of these groups by the instrumental temporality causes them to direct themselves against groups or individuals by unleashing the very tools of their absorption into a wicked instrumentalism. Many times, these islands of violence are collectively organised and procure the consent of large groups. An island of instrumentalism is constituted wherein the evil overrules any kind of mechanism of rupture and division. Thus, an invisible world develops that does not adhere to any form of organic communication. The invisible veil of fear, and the invisible moment of the threat as to the inability to procure their freedom from their bonds, impose compliance and subjugation to the laws of mafia. Mafia becomes the assimilating collector of every structural distortion and converts the instrumental time to a rule of conduct.6 At the same time, it reigns over the subjective worldspheres, which find themselves sunk into an ocean of brute compulsion. The collective manifestation of evil, that is mafia, has a web of participation, support and acceptance. This web is waved by an instrumental community that is placed, per se, outside the intimidating action of mafia. It is a community that has been absorbed by the laws of instrumental temporality. Thus violence,

6

See Plato (The Republic, 575c-576a); Parsons (1951, p. 291); Fukuyama (1995, p. 338).

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which is a product of this instrumental separation, puts aside every component of functionality and imposes its own internal laws. This community of violence is certainly an indicator of the functional deficiencies of a worldsphere. Specifically, it betrays its moral deficiencies. For this reason, the community of mafia attracts, introduces and mans every distorted island that exists in a world. This world passes from the stage of distortions to a stage in which the distortions are merged and joined through an interactive relationship with a community of violence. Mafia attracts individuals or groups who see their own instrumentality to be organised in a community that sets specific rules for uniformity and inclusion. Moreover, they see it infiltrating institutions and practices whose distortions facilitate an instrumental convergence. This collective constitution of the evil creates an instrumental field in which the residues of distortions collect, order, localise and are directed against every island of functionality. The conditions for the operation of mafia pertain to the conditions of its undisturbed action. On one hand, the archetype of mafia is a rudiment of an older phase of evolution of the process of the production of islands of functionality. On the other, it is a by-product of a weak reflective disposition. The progressive divergences of a world from its earlier condition did not enable it to become generalised across its entire territory. Therefore, the movement of its measuring up against the distorted islands carried within enters a phase of juxtaposition of functional models in regards to the depth of long-term sustainability. Islands with less-developed conscience were left to coincide with the movement of a worldsphere to build functional models. This stems from the energy of these functionality-yielding mechanisms; that is, their functional depth and their pace of production and expansion. It is the weak wave of production and allocation of models of functionality that sustains the existence of mafia and equips it with the distorted substratum by virtue of which it maintains itself. In the functional adaptation chain, there are irregularities and divergences wherein islands that favour mafia disrupt the intersection of functional models. The functional web as a whole loses its tenacity in regards to its mechanisms of monitoring and intervention because these are not allocated to such an extent that they could intervene correctively or in a timely manner at multiple points. As a result, the distorted islands are left immutable; they accrue and occupy territory and time. They exert power over people and construct a department of actual reality. The archetype of mafia, either on the subjective or collective level, is the outcome of a temporal arrhythmia by virtue of which the resistance, the presence and the distribution of the functional models is atrophic. A society’s functional deficiency is attracted by the archetype of mafia that is unleashed in the islands that this very

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deficiency does not control. The laws of the existence of functional rationalism find it difficult to deal with its instrumental mechanisms. 5.9 The indecisive confrontation between anomy and justice Within the distorted worlds there occurs an indecisive confrontation between justice and anomy. The functional models that have been institutionally registered and imprinted upon the laws are not uniformly expressed in the collective spirit. On the contrary, daily life devises practices prone to an unwritten law, one of violation of the functional models. The functional models are instrumentally situated within the law with limited points of utterance and resistance and, as a result, they are they not applied. The codified law exists without the processes of production of mechanisms that would support, recompose and enrich it. For, insofar as the law becomes an isolated instrumental prototype, its auxiliaries are too few to efface the zones of anomy whenever they appear. Instead, these zones confront the zones of justice and the outcome of this is sometimes indecisive. The zones of anomy at the level of actual life capture and accommodate the functional insufficiencies of a worldsphere. These deficits retain a subjective and institutional support and, as a result, the zones of anomy are reproduced in a friendly environment. The intersection of the functional models within this distorted environment is weak because it is pursued formalistically from above and it does not have at its disposal scattered auxiliaries in the multiple islands of the spatio-temporal setting that a worldsphere occupies. Thus, the zones of anomy concur with the instrumental declaration of functional models and create a distorted underworld. When the participation in the distortions is widespread, and when they represent the real stage of development of the mechanisms of production of functionality, they can situate themselves against the institutional containers of some functional models. The zones of anomy are disguised and protected by those who participate in them. They consist of the spiritual investment that conditions the spatiotemporal field prior to and following any functional intersection. Within this spatio-temporal field, in which watchfulness is disarticulated and where distortion is masked and manoeuvring, anomy reigns. The distortions are rarely spelled out; when they are, there are very few who are apprehensive. Should they become conscious of the distortions, there are very few who will detect them. If detected, this consists of one singular moment of their manifestation among many. And even if they can be coped with, they would be forgotten and they would start reproducing themselves. The temporal rhythm of a worldsphere and the functional depth by which it is nourished constitute the regulating element that defines both the mode of the accumulation of distortions and the efficaciousness of their detection and correction.

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5.10 The degree of functionality of a distorted world The degree of functionality of a distorted world is commensurate to the depth of the functional models that are produced within a concrete period of time by the reflective mechanisms and upon which human and social fabric are modelled. There is, on one hand, the present scale of its functionality by virtue of which it can be determined as distorted and, on the other, there is the unfolding of the process of production of functionality. As for the stage of functionality of a worldsphere, this is measured by the practical results and the applications of the functional models that it produces. These models have concrete consequences over time and space, and it is through them that functional depth can be estimated. In the distorted worlds there is not a strong conjunction between the activity of thought and the flow of reality, for the reflective mechanisms are in a less progressive stage. Besides the limited production of functional models, this reflective inertia accrues gaps that compose the ground wherein the distortions are concentrated. The latter often regulates the distorted worlds through rigid theoretical and institutional compounds that are sunk into the mode of existence of instrumental time.7 As such, they resist the scattered reflective islands that visit them and endeavour to integrate them in the terms of the operation of the functional temporality. In the distorted worlds, there is always an active process of production of functional models. This process is calculated and cannot make leaps because the new functional models respond to the deficiencies of the old, owing their existence to the practical experience the latter provide. Hence, they are evolutionarily close to the old ones and cannot diverge enormously from them. They emanate from the successive stages of reflection-consolidation-creative differentiation through which a worldsphere can attain a functional depth. It is the enhancement of the effects of the latter that would lessen the territorial disposal of distortions. The activity of the functional productive mechanisms in the distorted world carries the perspective of its correction. For, insofar as they are situated in scattered islands, their energy is weak. However, in their confrontation with the distorted constructs at which they are directed, they prevail in the long-term because the functional field favours them. This prevalence is slow and gradual. The corrective islands follow a trajectory of divergence, accumulation and materialisation. In this way, they displace and replace the distorted schemes with more functional ones. Thereafter, they are

7

Locke (1980, p. 100) attributes the perpetuation of unjust regimes to the conservatism of the people that are attached to old institutions. Arendt (1969, p. 49) attributes the perpetuation of impotent regimes “either because there was no one to test their strength and reveal their weakness or because they were lucky enough not to be engaged in war and suffer defeat.”

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bifurcated and produce other reflective mechanisms that subject their own quality to a process of betterment that is paramount to the attainment of a functional depth with concrete energy and by virtue of this would be named as a functional world. 5.11 The conscience of the distorted world The distorted world is regulated by a reflective idio-rhythm that constitutes itself as an evolutionary grade in its attempt to reach an evolutionary depth. Similarly, it produces an idio-type of functional models. In the case of the laws by means of which a worldsphere operates, these models represent the accumulation of the work of the reflective mechanisms. This work is diffused in every spatio-temporal island; it becomes objectified and stratified reason that perpetually lies to rearrangement and enrichment. This reorganisation and enrichment lie in the storing up of the functional models within the structural disposition of a worldsphere after the examination and experimentation that they have undergone. These models represent the living reality of a worldsphere. Every practice and ideology is shaped and spirited by them. In the distorted world, the process of fabricating functional models does not have a functional depth. Therefore, it has not been transfigured into a consolidated, stratified reason that dispenses with instrumental temporality. This is because the mechanisms of their production are slow. Because of this, the correction of the distortions is delayed; these worlds possess a conscience that is dependent on the temporality in which they are immersed. In the distorted worldsphere, a developed system of justice distribution does not exist; there is no developed consciousness of human rights; there is no sustainable economic growth; and there is no great expansion of the horizon of the moral response. All these have descended from a moral deficiency that is signified by the sustaining, development and tolerance of the multiple distorted fields. In other words, a distorted world is a world without an augmented conscience, for the mechanisms that yield functional models and correct the distortions in a timely manner are identical with those that produce the collective conscience of a worldsphere. The conscience of a worldsphere is grafted in the spirit that it shapes and the effects the activity of the latter has on the systemic formation of the world it inhabits. 5.12 Sparta as an archetype of a distorted world Sparta is a prototype of a distorted world. The Spartan world required conformity to an extended plane that entrenched itself without leaving any room for progressive adjusting mutations. This constant exercise of a world upon compliance to pre-configured ideas had nothing to do with a gradual synthesis of islands of functionality. Instead, adjustability meant the shaping of

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the individual on a warlike culture through communal educative mechanisms that procure the extenuation of a fixed system of ideas invented as a response to a distorted situation, that of the enslavement of the helots.8 Thereafter, this cemented tradition served as a regulative element for the formation of the Spartan mode of being regulated upon the event of war. In this mode of collective being, wherein the individual is moulded exclusively upon the ideal of preserving a warlike city-state, the gap between the functional field and the system of ideas was widened to such an extent that the latter aimed at the perpetuation of an unjust arrangement. It was the lessening of the effects of the functional field that allowed the imposition of a set of static and immutable ideas that worked as an iron cage to minimise creativity, and disallow modification. So, unlike Athens – which through a successive series of a genius de-codification of some of the fundamental prescriptions of the flow of reality intensified the energy of the functional field and established a consistent conversational relationship with it – Sparta, by utilising to a large extent a self-referential parcel of laws and beliefs, weakened subjective freedom, creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Only a direct contact with the functional field can preserve the creativity of a worldsphere, and the Spartan mode never recognised the freedom of the innovative free spirit to experiment with and immerse itself into such a dialectical relationship.9 On the contrary, the subjective conscience was absorbed into the collective militarist culture prescribed by the constitution of Sparta, and oriented into obediently serving the distorted roots of such a constitution by becoming a citizen-soldier.10 As a result, unlike the universality of the Athenian functional models that made attunement possible and acted as a force of functional attraction, Sparta created a feeling of functional aversion with the particularistic Spartan mode of being and the mechanisms it developed for its purification. So, unlike Athens, Sparta weakened; it did not develop the intellect and morality, instead developing a mode of collectivism that silenced subjective freedom and disabled it from conversing with the functional field. Hence the exclusive applicability and communicability of the Sparta mode of being. 5.13 Crisis and the revolution of the subjectivities The distorted worlds run a course of crisis. The crisis is constituted by the moments at which the functional field, which is irreducible to its constitutive

8

See Plato (The Laws 625e); Aristotle (Politics 1271b,1333b-1334b); Mitchell (2015, p. 18) See Jaeger (1946, p. 83, p. 137) 10 See Plato (The Republic, 549a); Hegel (2004, p. 262); Jaeger (1986, p. 170); Popper (2013, p. 173). 9

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elements, exposes the weakness of the tools of a worldsphere to respond to the problems that it confronts. The crisis appears as an apocalyptic moment of a sharp disparity and asynchrony between the prefigured responses of a world and the flow of reality that they are intended to address. This chasm reveals the accumulation of distortions as misguided perceptions on the management of reality. This concentration and maturation of distortions indicates the exhausted detour of the distorted worlds. Notwithstanding their reflective slow rhythm and the lapse of the lost time, the functional field transmits the need for the correction of distortions. This need creates a condition of crisis whereby reality loudly speaks for itself without the intermediary aid of the tools that have been devised to speak on its own behalf and that appear disused. It then starts to conjure up the frozen time and to call for new reflective devices. Crisis then means, above all, the collectively conscious need for the correction of the distortions that have not been previously noticed as such. In order for the corrective dialectic to gather force it should be initially perceived by consciousness as such. The distortions exist and are detectable but very often it is when they reach the point of their exhaustion that consciousness conceives them as such. The leakage of functional time appears to be a constitutive part of the history of the organic constitution of the human itself. It seems that humans cannot record in a timely manner the signals of the functional field and, in retrospect, what they do appears always as untimely. From this perspective, in order for novel functional models to be devised, failure has to speak repetitively in itself for the ideological veils that prevent it from being perceived as such to disassemble. Of course, this constitutive delay of the human exists only in human terms. It is part of a process that we, as humans, perceive only insofar as we can utilise its beneficial results. This seems to be impossible because in order for them to take a form, it needs the lapse of lost – in human terms – time. 5.14 Collapse and the dialectic of correction It is the subjective consciousnesses themselves that conceive the crisis as such and react to its appearance. The crisis is accrued initially as a perception in the subjective judgment long before it begins to be canalised in the functional field. The crisis works as a compelling mechanism for thought to reflect on the tools that were supposed to aid its transition to the external reality. The functional field transmits information to the subjectivities concerning the scale of adjustability and endurance of the tools of a worldsphere. Even if a worldsphere collectively follows a distorted pattern of development, cells of conscience commence a silent and unseen process of organic communication with the functional field, subsuming thus the rigid institutional and ideological

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impediments in which a worldsphere is sealed.11 Within the subjective mental spatio-temporal plane new functional models are gradually concentrated that, in turn, manufacture invisible corrected worlds.12 The amplification of the distortions of a worldsphere, compounded by this unseen subjective process, make possible the discussion on the collapse or on the perspective of correction. It is the subjective worldspheres themselves that comprehend and name the collapse as such and, moreover, figure out corrective suggestions. The collective worlds contain subjective homeless and shapeless knowledge. For this knowledge to be reopened, the reflective process must commence once more within the subjective worldspheres and, from there, be channelled into the substrata of the common world. 5.15 Distorted material and the diffusion of islands of resistance The burden of the existence of the distorted worlds is undertaken by the subjective consciousnesses themselves. It is they themselves that carry and apply the distorted components of a world through which their mode of being is shaped, and in its turn, it reshapes them. It is out of them that its systemic disposal is comprised. The subjective consciousnesses within a worldsphere objectify the distortions through the externalisation of the stage of their development. Similarly, they sustain the stratified distortions because they are themselves their own bearers, carriers and auxiliaries. The systemic distortions then constitute the intermingling of their subjective employment and their structural formation. Hence the process for their correction begins from the living consciousnesses themselves. The correction of the distorted human material results in the creation of fractures in the coherence of the distorted field. These fractures subsist in any distorted world. There are islands of resistance against the subjective and objective complex of the distortions. These islands point towards a movement of branching off, aiming at the emasculation of the stratified distortions. These islands have innovated improved functional models that they apply in the spatio-temporal fields in which they are active. The dispersion of these islands initiates the dialectic of correction of the old tools through a measurement of their functional survivability. As new models outweigh the old and become reality, new creative divergences are successively generated with the form of imaginary corrections that improve the functional models of a worldsphere. Therefore,

11 As Lefebvre (1991, p. 403) remarks, “theory has shown that no space disappears completely,

or is utterly abolished in the course of the process of social development – not even the natural place where that process began. ‘Something’ always survives or endures – ‘something’ that is not a thing.” 12 See Locke (1980, p. 166)

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the correction of a world necessarily passes through the temporality of the consciousness that is liable to many evolutionary stages of objectification and improvement before it achieves a functional depth that, above all, is grafted and cultivated on the mode of configuration of the human material.

Chapter 6

Functional worlds

The concept of the functional world refers to those worldspheres which, through successive stages of reflective constructs, through their materialisation, testing and advancement, have reached a stage of functionality that yields a good rhythm. This stage of functionality does not refer to perfection, for the functional worlds continually improve and refine their constitutive components in a wellgrounded conversational relationship with the functional field. As Parsons remarks, “every social system is in some degree malintegrated, which means there is always a problem of discrepancy between institutionalised legitimised expectations and the actual outcome of events.”1 Rather, functional worlds refer to a stage of functionality whose objectification has such results that furnish it with a functional depth. The latter is a stage of functionality that is supported by the collective spirit and the corresponding institutions that both instil and satisfy a developed sense of justice. The functional depth is the attained stage of development, which amounts to the intermingling of the subjective and collective conscience that is deeply-rooted upon the functional field. This immersion in the functional field cannot be superseded by any distorted island. It regulates the disposition of a worldsphere, the quality of its responses and the nature of the qualitative leaps it makes. 6.1 The subjective and objective time in the functional worlds Within the functional worlds there occurs an organic binding between the subjective and the objective time. Subjective mental time can erect evolutionary bridges with the common reified world. That is, the common world is being accommodated and reopened by the subjective mental world so as to enable the latter to be hosted in its departments and be materialised unimpeded. The common world constitutes the evolutionary materialisation of the accruement of the functional models within the subjective worldspheres. The subjective world can tune mentally to the common time and place, for the latter has materialised the imaginary corrective models of the former. In this way, within the functional worlds, the subjectivities can experientially fit themselves into

1

See Parsons (1951, p. 164).

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their substratum because they harbour traces from the functional models that have been constructed by the reflective disposition of the subjective thought. Within the functional worlds there is an adjusting communication between the subjectivities and the common world that is regulated by a unison comprehension, investigation and watchfulness as regards the effects of the functional field.2 This means that the stratified and condensed aggregation of structural and temporal models that regulate the objective world ensure the possibility for the subjective thought to be synchronised with them. It would gradually embody them through an experiential confirmation and, thereafter, it would proceed to remake them. The objective world registers the record of the traces of the evolutionary movement of the subjective world to accommodate the signals of the functional field. The subjective world, insofar as it commences its bordered life within this worldsphere, is able to mentally align itself with these traces. The objective world aids the new subjective life to accomplish the evolutionary presuppositions that are prescribed for its deportment within. On the other hand, the subjectivities readjust and improve the common world under the creative impulse originated by the new evolutionary stages it approaches. 6.2 Existential conditions The existential conditions and states of mind arise out of the corporeal, psychic and mental composition of the subjectivities. No model of functionality deserves to be named as such if it does not contain and integrate the traces from an evolutionary, consolidated web of existential conditions. As Arnold and Verba point out, “what must be learned about democracy is a matter of attitude and feeling, and this is harder to learn.”3 These existential conditions are produced either by the constitutive needs of the compacted corporeal functionality, which is itself the precious child of the functional field; by the

2 For Tocqueville (1988, pp. 33-37; 2011, pp. 121-133) and Spencer (1904, p. 186), Arendt (1966, p. 252); Aron (1968, p. 78, p. 142), Arnold and Verba (1963), the modern functional worlds or more successful and stable democracies are England and America, and it took centuries to reach such a functional depth. Foucault (2008, p. 217) emphasises a distinct element of the American liberal democracy: “The demand for liberalism founds the state rather than the state limiting itself through liberalism.” See also Huntington (1968, p. 7) and Fukuyama (1992, p. 219). In this sense Tocqueville, (1988, p. 303) is right when arguing that “in the United States, society had no infancy, being born adult”, referring to the enlightened principles of government first applied by European immigrants. For Popper (1999, p. 90) the functional worlds are the western democracies, “the best of all political worlds of whose existence we have any historical knowledge.” 3 See Arnold and Verba (1963, p. 4). Heidegger (1962, p. 177) states that: “Any cognitive determining has its existential-ontological Constitution in the state-of-mind of Being-inthe-world; but pointing this out is not to be confused with attempting to surrender science ontically to ‘feeling’.”

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subjective psychic sphere; or by the variable empirical conditions. As such, they orient the subjectivity towards a perception of the world that is filtered through a substratum of existential moods. That is, the subjectivities see in the common world whatever it, itself cannot see. The subjectivities are both consciencedwelling as well as the source of a spirit that puts in motion the constructs of the common world. This incorporated layer of the existential conditions activates the commonly shared disembodied reason as is transferred from one subjectivity to another. The institutions and the constructs that have been created within the public space of the functional world have inserted this web of subjective conditions into its systemic infrastructures. That is, they have been reopened by virtue of their substratum of existential conditions, and have modified them in such a way to allow for a mutual penetration. For this reason, in the functional worldspheres, there is to a large extent reason that is not orphaned of existential conditions. This means that the subjectivities can be coordinated with the tools of the common world since they inhabit responses to their functional needs. As these tools contain traces of moods that are produced by fundamental existential conditions, the subjectivities can detect and be attracted by the traces of these moods and fit themselves within the worldsphere in which it occurred to them to live. The tools of the functional world can be employed and can optimise their functionality because they generate a web of reason that is founded upon a web of existential conditions. The tools of these worlds encompass traces of existential conditions, and this prompts an invisible evolutionary process of their accumulation. The tools of a world codify multiple existential conditions. As they are imprinted in its tools, they interact with other conditions. Thus, begins a process whereby the shared world integrates and synthesises gradually and in a complementary manner with the existential conditions, without being reducible to them. In this way, the common world becomes the field where the merging of the existential conditions is registered in the tools that it manufactures. This fact determines the terms of coordination and communication between the subjectivities and the common world. The subjectivities synchronise themselves with the common world to the degree that it permits them to detect traces of their existential conditions in its layers. The subjectivities are able to concur with the existential conditions of other subjectivities by virtue of the transplantation of condensed multiple existential conditions in the constitutive elements of the functional world. Moreover, only the functional world can sustain the process of their merging, because it is it itself that collects, investigates and compresses the multiple existential conditions. In this process, the functionality of the tools of a world is supplemented by a synthesis of existential conditions. This synthesis in turn

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engenders new compositions that are not encountered separately in any subjective existential condition. Thus, apart from the inclusion of existential conditions, the functional models of a worldsphere are channelled to produce new harmonic compositions. 6.3 Participation - The field of functionality operates as a regulating body Within the functional worlds, the functional depth operates as a regulating and orienting force. Insofar as it contains an autonomous dialectic of existential conditions that founded any concept of perception and participation, it comprises a receptive field of the participative activity of the subjectivity. As the subjectivities throw themselves into the functional world, they have a multiple evolutionary affection with it. The latter not only does not suspend and cancel their existential conditions but every construction they encounter appears to have been already and repetitively informed by them. So, subjectivity is withdrawn from itself to find its traces in the islands of functionality. For subjectivities to immerse themselves in these fields, they need to develop or activate their existential conditions in order to synchronise themselves with the functional depth that exists as such because a shared functional root has been integrated within it. The functional world provides and encourages the possibility of progressive adjustment. This possibility is founded on its functional depth and its saturation by stratified functional models and the existential conditions that accompany them. As the subjectivity is thrown into the world, it is called to activate and enlighten its consolidated corporeal functionality and, as soon as this occurs, to accommodate thereafter the constructs of the common world. In the functional worlds, the corporeal rhythmic operation permeates every worldly construct. For the traces of this connectivity to be found, the subjectivity needs to know itself both by virtue of the reviving of its evolutionary inscription in the world and through its disembodied traces that are widespread in it. At the same time, this adjustment, therefore, is an education of self-knowledge of the corporeal, psychic and mental equilibrium that has been accommodated by the functional time and needs to be attained by the subjective time. This organic bridge between the subjective and the objective world occurs in the functional worlds because the fundamental subjective necessity that has been accrued has been arrested and instilled in the functional models. This accumulation has undergone an enhancement that conveys to the subjectivities the information regarding the mode of their own mental and organic leap in order for them to be coordinated with the accomplished functional depth. Thus, the beginning of one’s life heralds a struggle to reach the stage of functional depth and, thereafter, to contribute towards its enhancement.

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The subjectivities that inhabit the functional worlds not only attune themselves with the aggregate of the attainments of their functional stage but can also contribute to their existential broadening through their own inscription. In other words, there is a crystallised line of functionality in the functional worlds that has been persistently perceived and pursued as such. Thereafter, successive waves of thought and corresponding constructs have been informed by it. This line of functionality assists the organic connection of the subjectivities with it and anticipates their improving effect and contribution. The subjectivities have to internalise and become existentially, psychically and mentally congruent with the widespread substratum of the functional depth. That is, the subjectivities within the limited lifespan of the horizon of their lives are called to be grounded in a conversational relationship with the functional field and, by virtue of this, to make an evolutionary leap so as to co-adjust with the accumulated and codified functional depth. As soon as the subjectivities achieve their synchronisation with all the constitutive ingredients of the evolutionary leap and assimilate it by making themselves homologous with it, they themselves occasion a process of creative divergence that is effected by the functional field itself. This variability is due to the fact that the subjectivities lift the weight of the renegotiation of the functional depth and reinstall it in its subjective root. The functional depth enters the human organism in a codified form, is embodied again and is subject to a transformative process by the subjective consciousness, which itself has already been transformed and mutated. The subjectivity wishes to graft this very qualitative mutation in the worldly functional depth so its organic connection with it may be renewed. In this way, the functional depth is submitted to a process of updating and modification in order to host new subjective existential and mental qualitative differentiations. As a result, the functional depth is synchronised with the subjective worldsphere that reconstitutes it on the basis of the information it received from the functional field. In doing so it augments the depth of its functionality. This process is continuous and follows an evolutionary movement of mutation and differentiation that keeps the subjective worldspheres and the functional depth in a durable relationship of functional communication and, through this, in a relation of mutual mutation governed by the improvement of the functional models or the attainment of new ones. Within the functional worlds a comprehension of the world in a compressed form occurs. The functional models rescue in time the perspective of the longterm functionality. By condensing and inscribing the products of the living subjectivity in actual reality, they disperse the traces of the fundamental human necessity in a worldsphere. As their reification is concentrated, they are dispersed by the human existential condition through which they contain its

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inner-worldly traces. And, since they are perceived each time through the filter of the human existential conditions, they are not left to be instrumentalised; to develop an autonomous and moodless course irrespective of their deep subjective root. On the contrary, each time they are perceived, they are also being recharged existentially. The understanding of the functional world lies in the experience of the human traces it contains. These traces that become inner-worldly are actualised in the consciousness, which retracts the existential conditions that they condense. The fabrications of the functional world aid the comprehension both of the subjective conditions and the world which encompasses them. These inner-worldly traces are combined with an entire population of traces which, in conjunction, can furnish a worldly construct. Hence a worldly creation could help us in understanding multiple existential conditions. This merging of the traces of the existential conditions can only be initially materialised in the common world. It is thereafter that consciousness in its own field activates and perceives their combination in the worldly reality. This perception renders this merging part of the constitutive elements of the consciousness itself. Then, they define the way in which the world becomes perceptible and also the mode with which consciousness intervenes within it. This agglomeration of the existential traces within the worldly reality effectuates an independent process of fusion of the human traces that is not reducible to the subjective worlds. That is, a process of merging of traces is founded that no subjective world can construct. This process belongs thereafter to the functional field in which it is incorporated and as an integral part of it. This process not only synthesises the various existential conditions into something that none of them separately can achieve but moreover activates a process in which new divisions and differentiations are produced out of the synthesis of the existential conditions. As a result, new syntheses are created due to the self-powered process of the merging of these conditions. The condensation of the human traces creates a synthesis. This synthesis in itself runs an autonomous course in which fields of moods are independently produced in a condensed form; that is, compressed formations that allow the documentation and the steady evolutionary movement of the human existence. 6.4 The conditions of rhythmic harmony The establishment of the conditions for the rhythmic harmony is a trait of the functional world. The subjective mental, psychic and existential spatio-temporal plane has appropriated the spatio-temporal islands that are proportionate to it. That is, in the common worldsphere, the subjective worldspheres can be hosted with all the structural components that remain indispensable to them.

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On one hand, this means that the commands of functionality that are concentrated in these spatio-temporal planes are not oppressed in order to cause an organic alienation from the world that could nourish a mood of revolutionary anger. On the other hand, this means that the subjectivities, by becoming part of the reality, create a relationship of affective creativity with it. This relationship widens the actual reality itself; it amends it so that the disposition of other spatio-temporal fields in it, which also condense prescriptions of subjective functionality, can adjust themselves to the evolutionary mutation of the whole. The common place in the functional worlds founds the conditions for the rhythmic harmony that is always under formation and evolution. This harmony creates an inner-worldly equilibrium. The latter exists because the common world is constantly being informed and progressively rearranged by the injunctions that the corporeal functionality as a whole transmits. The common world becomes a collective body that encompasses the traces of multiple subjective functional commands. As the common world contains the traces of the corporeal functionality, it continuously changes in the process of their incorporation and assemblage. This change, which occurs for the creation of place that will accommodate compressed and oppressed mental places, also occasions the formation of a series of other changes in the collective body as a whole in order for its functional equilibrium to be preserved. These changes modify the whole of the worldly spatio-temporal islands that are already members of it in order to allow them to readjust to the enlargement of the actual reality. 6.5 The timely correction of distortions In the functional worlds the distortions are not diffused and generalised. The existence of the functional depth signifies the existence of monitoring mechanisms aided by a community of correspondingly shaped spirits that prevent the generalisation of the distortions. In the evolutionary chain of functionality many distortions have been rectified by the effects of the temporal depth of the process of building and testing of tools and practices. Innovation and ingenuity are harboured in the functional worlds because they appear as creative responses when distortions or irregularities are detected. For this reason, the distortions appear at isolated points and are rendered visible and tractable, for they are immediately and consciously conceived as being in a less-developed stage in comparison to the established line of functionality.

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The functional depth relies on the multiple points of observance that are consistent with the rate of its development.4 This interlaced and active web of observation exists both in the mode of being of the moving subjectivities, and in the institutional formations. As such, it is oriented towards the preservation of the functionality of a particular worldsphere. It is the web in which the usability of the tools and practices of a world is submitted to a scrutinising test. Since there is functional depth, the appearance of the distortions is necessary and inescapable. It signifies the movement of a worldsphere to enhance its functional depth. In the functional worlds the appearance of a distortion is tractable in an easy and timely manner, and is equally easily dealt with. The functional world is unaccustomed to the distortions; it does not allow them to accrue because this would jeopardise its own persistent process of accumulation and development. The correction of the distortions within the functional worlds demonstrates the collective will of the worldsphere to live. 6.6 Fast-paced rhythm Within the functional worlds the fast-paced rhythm concerns the structural and subjective rooting of a reflective relationship with the constructs and the existing inner-worldly arrangements. This reflective bond is structured on the consent with and the assimilation of the existing functional depth. This functional depth communicates attitudes of reason and of experiential necessity with which the subjectivities internalise and synchronise. Thereafter, they preserve them and further evolve them. It is because of the energy of this affective relationship that the quality of the fast-paced rhythm appears. This quality refers, on the one hand, to the fast-paced mode of configuration of functional models, and on the other, to the timely detection of the distortions. The rapidity of the construction of the functional models is founded upon the synchronisation of the subjective consciousnesses with the existing functional reservoir that yields and channels an immense creative impetus. This synchronisation causes a co-evolution of the two in which the mental energy of the subjectivities affects and contributes directly to the formation, reformation

4 Castoriadis (1991, p. 76) ascribes to the functional worlds the property of autonomy: “The activity that aims at the transformation of society’s institutions in order to make them conform to the norm of the autonomy of the collectivity, that is to say, in such a way as to permit the explicit, reflective, and deliberate self-institution and self-governance of this collectivity.” See also Sidgwick (1981, p. 296); Tocqueville (1988, p. 244); Rawls (1971, p. 516); Durkheim (1992, p. 89); Piaget (1948, p. 366). Kant (1998, p. 106) calls such societies “ethical community”, Popper (2013, pp. 57-59) “open society”, Luhmann (1990, p. 177) calls them “societies with higher order of differentiation”, Huntington (1968, p. 78) societies that “have succeed a high degree of political institutionalisation”, Fukuyama (1995, p. 26) “high–trust societies”, and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, p. 151) societies with “inclusive institutions.”

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and progressive evolution of a worldsphere. Unlike the distorted worlds, in which the subjectivities, oppressed as they are, externally direct themselves towards an inward field whereby they reconstruct the imaginary world, in the functional worlds the subjective consciousnesses are already partially materialised in the world through the functional registering of the instilled functional models that have been devised throughout the experience of successive generations. It is upon this accumulated field of materialisation that they build and continue to complete their worldly insertion in a spirit of generous freedom. Because of this fast-paced rhythm, a structural orientation of a functional worldsphere has been embedded in which the distortions are detected in a timely manner, and do not become tolerable for long intervals. The functional depth enlightens the nature of the distortions because it binds them to the islands of functionality. This enables this world to conceptualise its problems and to annex their solution to the process of functionality. There is an interdependent and branched circulation of the functional models that are uniformly oriented both subjectively and institutionally. This circulation forms a generalised filter of examination and observability that renders the distortions rapidly visible and prevents them from becoming exhausted through their maturation. Thus, on one hand, the fused circulation of the functional models reduces the time-wastage that their existence entails and, on the other, it clears up the space from the distorted islands that obstructed the expansion and the activity of the functional models. The uncovering of the distortions is effected either because they retrograde from the stage of the functionality of a worldsphere or because the functional field of testing and examination generates the condition of crisis, understood as the persistent necessity of corrective gestures or the necessity of replacement of the tools and the institutions that fell into a state of disuse by means of their incongruence. It is the fast-paced rhythm, by which the idio-type of the reflective intervention is conditioned, that defines the speed of the detection and correction of the distortions. This fast-paced rhythm, as it has been affected by the functional field, makes possible the perception, comprehension and rectification of the distortions. As the functional models have been widely dispersed, the distortions can only use unaffected circumscribed subjective and spatial carriers. Therefore, their temporal and spatial applicability and durability are restricted. In the complex of the functional circulation, the distortions encounter institutional and subjective resistances that tend either to eliminate or correct them. When the yardstick in a world decisively yields to the side of the functional depth to which each of its component part is committed, the distortions can neither unfold and present themselves as an antagonistic force nor gain a lasting structural root.

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6.7 The functional depth The functional depth is the aggregated functionality that a worldsphere has attained through the attentive and repetitively fast reflective mechanisms that were deployed in a depth of time and space. According to Tocqueville, “in order to profit by past experience, a democracy must already have reached a certain degree of civilisation and enlightenment.”5 These islands of functionality are reducible to a long-term process of construction, testing and accumulation. These models have been injected into the collective consciousness of a worldsphere that has been moulded and remoulded in an affective relationship with it. These functional models govern both the institutions and the mode of practices, as well as the subjective consciousnesses that live in a world. It is the aura of functionality that permeates every corner of a functional worldsphere that is under its care. With the opening up of every single corner of this world, the aura of functionality exists alongside and undertakes its management. No ideology or revolution can build a functional depth.6 Preconfigured systems of ideas can name the injustice, but they cannot attain a functional depth. The existence of a functional depth derives from the instilled experience of a worldsphere whose rules of formation are different from those of ideologies. The time and place in which the functional depth was produced and is still being produced, is the time of conscience that answers only to itself. It is upon the pre-existing substratum of the functional depth that ideologies and worldviews are being produced, being inefficient in their own conception of time. Hence, they are liable to its long-term dialectic. Within this functional depth, the essence of the human existence is distilled, acquiring the shape of a family of the elements that achieve survivability. The gaze and the watchfulness which set in motion an evolutionary chain, are posed in a depth of time. The functional depth is the present-essence of the passing by of the preceding generations, and it is upon their multiple experiences that the functional dialectic builds. As Aron remarks, “it is our knowledge that reveals the limits of our power and recommends that

5

See Tocqueville (1988, p. 225). Huntington (1968, p. 12) notes that “the level of institutionalisation of any political system can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organisation and procedures.” See also Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, p. 44, p. 271, p. 364). 6 Kant (1996, p. 78) points out that the replacement of defective constitutions cannot be effectuated by a leap, a revolution. Rather, “if it is attempted and carried out by gradual reform in accordance with firm principles, it can lead to a continual approximation to the highest political good, perpetual peace.” See also Kant (1991, p. 55); Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics 1289a); Tocqueville (1988, pp.314-315, 433; 2011, p. 70, pp. 129-133); Dewey (1930, p. 108).

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we gradually improve what exists, instead of starting over from zero having destroyed the work of centuries.”7 Within the functional worlds, crises occur; that is, perceived information on the correction of distortions or their recomposition are accumulated. However, in these worlds, crises appear at remote points and are due to the solidity of the functional threshold, to its accompanied reflective fast-paced rhythm and to the intensity of the energy of the concentrated web of observation that detects them. There is not a generalisation of the distortions to the degree that they antagonise with or oppress any models of functionality. The functional dialectic is not silenced by the mechanic temporality. Rather, in these worlds, the crystallised dialectic is that which is moved by the functional models. And this dialectic does not allow the distortions to undertake the management of the movement of the worldsphere until they themselves are exhausted. In other words, it does not permit them to deprive a world of useful time and to bequeath to it the untenable remembrance of the lost time. The functional models cannot be constructed ritually, instantly or uninterruptedly. They are moved by conscience, which is generated through a genealogical and dialectical relationship with the functional field. The functional models are comprised of the products, fundamental moods and the very specific disposition of a mode of being that has been shaped by a grade of evolutionary development. As such, the functional models occur in a depth of time and therefore the functional depth, as it cannot be obtained at once, similarly cannot be effaced because it is repositioned in the collective conscience. Therefore, only the careful cultivation of a mode of temporality – in which the activation of the reflective mechanisms intensively and constantly produces functional models which are thereafter utilised – could gradually lead to the edification of a world that operates under the uninterrupted energy of the functional depth. 6.8 The conscience-gram of the functional world Within the functional worlds, the scattered distortions are counteracted by the corrective compulsion of the branched models of functionality that procure their long-term functionality. The functional depth that a world acquires is its conscience itself.8 The models of long-term functionality that have been

7 See Aron (2017, p. 757). Aristotle (Politics 1264a), criticising Plato’s Republic, says that “we cannot afford to disregard the experience of ages.” Rawls (1971, p. 525) puts it as follows: “To say that man is a historical being is to say that the realisations of the powers of human individuals living at any one time takes the cooperation of many generations (or even societies) over a long period of time.” 8 Sidgwick (1981, p. 165) calls these societies “well-ordered.” Rawls (1971, p.5, p. 353) also uses the term “a nearly just society.” Bergson (1977, p. 268) calls this society “open”

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erected, become concentrated; through this they rescue in time whatever is functional in the long run. That is, the functional depth procures the property of the collective conscience that has been accrued and as such it directs the spirit, the constructs and the responses of a world. Within this inner-worldly conscience, the organic connection between the subjective and the objective world is pursued though the meditative bridge of the functional models. As a result, the human condition and its existential attributes, the live corporeal stratified functionality and the claims of justice that they express, both inform and contribute to the formation of the objective reality itself. The commonality of the functional world consists in the uniformity of participation in its collective conscience.9 The latter serves as the only regulative principle for the government of its inside and, also, for the form of its communication with external worldspheres. As a subsequent effect of the stage of functionality that has been reached, the collective conscience generates an indissolubly connected net of values that are all bound to a specific developmental stage. There is a strong sense of justice, an uncompromised sincerity, a generous humanism and a widespread sensibility that has injected itself everywhere: in morals, thought and arts. In the functional world there is a sphere of intense energy and innovation spirited by the functional depth that aims at its deepening. A world cannot be functional if it is not just. And it is just because it is functional; justice, as Rawls suggests, can neither be attained nor be preserved without the functional models, the energy and the synthetic effects of the functional field. Rawls subjects justice neither to the functional models nor to the functional field. Rather, he presents justice as a discursive negotiation of competing interests.10 The same applies to Sidgwick’s account of justice.11 As a result, justice neither possesses an evolutionary nature, nor can the mechanisms of its production be defined. The principle of justice indeed should rule the world, but its very configuration is ascribed to the functional models that are fuelled by the

because it widens the scope of moral obligation that was initially made to cover the kinship group in order to embrace all humanity. Popper, referring to the values of western democracies, says that “never before have so many been prepared to make sacrifices to relieve the hunger and the misery of others.” 9 As Spinoza (1996, p. 157) says, “the things which beget harmony are those which are related to justice, fairness, and being honorable.” As Tocqueville puts it, (1988, p. 274) “laws are always unsteady when unsupported by mores; mores are the only tough and durable power in a nation.” 10 See Rawls (1971, p. 129, p.137). Similarly, Aristotle without binding justice to the functional field, (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1136a 25) argues that “just acts occur between people who participate in things good in themselves and can have too much or too little of them.” See also Aristotle (Politics 1325b). 11 See Sidgwick (1981, pp. 264-294).

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functional field whose function should remain unconstrained. The latter precedes the functional models that precede justice, which is one of the ontological forms they make take. A developed sense of justice is a consequence of a developed functional stage, and nothing can compensate for the absence of this stage. Justice stores up the achievements of the stage of functionality that, in each instance, a world accomplishes. In the functional world, the aura of functionality is dominant and, by virtue of this, the subjectivities that already happen to be there are entrusted to it. They acknowledge its own stage of functionality, the dominion of the functional models and the process of their constant reformation over the distorted field. The aura of functionality is clearly oriented and procures the consent of the human being because it has managed to accommodate and establish the conditions for the enhancement of all the claims of their corporeal, psychic and mental functionality. A functional world can neither be corrupt nor can it be possessed by a restricted moral sphere. It respects human rights and the human freedom for self–realisation from which it is nourished. The systemic moral deficiencies are ascribed to the distorted world. It is out of these that any political, social or other collective crises emanate. On the contrary, the functional world is furnished with stratified moral surpluses that compose the collective conscience. While in the distorted worlds, the stratified distortions create stratified moral deficiencies that, in their turn, produce the greatest of crises, in the functional worlds the moral surpluses allow only the isolated appearance of the distortions. And while in the distorted worlds, the generalisation of the distortions means a deficit of generalised functional models, thus jeopardising their survivability, in the functional worlds, the wiring of the functional models means that the nature of the distortions is isolated and short-lived. Hence, their timely response to the crises they face and their structural property to remould themselves. 6.9 Athens as a prototype of a functional world In the development of the historicity of functionality, Athens serves as a prototype of a functional world. As Jaeger points out, in polis we have a social and political bonding through shared values, not through the kinship of blood.12 The Athenian polis was a conscience-centric moral entity, and it was

12 See Jaeger (1946, p. 287). This organic community of the city-state was considered to be the “source of all moral standards” (1946, p. 326). See also Jaeger (1947, p. 61); Popper (2013, p. 163). The Athenian polis was regulated by what Boehm (2001, p. 67) describes as “egalitarian ethos”, that “selectively extends to the entire group the cooperation and altruism found within the family.”

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created by the perception, cultivation and sharpening of the mechanisms that produce conscience. In fact, polis was the condensation of all the practices and virtues that composed a functional depth, which in its turn enhanced the density of the functional field whose energy it was primed to receive. The Athenian mode of being consisted of a consistent attempt to harmonise itself with the functional field. In this world, the subjective microcosm and the macrocosm have conscience as their transitory bridge. That is, their matching is possible only when they serve one another. The ethical material of the Greeks consisted of the configuration of the external spatio-temporal conditions in such a way so as to activate and enhance the condensed corporeal functionality. The functional depth that the Athenian worldview attained demanded the diversified development of all human properties and, in relation to this, it provided the conditions for the augmentation of the human material.13 The Athenian prototype is exactly the investment upon the modelling of the human material through its conversation with a condensed and functional dialectic. It is a functional field made out of the intensification of the human interaction and the de-codification of the functionality of the human nature. The Athenian constitution was the outcome of a genius congregation of the collective conscience of the polis whereby a law, which is a moral one, is embodied by everyone and rules everything.14 The Athenian pursuit of justice and of common good was the outcome of the discovering of the effects of the functional field that were gradually grafted as the condensed wisdom of the past upon which the individual, each time, was modelled on. Thereafter, the Athenian spirit immersed itself in a conversational relationship with it that empowered both. In this sense, freedom meant to be guided by a genuine and autonomous desire towards the expansion of the functional pool.15 The art of sharpening of the attentive relationship with the functional field – without the mediation of an all-encompassing ideology – led to the de-codification of its laws. Through mechanisms that ensure intensive scrutiny, supervision, inspection, monitoring and accountability, the Athenians created a constantly actualised functional field furnished with fast-paced rhythm of temporality. The Athenian functional depth was the result of the harmonisation of the laws

13

See Hegel (2004, p. 260); Jaeger (1946, p. 78); Mitchell (2015, p. 37). Only in democracy can moral virtue find expression in civic virtue. For a discussion between the two see Aristotle (Politics 1277a-1278b). 15 Plato (The Republic 562c-562d, Plato’s Laws) considers the “excessive desire for liberty” and its consequences as a defect of democracy. Departing from the ethical base of the Athenian polis, Plato creates a prefabricated new world order that enervates the relationship of the subjective conscience with the functional field. The freezing in laws, which are not the product of the consent of free citizens, of the ongoing dialectical relationship with the functional field, blocks off all the forces that contributed to the generation of the Athenian polis. 14

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and the spirit of the people with the laws that had been accumulated in a depth of time.16 Therefore, the free individual who exercises and adheres to the laws of Athens, that is, to the collective conscience, is the most valuable tool for its preservation.17 The experimental attitude of the Athenian spirit was supported by a reflection upon the functional field. This innovative spirit discovered a flavour of functionality upon which generation after generation spent an immense amount of energy.18 In conjunction with a cooperative mode of being which respected the sphere of subjective conscience, the ontological formations brought about by the interaction with the functional field have deepened. This stressed the importance of the urban temporality and the interaction with other worldspheres as well. The urban density of the Athenian population, the modelling of space upon the human claims for its accommodation within it and its architecture, points to a commonly generated specific mode of interlaced effects and an accelerated mode of multiple relationships. Thereafter, every aspect of life was designed so as to enhance these affective relationships.19 The Athenian democracy could as well be understood as the effect of an intensive introspection upon the essence of functionality and, therefore, of morality. The Athenian humanism, compassion and goodness as well as the fierce commitment to disinterested justice captured the spirit of the people, and it is this spirit that animated the Athenian mode of being.20 Athens was clearly oriented, fixed and adopted on a conversational relationship with the functional field. The Athenian spirit understood the effects of the functional field and it established a crystallised relationship with it through the development of its moral and mental growth. Democracy was the precise outcome of an intensive study upon the functional field that took place in a depth of time that brought about a corresponding cultivation of the citizen with a developed moral sense. This could be pursued only through a culture of

16

Arendt (1958, p. 198) remarks that “the organisation of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws – lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition – is a kind of organised remembrance.” 17 Socrates does not want to betray the laws of Athens because to a large extent he considers himself a product of these laws, see Plato (Crito, 51c). 18 This great impetus starts with the legislative work of Solon and later of Cleisthenes. See Aristotle (Politics 1274a, The Athenian Constitution book II, Ch. 5-13, book IV, Ch. 20-21). See also Mitchell (2015, pp. 26-32, 39-49, 300). 19 See Lefevre (1996, pp. 237-241, 2003,117); Mitchell (2015, pp. 117-121). 20 Castoriadis (1991, p. 22) conceives the Athenian polis “as the continuous process of democratic self-institution for almost three centuries: there is the creativity, there is the self-reflectiveness, there is democracy, there is the lesson.”

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agility and modifiability. Thus, an intensive interplay and interdependence between thinking and the functional field was set in motion that never lost sight of the demands of the functionality. Rather it was seized by the consciencegenerated process. Democracy, therefore, was the result of this interplay. The nobility of the Athenian soul, its ingenuity and magnanimity, were the byproducts of this collective grounding upon the functional root. Athens, by evolving through a conversational relationship with the root of conscience, acquired a functional dialectic that was fed with evolution and adaptation. Progress and change through the preservation of the attained functionality and the correction of distortions21 was the moving impetus of the Athenian worldsphere. These Athenian achievements were the product of a creative energy of which only the traces can now be witnessed. It was the mode of a specific temporality that produced an intensified space, and its endurance that created the Athenian mode of being, its correlated virtues and institutions. Nothing could compensate for its recession during Hellenistic times, for the withdrawal of the functional depth meant the recession of human creativity, innovation and ingenuity. What was left thereafter was the exercise of mimicking or scholasticism upon a dormant universal functional culture. It was this specific configuration of an innovative, intelligent and tolerant spirit that was able to inspire the edification of new functional worlds around the globe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And it is with the lapse of many centuries that the human spirit, aided by the amendments effectuated to temporality because of technological advancements, developed a mode of temporality that created an environment of specific effects that shaped a creative spirit that delivers equivalent virtues and institutions. 6.10 Change – the process of accumulation and divergence of functional models The functional world is seized by its own idio-rhythmic temporality. In this mode of temporality, reformation is rapid. That is, the differentiation, divergence and improvement of the functional models are fast. This creative dichotomy within the functional worlds – which is due to its consolidated depth that accelerates reflective mechanisms and conditions their quality –

21 See Aristotle (Politics 1284a, The Athenian Constitution, Book V, Part II, book V); Mitchell (2015, p. 45). Ostracism is a highly illuminating device of the Athenian moral disposition as far as the measures taken against the accumulation of distortions are concerned. The expulsion from the city of those who could possibly threaten the survival of the democratic moral community consists of a precautionary measure against the emergence of a distortion. The same purpose serves the assignment to various duties by lot.

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leads to their imaginary correction. New imaginary corrective models are being articulated that lean towards their own realisation that is consistent with the reified configuration of the world. They conjoin themselves to a functional depth that generates, attracts and organically annexes them. A functional world is a reformist-minded community that continuously prepares and anticipates its forthcoming progressive leap. Tocqueville comments on American democracy as follows: “All think of society as a body progressing; they see humanity as a changing picture in which nothing either is or ought to be fixed forever; and they admit that what seems good to them today may be replaced tomorrow by something better that is still hidden.”22 In this way, the functional world is a highly spirited and populated domain, which by virtue of the effects that its attainments have on thought, is oriented towards its own constant progress. The intensity of the energy of the functional field in which the survivability of specific configuration of the human element or of any ontological, institutional or other formation is exhaustively being examined, informs with an equivalent intensity the collective conscience. The latter, being shaped as it is by the aura of functionality, and being attentively absorbed by the functional field, extracts both functional models and information as for the effectiveness of the existing ones. The reconstructed functional models in their turn widen the functional field that amplifies its intensity to an even greater degree. In doing so, it conveys to the functional models new information concerning claims of functionality which, in their turn, are utilised for its own enrichment. This process, with its new idio-rhythm, each time enlarges the functional depth of a world. This constant widening indicates the progressive modification and the constant adaptation of rhythm as a structural element of the functional world, without which it cannot attain cohesion and endurance.

22

See Tocqueville (1988, p. 374).

Chapter 7

Inner-worldly temporality

Temporality is the rhythm which regulates the mode of the reflective process within a worldsphere but also the degree, speed and quality of the divergence from it. This temporal rhythm creates the invisible borders of a worldsphere by shaping a distinct collective spirit and, moreover, by monitoring the process of building models of functionality. It also conditions the progressive leaps that a worldsphere can make towards improving its own functional depth. A world’s temporal rhythm is served by a web of supporting auxiliary mechanisms that define the speed of the reflective processes aiming at improving its functionality. A world’s temporality is dominant and imposes its own pace of rupture with the established world on the other heterogeneous islands of temporality that operate within its sphere. 7.1 Divergence A worldsphere is ruled by a dominant temporality that is both served and conditioned by the objective reality that has been built by the work of collective consciousness. Yet, there are islands of rupture from this dominant temporality. These islands of rupture are governed by a different temporality; its difference being that it is more developed in terms of the reflective assessment of the actual world. As a result of this differentiated reflective experience of the actual world, within these islands of temporality, the actual world has been imaginarily modified, reformed and corrected. This in its turn yields new tools and products that support a burgeoning temporal shift. It is upon this imaginary correction of the actual world that subjectivities that move within progressive islands draw, to disrupt and penetrate the world that is regulated by the established temporality. 7.2 Corporeal functionality and temporality The divergence from the consolidated field of temporality comes also from the demands of the embedded and stratified corporeal functionality. This is, in fact, a bodily arrest of islands of functionality caused by the great effect of the functional field in a period of time that appears unmanageable for the human mind to articulate. The human corporeal structure is not to be seen only as part of natural contingency, which as such is not considered the work of

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consciousness and the reflection of this work back to the consciousness. Instead, there is an organic intersection between the human corporeal structure and conscience. This binding refers to a living and recurring pool of condensed and embedded reason that, more than anything else, affects the human world through the capture of islands of functionality. Since we are being-in-condensed reason, we are being in condensed models of functionality. These models are not the short-term products of consciousness in the actual world, nor can consciousness see its worldly movement represented in them. They are condensed models of functionality constructed by the corporeal structure before consciousness took its present shape. As such, they condition consciousness that moves within the rules of the condensed corporeal functionality. The body is the “functional prison” of the mind. Plato,1 by virtue of his theory of the vision of the form of the good and drawing from the Orphic-Pythagorean tradition, considered the body as less real than the mind: “a living tomb” of the elder and immortal soul, being subject to the world that changes and decays. This atypical movement of “pure reason” departs from its groundings, disrespects the functional field and conceptualises an independent ascending process towards the immutable world of the absolute good that is outside of time; all of this despite the great influence medicine had on Plato’s ethical and political theory.2 On the contrary, Lefebvre understands the body as the “site and place of interaction between the biological, the physiological (nature) and the social (often called the cultural), wherein each of these levels, each of these dimensions, has its own specificity, therefore its own space-time: its rhythm.”3 Damasio, along the same lines, remarks that “the brain’s body-furnished, body-minded mind is a servant of the whole body.”4 The corporeal stratified functionality intervenes in the process of structuring models of functionality. If they are informed by it, it provides its consent; but if they violate the corporeal rhythm, it inclines to overthrow them. As an embedded reason it precedes and disrupts various constructions of consciousness that ignore and do not accommodate its functionality. In this way, corporeal functionality is both in and outside one’s worldsphere temporality. It is inside insofar as the products in the actual world are informed by the claims of the corporeal structure and harmonise themselves with it. It is outside because such claims have been built in a timespan that is not comparable with the lifespan of consciousness that historically objectifies itself. As a result, the corporeal structure is always in a state of dissent with the

1

See Plato (The Republic, 532b-533e, 585d; Phaedrus 249e; Phaedo 95d; The Laws 896c). See Jaeger (1986, p. 21). 3 See Lefebvre (2004, p. 81). 4 See Damasio (2003, p. 206). 2

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established temporality. Its claims inform consciousness; by articulating them in its turn, this proceeds into the creation of models of functionality that are more informed by the stratified corporeal reason. 7.3 The subjective mental world and temporality The subjective mental world is also both in and outside the dominant temporality. One’s mental world has its own distinct temporality. This temporality is based on one’s conscience and embedded corporeal reason. One’s conscience and one’s condensed corporeal functionality are not recognisable in the objectified actual world, for many subjective deportments are governed by a temporality that is situated at a more advanced stage than that which regulates a worldsphere. That is, many subjective worlds have accelerated the reflective process and have managed to acquire and to be governed by more advanced models of functionality. These subjectivities disarrange the hegemonic temporality because the objectifications of their consciousness carry the traces of the models of functionality that they have invented. Subjective existential conditions inform and accompany both discourse and actual articulations. The subjective world is a being-in-existential conditions that have generated, deepened and framed every reasoned or practical construction. Such existential conditions cannot be fully contained within the actual world. The prevailing temporality that sustains a world is only infused by such existential conditions because they are never completely accommodated in the actual world. Therefore, the temporality of the subjective world is additionally composed of the actual claims of existential conditions. These claims speed up the subjective temporality, for the latter in its attempt to accommodate them revisits the objectifications of the external actual world. That means it creates new discourses invested with existential conditions that, in their turn, build new models of functionality. This concerns both the attempt to render institutions and discourses existentially spirited and the inscription of new claims in the field of reality that needs to renovate itself in order to accommodate them. Because of this corporeal, mental and existential divergence, the temporality of a worldsphere becomes a heterogeneous expanded field whereby multiple temporalities exist alongside the prevailing one that administers the whole. Since temporality refers to all the conditions that concern the mode of the process of composing islands of functionality, the existence of multiple temporalities activates and sustains processes of divergence that are not recognisable from the point of view that the dominant temporality installs. That is, what appears as new is what took place in an unseen and silent process that finally makes its own way into the established temporality and there

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announces itself. As Hegel puts it, “as soon as Thought arises, it investigates the various political constitutions: as the result of its investigation it forms for itself an idea of an improved state of society, and demands that this ideal should take the place of things as they are.”5 This movement from the subjective to the objective temporality should be understood as one that manages to inscribe itself into the objective reality. It does not depart from it, it is not reducible to it but instead, it departs from the subjective temporality that attempts to inscribe itself on the objective temporality. Its eruption seems sudden and unexpected when seen only from the possibilities that established temporality sets up. In reality, it is the announcement of the product of the long processes of the subjective temporality into the objective world. Subjective temporalities encounter dead spatial and temporal fields that they cannot approximate. Subjective temporality produces more developed models of functionality, and at a faster pace. The temporality of the actual world is based on a less-developed model of functionality. As a result of this functional disparity, subjective worlds desire to organise their surrounding world on the basis of their own functional models. The established temporality, though, represents the safe stage of development that a world has entrenched for itself and as such it conditions the movement of changing the rhythm of reflective processes that result in greater improvements. Thus, the subjective worlds confine themselves to employing their imaginary corrected world against the established one. Inside the subjective worlds another imaginary reality is accumulated. This reality is a reshaping of the existing one and as such wants to become an actual reality. It is under the compulsive energy of this imaginary corrected world that the subjective spheres dispose themselves within the actual reality. Their words and deeds gradually build a new reality into that already established. As a result, the actual world is each time already under a process of change that is affected by the energy of the subjective worlds. This change is not yet recorded by the mechanisms of the established reality. Established temporality resists the new creative rhythm with which the subjective worlds want to inject it. This resistance often takes the form of violent response or marginalisation and occurs because the dominant temporality creates a governing complex of ideas, practices and institutions that are grouped together and intermingle because of a specific temporal rhythm. A new subjective temporality unsettles the coherence of this whole

5 See Hegel (2004, p. 268). Tocqueville (2011, p. 256), commenting on the French Revolution,

remarks: “the spirit that was to produce the revolution – the active, restless, intelligent, innovative ambitious spirit, the democratic spirit of the new societies – had begun to animate everything and, before briefly turning society upside down, was already strong enough to spur it on and develop it.” Parsons (1951, p. 514) refers to frustration emerging out of “rising levels of expectation.”

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and as such is perceived as a threat. The power of the already existing is greater than the power of that which does not yet exist. Be that as it may, to modify and alter the temporality of a worldsphere is an enormously difficult endeavour. The modification of the temporality of a worldsphere is equivalent to a structural grounding of a steady process of gradual evolution. 7.4 The roots of temporal divergence The temporal divergence first appears in the subjective world. It thereafter solidifies and accumulates itself within the non-actual subjective sphere. This imaginary functional growth communicates its temporality – its developmental condition – to its surrounding environment by virtue of it being in its disposition functionally more advanced. Within this environment, some are receptive to the new temporality which is transmitted to them through its spiritual and practical manifestation. So, gradually, the divergent temporal mode is expanded: it creates an assemblage of zones of temporality that are evolutionarily linked and related. That is, evolutionarily related families of divergence from the established one are created and sustained by the spirit of a more developed temporality. This spirit transfuses itself into institutions, values and relations. It sustains itself insofar as it continuously works and applies itself. This new setting creates a complex multi-layered relationship with the functional field. The functional field, the plane where the synthesis of the totality is tested and emplaced, is what continuously transmits information to the subjective spheres. The initial creative divergence in the subjective sphere takes place because it responds to the signals of the functional field. Similarly, the assemblage of divergence in a community of subjective worlds establishes a more powerful communication with the functional field. In fact, the antagonism of temporalities is regulated by the functional field that calls for responses that are made asynchronously. Therein, nothing can exist in itself and nothing can independently raise claims of functionality. That is, the established temporality and the assemblage of divergent temporalities are thrown into a relationship with the functional field. This relationship rearranges both the field of antagonism and the source of power. Functionality now enters the very core of time and is bound with survivability. Temporalities act at the point at which they must form their own responses to the messages transmitted by the functional field, and to adjust themselves accordingly. 7.5 The effect of temporality upon the functional field The functional field exists independently of the zones of temporality. It informs and it warns, for everything is liable to it. The rapidity of response could lead to a smooth adjustment. The slowness of response could lead to variable levels of

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crisis. Some zones are neither receptive nor adjustable to its signals. They have not managed to attain a long-term watchful relationship with it that could enable them to comprehend distortions and, thereafter, to devise the corrective responses to them. Thus, these zones identify themselves with the instrumental time that is bound to actual reality; that is, with what already exists. Their leaning towards the functional field is weaker than their absorption by the effects of the conditions dependent upon the instrumental time that exists as such, because it remains unaffected by the energy of the functional field upon the intellect. These zones, therefore, resist their recomposition and advancement. Along with the fragments of reality that are related to their actualisation, they follow the temporality of the established reality and consequently are caught in a state of idle inertia. Their response to the functional field aims at its disuse since they do not recognise its function within a worldsphere. Of course, this does not mean that they can ever cancel the work of the functional field. It can only mean that they slow down the process of gradual mutation of the whole of a worldsphere. The zones of temporality that are more receptive to the information granted by the functional field are those that accumulate and depart from the established reality. This growing assembly of the zones of divergence consists of an articulated response to the processes that take place in the functional field. The functional field itself does not codify, theorise or offer ready-made solutions. It does not think, but it checks the products of thinking in a field that provides the best test. It works as a field of a never-appropriated overflow that nurtures, grounds and facilitates reflection. It is the shifting ground of disassociation that vitalises reflection and helps it to examine the relationship between its formatted products and the flux of actuality. That is, its use is beneficial only when the inexhaustible information it transmits could affect ontological figurations that would be placed within the already established fields of functionality and therein would be allowed to affect their arrangement, to ease their reopening or lead to new functional conceptions. These zones, as they are trained to be watchful and investigative, reflect on the processes that only the functional field facilitates. Reflecting upon these processes, they detect needs that have not been met and, by retaining the pressing character of these needs, they create different modes of functionality. By doing this, they diverge from the established temporality. This accumulated divergence and differentiation results in an imaginary improvement of the models of functionality by which a worldsphere is governed. Being guided by more developed models of functionality means to find oneself in a different temporality. These zones of temporality in their turn initiate a process of being actualised. To become actual means to gradually seize the temporal and the spatial fields that are ruled by the dominant temporality. Thus, the actual

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divergence initially appears within a limited spatial and temporal field. Its locality is its origin, which inclines towards expanding itself. 7.6 The antagonism among the modes of temporality Though a worldsphere is governed by an established temporality, its power is not all-encompassing. On the contrary, a dominant temporality always follows a descending line of force because its constitutive elements, by being answerable to the functional field, shift as far as their configuration is concerned. Through this the established temporality has already been tested; the outcome of this already informs consciousness, which no longer fully supports the established order of things. The divergent zones of temporality gradually build blocks of reality that are spirited by a more developed functional rationality. These zones of reality and the spirit of temporality by which they are sustained create a heterogeneous field of temporality, each zone of which is regulated by a different model of functionality. This evolutionary difference of temporality creates a field of antagonism and conflict. This antagonism occurs between what exists as actual reality with self-monitoring effects alongside the spiritual grounding it provides, and what does not yet fully exist alongside the spirit of functionality that supports it and by which it is supported. This antagonism concerns different modes of temporality, some less- and others more-developed when viewed in an ascending scale of development. The outcome of the antagonism itself is neither monitored nor decided by them. The functional leap that divides them cannot be remedied by the use of communicative or dialectical reason. The functional leap is attained and once grafted on conscience, is not easily communicable when functional evolutionary breaks intervene. Whereas communication is based on linear conversational time through the means of discourses, the models of functionality are the products of embedded and stratified time of which we testify only to its products. The generative impact of these modes of temporality is thrown back into the functional field and it is therein that the rules of the antagonism are set up. These rules concern long-term functionality and viability. As such, they are independent of their claims and their purposes. The functional field itself will pass to consciousness the judgment upon which temporality, in the long-term, is functional. In other words, in the field where everything is tested and evaluated as for its workability, the more functional temporality would prevail. The always urgent imperative of the functional field prescribes that, each time, the more developed models of functionality that a worldsphere has at its disposal should guide the worldsphere. The violation of this law amounts to a spreading over of zones of lost time. That is, models of organisation that are doomed to failure, but none are present to conceptualise this.

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7.7 The mutation of temporality Once divergent temporalities procure a spatially confined functional rooting, thereafter it follows a scaled process of expansion of the spheres that are conditioned and therefore governed by them. The consolidation of these spheres creates an evolutionary familiarity between blocks of actual reality. Blocks of reality that were ruled by a less-developed model of temporality have already been discredited. That means that established temporality never circulates unhindered; it is faced with islands of resistance that are not affirmative recipients of its reflective rhythm. These islands of resistance in their turn create a network of well-compounded islands of reality that evolutionarily partake of the same temporality. This network is in a state of evolutionary progression in relationship with the dominant reality. The islands of the hitherto ruling reality are gradually effaced by virtue of them being attached to the more advanced temporality. That is, less-developed models of functionality are replaced by those that are more developed. This is because change in one island of the worldsphere through its accompanying effects causes corresponding and correlative changes to the other islands. The products of an island of reality are spirited by a specific mode of temporality. To be accustomed with, to use, communicate or throw oneself within a world means to be able to conform to the temporality that it produces. Moreover, to interact with this world means to establish an evolutionary affinity. As a result, the tools and the products of the dominant temporality fall into a state of disuse. They are replaced by a symbiotic configuration of products that are spirited by the newly established temporality so to be applicable in the spheres it controls. 7.8 Functional leap and qualitative time Inner-worldly change pertains to the mutation of the models of functionality and the solidification of the corresponding conditions to which they are related. Change means that a functional leap has been effectuated first in consciousness and then in objectified reality. So, change is conditioned by a mode of consciousness, the products it yields and the transplanted binding of both in institutions. The difference between models of functionality gives us the notion of the qualitative time. Differentiation and divergence refer to functional leaps. The distance between a less- and a more-developed model of functionality is called qualitative time. For this reason, our notion of time always looks backwards. We can always conceptualise progress only as it relates to the transgressed past forms. It is once this new form of functionality takes shape in the actual world that the realisation of a functional leap is made possible.

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What is functional will survive in the long run because it has distilled out of the synthetic energy of the functional field whatever encapsulates and transcends calendar time. Yet it cannot forever remain as such.6 Functionality cannot be fixed once and for all, for it is subject to a changing disposition. The duration of workability depends upon the autonomous processes that the functional field activates. These processes in their turn do not depend on the intention and will of the consciousness that is motivated by a specific functional model. The functional field never ceases to exist as such. No matter the fixity of its effects, corporeal, institutional, moral or otherwise, it remains the energetic outside both of its reification and of any other form of reification. It informs consciousness but is not reducible to it. Therefore, it will always independently produce results on which consciousness would be called to elaborate. Once a model of functionality replaces another by fully becoming actual reality and hence establishing its temporal hegemony, it has already been disarticulated from within. This is because in the occult temporality of the subjective sphere the flow of the information transmitted by the functional field has already arrived and the impact of its digestion brings about a process whereby new models of functionality are being formatted. Functionality concerns a qualitative leap that carries the affection of the functional field towards which it always leans. It always strives forward and, by definition, can never reach an end. It is conditioned by a historical horizon and differentiates itself from its pre-existing forms, but it is anticipated by the moredeveloped future ones. These forms never enter consciousness and elude our imagination. It is only when we will arrive at them that we will start thinking anew. Since then, the “tyranny of the already existing” will condition our being. For this reason, we must attempt to formulate a philosophy of the future, even if this could only aid us to shift our horizon. But under some circumstances, a more accommodative horizon means an abundance of things. 7.9 The silent change in the lapse of time Change is silent and remains initially unnoticed. The subjective sphere is the first abode of change. It always remains its home because without the constant flow of its subjective grounding, both individual and collective that evolve with it, it can regenerate into a dead letter or a soulless thing. Since change begins from the subjective sphere, it is irreducible to calendar time because, as a consequence of its very constitution, it does not measure values, sensibility and modes of being. Calendar and public time pay attention only to the leaps of functionality that have already been attained and the ensuing breaks in time,

6

Leibniz (1991, p. 45), lacking any idea of progressive evolution, understands absolute perfection as something that exists either in nature, intellect or in his conception of God.

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and only insofar as they have been noticed. It busies itself with the eruption of change that is determined as an event and not with the hidden processes that bring change to a stage where it erupts. These hidden processes take place in the underworld of subjective spheres, in the unheard reflective life of the assembly of the citizens who work towards transcendence in a worldsphere that is still bounded to its reified forms. Thus, if we want to elaborate on change, we have to start from the beginning of these processes and the breaks in which it results. Such a beginning however, alongside the processes that follow and lead to the emergence of new functional models, eludes our notion of time. We are dealing with amalgamations that are bequeathed to us and not with the movements that lead to such ontological and institutional formations. We only see change itself and not the path that follows to formulate itself. But to deal only with change per se, is to debase its real essence and devalue its real source. It is to give legitimacy to ideologies and networks of interests that seek to be superintended with a paternal role in a movement that unfolds independently of them. It is exactly within a lapse of time that such changes accumulate growth and manifest themselves. Lapse of time exists because of our inability to trace the movement of all the stages that a change goes through up to the point it erupts before us. Normally, we arrest only remote moments that are part of a greater movement, and upon them we build whatever we wish. Nevertheless, such movements build one upon the work of another, and are noticeable only when the divergence solidifies itself. However, what we notice thereafter is just breaks in our own notion of temporality and insofar as there are functional leaps. Such leaps are the outcome of a series of processes that never end before or after the leap has been conceptualised. But what we frequently notice is merely the outcome as it is situated within our own functional map. Thus, change is normally understood as the moment that breaks with this functional map.7 If change is understood as a moment, then we may misinterpret its source and tie it to the frozen calendar time that works upon the maxims of fixed reason. If, however, change is understood as a movement, then we can generate a better understanding of it, one that does not depart only from its articulation, emergence and objectification. It is by measuring change with the tools of fixed time that great ideological schemes establish their nonetheless arbitrary existence. On the other hand, by understanding change as a movement we do not re-establish its actual course. Such a course is even irreducible to the consciousness wherein change accumulates. Rather, by understanding change

7

See Bergson (1946, p. 24); Castoriadis (1997, p. 105).

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as a movement we realise that, as such, it escapes full theoretical articulation. Reason is never fully equipped with the ability to conceptualise change. The nature of the functional depth as a storehouse with a lifespan that exceeds that of humans, is irreducible to reason that moves within the confines of one’s lifespan. Thus, change escapes full philosophical investigation. Instead, it grounds philosophical investigation in the real movement of the actual reality without permitting to it to detach itself and hijack by misappropriating the functional leap that has already been made. 7.10 The revolution of the everyday life As Lefebvre says, everyday praxis, everyday lived experience, revolts by appropriating and producing its own space.8 The first origin of change is the subjective sphere, and it is there that one must trace the beginning of a creative divergence. The fundamental grounding of change is also the subjective sphere because it is there that the spirit of a change is kept alive and circulates freely from one subjectivity to another. The temporality of a worldsphere contains shadows of the subjective sphere but never its complete form. Subjective spheres will be eternal refugees. There is always a better world nourished in the subjective sphere, which always accedes a more-developed functional leap. The fusion and the dispersal of a more developed temporality in extended islands of a worldsphere do not substitute the prime role of the subjective sphere. This is because in its temporal world another break has already been made and, by virtue of this, it is already somewhere other than the newly established collective temporality. This fusion and the dispersion of temporality in a worldsphere render the temporal map heterogeneous. Distinct temporalities exist alongside the dominant one. That is, different stages of functionality have been reached within a worldsphere struggling stubbornly to circulate their products. This temporal race has its own rules and laws that transcend our own lifespan. Nevertheless, temporal homogeneity is impossible to achieve. The temporal movement constantly produces results that are accommodated by consciousness. It is the consciousness itself that either decides to use the data that the functional leap conveys or, being disabled by the derailed world of instrumental time, fails to notice them. It is also up to the consciousness to construct the functional leaps that will respond to the needs that are continuously unveiled.

8 See Lefebvre (2003,

p.183). As he puts it (2004, p.71) “the everyday is simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in a conflict between great indestructible rhythms and the processes imposed by the socio-economic organisation and production, consumption, circulation, habitat.”

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The functional field opens rooms for change. Consciousness drawing upon the islands of functionality and the collective functional depth decides the form and the structure of the change. The temporal field covers the whole as it interacts, and in its turn creates upon its endless creations. Ideologies claim something that does not belong to them; they claim and appropriate change and use it for their own purposes. But change is the product of the work of the people, which has a depth in continuity. And such work in the field of actuality does not obey nor is it guided by any ideology. Ideologies – in obscuring the field of reflection and by claiming themselves to be the field of reflection – block and derail change. That is, they ignore the real work of the collective consciousness on a multiplied ground that conditions ideologies but are not conditioned by them.

Chapter 8

Inter-worldly temporalities

The human world is comprised of a web of worldly temporalities; worldspheres that are regulated by a predominant temporality that is never identical, but always differentiated in each world. This differentiation refers to the stock of each worldsphere’s functional depth that brings about a difference in the mode of the temporal rhythm that delivers models of functionality. Therefore, each distinct worldsphere is positioned on a different scale as regards the developmental stage of functionality that has been attained. This difference denotes the temporal depth of the functional processes. Hence, a framework of analysis could only be set up through the measurement of both the products of these worldspheres and the configuration of the collective spirit that is interlaced with them. In this sense, the world, as an increasingly interactive web of worldspheres, operates as a functional barometer. The functional barometer undertakes assessments of the functional depth that a worldsphere has reached. Since different worldspheres display a rapidity or slowness into fabricating and advancing functional models, the functional barometer is the yardstick of the stage of the functionality they inhabit. 8.1 The distinct traits of a worldsphere A worldly temporality is distinguished by the mode of the rhythm with which it assembles, corrects and updates models of functionality. The tools of a worldsphere contain the spirit that generated them and preserve their meaningfulness insofar as this spirit does not recede but is instead kept alive alongside its own products. Once the generative soul of a worldsphere recedes, its tools are deprived of their meaning. They either fall into disuse or are employed through the means of scholasticism or the holy book approach; a clear symptom that the web of growth that conditioned an objective reality has been displaced. The spirit of a worldsphere is its collective consciousness, the subjective grounding of both its temporality and the outcome of its work. For Tocqueville, the spirit of the people encompasses the sum total of the effects of the functional growth upon the mental and moral disposition of the people. The spirit of the people is composed by the mores, laws, habits, customs, ideas, good sense, forms of behaviour and virtue of the citizens, and sustains and

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gives life to institutions.1 This spirit is always there but only as a possibility to be discovered. Only the sum total of the polygenic generative effects of a worldsphere can shape that spirit which, in itself, interweaves with the sum total of all the existing things that therein it is acquainted with. So, a worldly temporality is an idiosyncratic sphere of an embedded form of reason that is assisted by existentially, psychically and mentally energetic forces. As such it is composed, fused, condensed and accumulated. The stratified reason gives ground to the spirit of a worldsphere that cannot be easily obliterated. The spirit of a worldsphere, as it has been moulded by the collective reified consciousness, delineates the limits of the subjective consciousness. These limits refer to the concrete developmental stage of the objectified reality. This stage is both the cage and the impetus of creativity. It is the cage because creativity is conditioned by its reified status and therefore functional leaps that can be made refer to the network of existing objectifications. It is the force of creativity insofar as its functional field enables consciousness to form a series of responses that call for a measured functional leap. Consequently, the temporality of a worldsphere in large part conditions the work of the subjective temporality. It functions as its plane, its constraints and the pool of its temporal, and therefore functional possibilities. 8.2 Temporality as the borders of a worldsphere The planetary field of worldspheres is constituted by distinct territorial zones. Here, where one world begins, another ends. What makes a worldsphere distinct is the stage of functionality it has reached. This stage is rooted in its spirit; the aura of the circulation and application of a moral and mental disposition that saturates both the interior and exterior of its creative achievements. Crossing the borders is a unique experience, because immediately one senses a specific spirit fading away and another one coming onto the scene. The emptiness of the passing point of borders, should it ever exist, is of a very short duration as one is immediately affected by the aura of another spirit that exhibits itself. What could make the borders real is their moral and mental anchorage, nothing else. They are mental borders because in the mind of their citizens their world has limits. They are moral borders because, within

1

See Tocqueville (1988). Hegel (1977, p. 231, par. 351) defines spirit as the actual reality where the laws and the customs of a nation, which express an ethical substance, are particularised in all specific citizens, creating the “spiritual substance of the nation.” See also Smith (part 5, ch. 1, par. 7); Hegel (2004, pp. 74-76); Aron (1968, p. 68); Durkheim (1995, p. 209); Jaeger (1947, p. 239).

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this limit, a moral community exists that considers its products possessed of a bordered applicability.2 The existence of mental and moral borders underlines the affective energy of the holistic field by which they are sustained. This is the functional sum total that a worldsphere has attained. It is not the language, the tradition, the history, the religion, the habits or the peculiar turnings of the mind. Rather, it is the difference as far as functionality is concerned, whose effects are felt through any form of contact with the outside environment. It is the functional difference that this contact highlights that renders the borders relatively durable. That is, it is the functional distance, slight, small, average or great as it might be, which separates different spheres of the world and prompts them to withdraw into their borders. The borders signify an act of withdrawal into the familiar limits of a functional stage. They also signify the outsider’s sense that one cannot immerse oneself functionally into this bordered world. The borders incline towards the inside rather than the outside. This functional distance instils itself into the spirit of a bordered field and manifests itself in ideas, habits, beliefs, and generally in the spirit of the people. It is their ground, albeit an alternating one, which nourishes them and lends validity to their claims. 8.3 Modes of contact among zones of worldly temporality Different zones of worldly temporality have polygenic modes of contact. These modes of contact are not strictly actual. Rather, they occur in an imaginary field created by the juxtaposition of the familiar temporality in which one lives with the external one by which it is affected through every single objectification of the spirit that animates it. These points of contact concern the sum total of the elements of which their spirit is composed. One world, through its tools and its creations, communicates to us its spirit. It also does so through its institutions, governmental or other. Above all, the spirit of a worldsphere is transmitted by the multitude of subjectivities that populate its borders. Worldly temporalities contact one another through the effects of every single element that is an integral part of them. This contact between worldspheres is, for the most part, pursued successfully. It bestows upon an individual who has not been sculptured by a concrete temporality the depth of an aura that it cannot master completely. Most importantly, one world evaluates and proceeds to pronounce judgments on another. Moreover, the differentiated worldly temporalities that come into contact with one another do engender a

2 As Parsons (1951, p. 482) remarks: “The definition of a

system as boundary-maintaining is a way of saying that, relative to its environment, that is, to fluctuations in the factors of the environment, it maintains certain constancies of pattern, whether this constantly be static or moving.”

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ground that belongs to none of them. This ground is one where the distance between the two worlds, uninhabited as it is, becomes gradually appropriated by the by-products of the reflective encounter. Thus, the contact between them gives birth to a newly-established reflective process whose products fill the distance that makes the separate existence of worldviews possible. Comprehension, experience and communication with a worldsphere are based on a table of functionality which is always on the move. What a worldsphere really conveys is its stage of functionality. And it is through the viewpoint created by another specific stage of functionality that this worldsphere is filtered. Therefore, the contact between worldspheres, whenever it takes place, pertains to the interaction of different stages of functionality that each one of them inhabits. Functionality is the primary force which regulates, monitors and directs the relationships and alliances formed amongst various worldspheres. Huntington’s argument concerning cultural commonality or difference as the basis for forming alliances in a post-Cold War world bypasses the most fundamental bonds between worldspheres that are created by their functional kinship or functional distance.3 On the contrary, Fukuyama argues that alliances based on democratic kindship are more durable.4 The affinity, the distance and the great or slight differences as far as functionality is concerned, condition the relationship between different worldspheres. Strategic, religious, cultural or political alliances very often have primacy over functional affinity.5 But unless they concur with an energetic functional route, they are bound to collapse. Authoritarian regimes lacking a functional depth may proceed to form an alliance. Their common functional deficiency, however, cannot build a stable and progressive communication. On the contrary, their less-developed stage of functionality will cause a disparity born out of the silent accumulation of functionality within their functional field. So, functionality appears as the only form that can sustain long-term creative contact between different worldspheres. What binds the internal field of a worldsphere and its relationship with external spheres is the functional dialectic. The form of alliances created during the Cold War, especially within the communist bloc, was

3

See Huntington (1996). Plato (The Laws 951c) refers to the need for “observational missions” to other places in which advanced models of functionality could be detected and borrowed. As Durkheim (1992, p.75) argues “societies can have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organised and in possessing the best moral constitution.” 4 See Fukuyama (1992, p. 280). 5 Spinoza (2004, p. 307, 338), echoing the moral limitations of his age regarding the formation of alliances, argues that two commonwealths are natural enemies and they enter into an alliance for an interest.

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an example of a binding between worldspheres irrespective of the functional dialectic. 6 A worldly field conceptualises its outside environment through the level of development of the functionality it has attained. It is in relation to this developmental stage that we may understand varying judgments on the functional level to which a worldsphere adheres. Negative or positive judgments about one’s world or an external one, depend upon the stage of functionality in which one finds oneself immersed. Thus, a worldsphere is invested with a level of functionality, and this level conditions the mode of contact with it. However, this functional judgment also comes from the subjective population that lives within this sphere. The ability to understand the less- or more-developed stage of the functionality of a distinct world shows that the subjectivities are not bound to it completely. They have attained more developed functional leaps and it is through the constitutional necessity generated by their scope that they dignify or reject the worldsphere they do inhabit. Whereas distinct subjectivities accommodate themselves better in fields with more developed functionality, a worldsphere’s course towards a more advanced functional level is slow and troublesome. The subjectivities can align themselves more easily when thrown into a world inhabiting a more developed stage of growth. On the contrary, the throwing of oneself into a less functionally developed world always incurs a dreadful functional anxiety.7 It is felt, in fact, as an evolutionary retrogression. Any functional falling that deprives one of the actual conditions of its liberty and of personal growth is the worst nightmare of conscience. It robs it of the specific configuration of the functional field in a dialectic conversation with which one has been shaped. In this case, to conform is to lose oneself into an instrumental set of rules of conduct that are only externally employed by thought. For this reason, the migratory movement follows an ascending line of functional destinations. It is an imaginary will for a collective functional leap and not for a functional setback.8 The immigration flow as is correlated with the functional flow could be assessed only as far the stability, enrichment or threatening of a worldsphere’s functionality is

6

See Aron (2017, pp. 542-547); Fukuyama (1992, p. 254).

7 Socrates makes the distinction between well-governed and lawless cities, stating that he

would never want to live in a lawless Greek city which was clearly perceived by him to be regulated by a less-developed stage of functionality. See Plato (Crito 53c). 8 For the European mind, America was the land of promise of a mode of functionality more developed than that of the rigidified European societies. See Hegel (2004, pp. 8283); Tocqueville (1988, p. 281); Aron (2017, p. 319). Likewise, as Aron (2017, p. 501-502) points out, “if they had the choice, the great majority of workers, intellectuals, and mere citizens in Eastern Europe, would still prefer Western democracy to popular democracy.”

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concerned. That is, immigratory populations should only serve the maxim of the preservation and augmentation of one’s sphere of functionality and therefore should ascend to the highest level of functionality that a world has reached. 8.4 Functional convergence The different zones of temporality out of which the world is composed, both condition and in their turn are themselves conditioned by the stage of their functionality. Therefore, the world is also inhabited by divergent stages of functionality. Time, understood as the progressive attainment of a functional stage, is not homogeneous. Temporal heterogeneity refers to developmental gaps; developmental stages pertaining to the models of functionality that rule distinct worldspheres. Worldspheres proceed to form modes of relationships with external worlds on the basis of their developmental stage.9 What gives a specific form to such relationships is the position that each world possesses on the functional scale. Functional evolutionary proximity effectuates more inclusive convergence and communication between two or more worldspheres. To charge another worldsphere with a concrete functional level is to entrust the partial management of a flow of a mode of conduct to this worldsphere. It is to ascribe to it credibility, trustworthiness and a developed universal sense of justice. Functionally close worlds synchronise with one another. That is, they can adjust to the mental and institutional load of one another because they proceed upon the same line of the functional stage. Synchronisation is possible only when there is a functional connectivity that enables worldspheres, by relying solely on their own stage of temporality, to adopt, adjust and assimilate the products delivered by the temporal rhythm governing an outside worldsphere. 8.5 Functional distance The functional distance between worldspheres creates a functional gap that restricts the range of communication. The more advanced worldsphere in the scale of functionality cannot fully trust a worldsphere that is in a less advanced stage. It rightly knows that the usability of the products of the other worldsphere is constrained. It also rightly senses that its own products cannot be fully adapted to the environment that is governed by the other worldsphere’s mode of temporality. It can, as well, transmit its manifest forms, but it cannot transmit the stage of the functionality that sustains, modifies and perfects these

9 Aron (2017, p. 28), for example, makes the distinction between permanent allies who cannot conceive of, in the foreseeable future, being in opponent camps, and occasional allies that are bound only by a common hostility towards an enemy.

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products. This realisation brings about a functional alienation; the powerlessness before another world that carries traces of earlier stages of functional development that have been abandoned alongside the temporality they were compounded to. And as it is the fundamental rule of the constitution of the human intellect concerning progressive mutation, none wants to regress to transgressed stages of development. The less-advanced worldsphere may negatively charge the products of the temporal energy of a more-advanced world. The functional interval and the lack of a history of creative energy that shape an exterior temporality may create an ontological world that disposes of itself as a guardian of its early stage of functionality. This ontological world builds on the distance between the two worlds and makes their convergence even more difficult. Separated by a functional distance, the zones not only cultivate a different temporality but are also reformed at a different pace. The more developed the functional models are, the timelier the responses to the functional field and the greater the improvements that one world achieves. Therefore, whereas a worldsphere with a developed stage of functionality constantly improves itself, another with a less-developed stage of functionality brings to itself only slight changes. 8.6 Collision of temporalities One mode of relationship between worldspheres is conflict, whereby a multilayered functional difference is produced at the points of contact between every single element that belongs in their distinct spheres. This difference may take different forms. It may confine their cooperation into stereotyped political, military, trade, cultural or other exchanges. It may also generate a will to attain a functional communication. The more-developed world may wish to transplant its products, values, ideas and institutions into the other world in order that the less-developed one may improve itself. The less-developed world may cultivate a determinate will for functional evolution, having as a prototype the functional sustainability of the other world. Sometimes, however, this difference engenders conflict. Conflict here means a structural disagreement between two worlds as far as a series of issues that concern a democratic state with a deep functional depth. The violation of human rights, corruption, the rule of law, constitutional democracy, transparency and equality are issues invoked by advanced worlds in order to call other worlds to reshape and rectify themselves. What they really invoke, however, is a long evolutionary chain that occurred in their own functional course that produced such products. To inject this evolutionary chain is impossible. To disperse its products might possibly attract creative roots of a worldsphere, but change will be slow and turbulent. Thus, conflict is formed by the distance in the functional chain and the multiple effects that are connected to it.

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Sometimes less-advanced worlds legitimise and devise any kind of means to secure their position in the functional evolution. They have not accustomed themselves with the functional dialectic, nor have they formed a clear, unimpeded and focused process for their functional progress. Rather, they capture and thereafter imprison the products delivered by their temporality in fixed moral, legal, practical, institutional, and other constructs. Thereafter, they employ these against the spheres of the world that obeys a different functionality without a reference to the functional degree that is their prime cause. In this case, the functional falling has been clothed with ideological or religious networks of ideas that work as a parasitic supplanted field. As a result, dialogue is rendered an insufficient tool to be used as an intermediate element. Dialogue is ineffective where there is a long functional chain that separates the two worlds, and where this gap has been obscured by ontological artefacts.10 The systems of ideas that are being used – which might be varied in different cases – are themselves separated by this functional falling. Likewise, this distance may only be covered when the functional distance is minimised. Therefore, in this case, the technique of human dialogue – the inter-human dialectic – lacks a common functional ground that would facilitate common tests and convergences. Sometimes, each of the two worldspheres – or a community of worldspheres that are more or less functional – degrade one another. They degrade the products, the values or the mode of modelling of the human material it has affected. That is, more functional and less functional worlds are devalued equally. In the first case, what makes this devaluation possible is the positive functional distance, whereas in the second case it is the ideological side-effects of a negative functional distance. Compromise is impossible on behalf of the more functional worldspheres. Less functional worldspheres in their turn are thrown into a distorted course where sooner or later, through the maturation of their distortions – that is through the emergence of a deep crisis – they may discover the route for their future functional evolution. 8.7 Cooperation of temporalities with functional affinity Structural and spiritual cooperation between two different spheres, which fully includes the body of the citizens, is only possible when they have proximity in the functional chain. Such proximity creates bridges by means of which

10 Kitcher (2011, p. 393) argues that “from the perspective of pragmatic naturalism, the clashes of nations (and of groups) in the contemporary world are a scaled-up version of intra-social conflicts of our ancestors.” The theory of conscience, as it is connected with islands of functionality, enables us to formulate a more explanatory account of conflict in the modern world evolving around positions in the functional scale.

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consciousnesses that have exercised and been produced in different worldspheres are enabled to creatively manage and accommodate the products of one another. That is, the consciousness which has grown in one actual reality can immerse itself into another and synchronise its own stage of development with the stage of development of the new world in which it finds itself. It can employ itself and continue the pattern of its creative energy. This mutual functional employability is effectuated because one can adjust to the temporal rhythm of the other and credit it with a functional logical depth. The latter, even if it appears at one moment unreachable and unmanageable, is not degraded; rather, it is credited with a functional force and knowledgeability that demands one’s growth to reach it. In this case, one is attuned to the temporal speed of another world and acknowledges that behind the manifest orderly arrangements of things there is a meaningful layered energy of attentive and intense care that stretches into the distant past. So, one does not raise doubts about another’s world functionality nor is sunk into its distortions. Instead, by recognising its functional foundation, it charges it with a functional meaning that is called upon to gradually disclose it. Cooperation between worldspheres that are proximate to an advanced functional level creates a functional alliance based on a confluence in processing the activity of the functional field. These worldspheres realise that their functional stage is based on a specific mode of a temporal rhythm that delivers shared functional products. The bond of the temporal connection makes them aware that it is by cooperation that they may sustain themselves. The closer the functional stage of two worldspheres, the greater the cooperation and the creative interaction.11 This functional interconnectivity and interdependence creates a functional solidarity. The support for one another comes from a deep belief in the functional dialectic of one another. Above all, it comes from an unconditional commitment to the functional dialectic itself. This commitment predisposes one world to support another insofar as it acknowledges within it a strong functional dialectic. This support by its very nature is disinterested; is based on the strong affection to whatever appears as functional. This alliance is deeply rooted in the subjective spheres and manifests itself in the relationship between worldspheres. Conscience naturally always orients one to ally oneself with a worldsphere that is collectively being-in-conscience, for the conscientious network is the most powerful.

11 Kant (1996, p. 115, 119) refers to the right of states to form an alliance (association or federation) in order to protect themselves from a common enemy and to preserve peace. Such an association for him could be a congress of European nations.

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8.8 Cooperation of worldspheres separated by a functional distance The cooperation between a world that is spirited with an advanced functionality and one that is governed by a less advanced one never fully takes shape. This functional asymmetry is overridden by diplomatic, economic or political support that, at times, is based on a short-term political calculation. Strategic political calculation exists only when there is an absence of a functional alliance. In the case where a functional alliance exists, calculation is effaced by the universality of the affective force of the functional dialectic. Thus, strategic political calculation is, as such, based on the shifting ground of the functional mutation of the less functionally advanced world. This cooperation is constrained to a political or economic level and cannot encompass the whole social and economic body. Functional roots can only be effected at remote points within a fixed and set framework. In this mode of cooperation, the world which is ruled by a more advanced functionality should bind cooperation to a functional dialectic. That is, it should carefully decodify the functional map of the world with which it engages. For a cooperation to retain a functional long-term perspective, it needs to be grounded on a real functional root. Thus, in collaborating with such worlds, the more-advanced ones should choose to ally themselves with the creatively divergent forces that represent within their sphere the moreadvanced stage of functional growth. This is the only way for cooperation to tie together all the benefits that are implicated within it, and to integrate the economic or diplomatic interests in the process of a functional growth and alliance. 8.9 Cooperation between distorted worlds Cooperation between distorted worlds is often functionally and ontologically misguided. In this case, distorted worlds establish instrumental alliances that are bound to collapse. These alliances between autocratic, oligarchic and corrupted regimes are sometimes effectuated because of the early stage of their functional development. This stage favours the increase of a functional distance with the advanced worlds that manifests itself with differences in ethical, political, constitutional, humanitarian, social and other issues. These differences are perceived by distorted worlds as the material of forming a legitimate cultural and political distance which, in its turn, is furnished with habitual ethical and ideological maxims. That is, they focus on the ontological manifestations of this functional distance – which as such alter and transform themselves – and not on their real, unaltered generating ground, which consists of a permanent functional distance. Thus, their common functional lack and its proportionate products give ground to an instrumental alliance that serves their own preservation and is often directed against the reified manifestations

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of the functionally advanced worlds. Such alliances occur from the top down and never procure the consent of the population, which always has an acute sense of a functional orientation. The instrumental alliance gains primacy over the functional dialectic and diverges from the only possible route: synchronisation with its path. This dialectic, however, is on the move and at work within the wider social body. Sooner or later, the will to follow its movement will resurface, rendering the ground of distorted alliances vulnerable. Autocratic regimes cannot establish a long-term field of cooperation between them. Such a field can only be established by divergent groups within these spheres that represent a more advanced functional level. Only these groups can fix themselves upon the route of the functional dialectic and ground the prospect of a long-term cooperation based on a mutual development towards a functional growth. 8.10 The communicability of a distorted world A worldsphere with a functional shortage is, in fact, an isolated one. It is neither functionally wired to a worldly network that adheres to a specific value system, nor is it committed to a conversational relationship with the corrective warnings of the functional field. What can create routes of functional communication is its functional level. Since this level is low, it cannot attract the substance of the functional islands of other worldspheres. When a world with an improved stage of functionality enters communication, it wants to retain its ethical maxims unspoiled. It is willing to enhance its functionality, if it is convinced of doing so, but it is not willing to compromise or suspend it. Insofar as these maxims are not applicable in the communicative process or even moderated, such a worldsphere is not willing to engage in such a process. In this way, distorted worlds put at risk the employment and preservation of the islands of functionality that an external worldsphere has achieved. A distorted worldsphere may ally itself with other worldspheres, but on the basis of what conditions? Two distorted worldspheres cannot functionally communicate with one another. The will of a worldsphere to preserve its political or social authority cannot submerge the functional dialectic. Nevertheless, it establishes alliances with other worldspheres that are themselves distorted. Alliances based on the particularities formed out of an ethnic, religious, cultural or ideological resemblance – that is through the by-products that are generated by the intervals in which the dialectic relationship with the functional field is put on hold – never develop an autonomous dialectic. Such alliances are habitual, for they do not cohere to a functional root that they continuously address. On the contrary, they are retained with enormous efforts of indoctrination and very often with the use of brutal violence, persecution of dissent and the employment of the mechanisms of death that are used to

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enforce symbolic fixed points. Since such alliances are not based on functionality, they incur the long-term effects of the flow of functional time. The less the flow of functional time, the more the durability of such worlds, and the more the overflow of functional time the less the duration of their survivability. At any rate, such alliances between isolated and distorted worlds cannot be adjoined to the functional dialectic. For a world to be functionally unwired is to guard the functional distance from the other worldspheres. Conversely, for a worldsphere to assemble with other worldspheres is to participate in the disinterested development of the functional dialectic. 8.11 The functional tide The functional tide flows constantly, and by virtue of this it transmits functionally embedded blocks. A worldsphere endowed with a deep functionality transmits the spirit – the collective and prevailing stage of its functionality – that creates, sustains and improves its instruments. This spirit holds over another’s world environment, even though a firm functional link is not easily attainable. The degree of the transference of embedded functional blocks from one world to another depends on the position that each of the involved worlds acceded in the chain of functional evolution. The closer their affinity, the greater the transmission. A worldsphere that is founded upon an expanded functional depth maximises its permeability as far as external models of functionality are concerned. Thus, worldspheres that have proximity in the functional chain display great acceptability as far as embedded functional blocks that are conveyed by worlds inhabiting a higher place in the functional scale are concerned. This assimilative property comes as the natural evolution of their own progressive stage; it has the form of a functional leap, which these worlds are mature enough to internalise. These leaps are methodically accommodated into the reservoir of their functional tools. The worldspheres that are torn by a functional gap have a functional relationship as well, but the embedded blocks that are immediately transmitted are restricted. The functional distance does not permit these blocks to be methodically attached to the stage of their development. This is because within this functional gap an empty functional distance unfolds that needs to be covered. Unless it is filled with the corresponding functional process and all of its correlative constructive effects that concern a generalised process of mutation, the adoption of these embedded blocks neither strengthens nor serves the functional dialectic itself. Instead, these blocks, thrown into such a world, appear to be an abrupt leap into a future that this world does not possess the functional bridges to capture, accommodate, bind and adjust. When a functional distance divides two worldspheres, the embedded blocks of functionality are more successfully adopted by these solitary subjective

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spheres which, in their distinct temporality, have succeeded the greatest creative divergence that one can encounter in a worldsphere. On the other hand, worldspheres that are very close in the functional chain display a mutual advantageous relationship. They constantly transmit to one another embedded functional blocks that are rapidly adopted and incorporated naturally into their existing functional stock. Thus, worldspheres that possess a developed stage on the functional scale and share a similar functional level evolve faster not only because of the effects of the intensity of their internal temporality but also due to their corresponding permeability that appropriates the transmission of functional embedded blocks from other worldspheres. 8.12 The art of speeding up a worldly temporality The art of speeding up a worldsphere’s temporality is still something that must be innovated.12 Throughout human history a worldly temporality has consistently proceeded through immense difficulties, failures and tragedies. What we always witness is the by-products of a dialectic that was and still is, surpassed. We use and we appreciate its products; at times we cling to them by considering them as autonomous values that are detached from it. But we do not yet recognise it as the common force that generates, rectifies and improves them.13 A worldly temporality cannot transgress the steady and gradual process through time and place. Of course, it does not always follow the same pace throughout historicity. This pace seems to become increasingly faster but is still submitted to a gradual process of mutability. How can there be an art of accelerating a worldsphere’s temporality? Corrective responses from external worldspheres do occur and facilitate the process for a worldsphere to reach an outside of itself. These responses aim at moderating its distorted field but they do not easily contribute to the grounding of an autonomous functional dialectic. External worldspheres can spread across their tools and products. But as Tocqueville points out, they cannot instil into the other worldspheres the specific configuration of the spirit that forms and preserves them.14 This struggle of the distorted worlds to manage the

12 This would require, among many other things, what Lefebvre (2004, p. 68) calls a “rhythmanalytic therapy.” 13 Bergson (1946, p. 16) points out that “it is not the ‘states’, simple snapshots we have taken once again along the course of change, that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real.” 14 Tocqueville (1988, p.165, 307) indicates that “the Constitution of the United States is like one of those beautiful creations of human diligence which give their inventors glory and riches but remains sterile in other hands.” As an example, he cites the Mexican Constitution that copied the letter of the American one without possessing or generating its spirit that gives it life. On the contrary, commenting on the effect of the French Revolution, Tocqueville (2011, p. 21), remarks that “the great novelty was that so many

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products of other consciousnesses without recognising and without ascending to the spirit that nourishes them is a paradox. Yet, this paradox gradually sets up the conditions for its own progressive resolution. It creates a disharmony whereby the correspondence between their own spirit and the incoming external tools that are employed and are freely circulated are mismatched. This structural inconsistency enervates the link between their spirit and its hold on society. The extensive use of these tools and the products proceeds to disclose the distinct spirit that motivates them. Through their mechanical use and reiteration, traces of this very spirit are gradually revived and objectified. Hence, this spirit overrules the other spirits that are alien to the tools it nourishes. Thereafter, it releases itself and is accommodated. Henceforth, it begins its own dialectic of development in a land that did not give birth to it, but which it managed to discover, to give root to and make it its own. An art that aimed at speeding up a worldsphere’s temporality could exist, but it could not defy the laws of gradual evolution according to which the functional gaps need to be filled with all the constituent elements that accompany a functional process. What it could do, by means of the intensification of the layer of the conditions that sharpen the reflective encounter with the actual reality, is to clear the space of the forces and circumstances, the habits of the mind and the instrumental perceptions of time that hinder the mutative process and slow down its pace. The rhythm which governs a worldsphere is already speeded up by the planetary field whereby there is a fusion of worldly temporalities. So, it is already changing through the effects of forces that it does not and cannot regulate. Within a worldsphere itself, the institutional and environmental setting is of paramount importance. It is relatively easy to build institutions and plan the architecture of a worldsphere so as to multiply the corrective and productive effects of the communication of a population of gazes that reclaim and produce their own space.15 Yet, these institutions might as well gather and replicate the modalities of the dominant temporality. But by gathering it, they also accumulate the possibility for its mutation. This is because it is not the prevailing spirit that builds them. Instead, they dislocate the prevailing spirit, because by being themselves an island of reality irreducible to the dominant spirit, they dissemble the network of its correspondence with the actual reality. Therefore, their spirit in gathering itself in them habitually, also abandons itself. It is called

nations had reached the point where such methods could be used effectively and such maxims could be readily accepted.” Arnold and Verba (1963, p.7) remark: “How can a set of arrangements, so fragile, so intricate, and so subtle, be transplanted out of historical and cultural context?” See also Aristotle (Politics 1310); Aron (2017, p. 380). 15 See Lefebvre (2001, p. 133). Such a planning would both aim at the hegemony of the space by state power and the communicability of different hitherto isolated spaces.

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to change and, when it does so, it will utilise its mutated force that has been gathered therein. For a temporality to alter, it needs an origin wherein it is engendered more developed. A worldsphere sunk into a prevailing temporality is rare but, whenever it exists, the impression it conveys is always frustrating. Thus, change in this case necessarily has a single origin. This origin could be created by communities that are left scattered into a state of being in impotence before the prevailing temporality. Such communities may create blocks of resistance through which the prevailing temporality cannot pass. They should be moral communities that gather a moral leap and collectively seek to apply it. Such communities exist in any distorted world. But they are not aware of the functional dialectic. Most of the times they dress it up with ideological, religious, cultural and other codes and cannot yet see its pure dialectic. Yet, it is only the activity of these moral communities, the product of their work, their existential immersion into an energetic culture that would bind them to the stage of their development on which they might further reflect and improve. 8.13 The zones of lost time The world is inhabited by zones of lost time. These are the zones whereby one’s world temporality is seized by ideas, movements and events that, though they are themselves by-products of the temporal movement and as such liable to be transgressed, misappropriate its dialectic by freezing in time a certain schematisation of the products it yields.16 Thereafter, they form independent paths exclusively dependent on a debased process. Insofar as there is not a single world that is not at certain points fixed and rooted into pockets of instrumentalism, there is not a world that does not injure the functional dialectic. This fact means that, at certain points, any world lowers its own creative impulse and lessens the temporal rhythm. Throughout history we have witnessed many systems of ideas and many ideologies that managed to subject temporality to a network of autonomised products fabricated by an autonomised core of ideas. This mechanical deviation from the functional dialectic builds a world whose condition of existence is the silencing of this very dialectic. Aron, analysing the Soviet regime, refers to a gap “between constitutional fictions and reality.”17 The endurance, the development and the force of these by-products occur only because they bypass the functional dialectic. For the latter does not allow the processing of ideas in an unhindered

16 As Bergson (1946, p.190) points out, this mode of thought assumes “that all knowledge must necessarily start from the rigidly defined concepts in order to grasp by their means the flowing reality.” 17 See Aron (1968, pp. 170-171). See also Aron (2017, p. 448, 669).

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relationship to one another; it restructures them well before they create a family resemblance and interdependence. It halts their circulation before they build an unmonitored world of fixity that grows only because it fertilises itself. The mechanical products of the functionally debased world do not adhere to the injunctions of the functional field. Their very existence depicts a weak mode of temporality and a compounded loose network of reflective processing. The functional dialectic survives the anthropomorphic conception of time and the products associated with its employment. The functional dialectic is at work in a shadowy existence and reappears with a greater force at the point where various worldspheres crash when the autonomisation of independent ideas mature through their distortions. But still, these have been zones of lost time; lost progressive stages that could have been materialised. The attachment upon independent movements of ideas outside temporal mutation accrued wasted time. It has been the forgotten era of the functional dialectic in which the gathering of forces, instead of amplifying, attenuates the functional binding. But they are always proceeded by the rectifying effects of the silent functional process. These worlds sink into a deep crisis and they become aware of the sea of distortions that surrounds them, for in a state of crisis the messages of the functional field superimpose themselves on the fixity of the prevailing practices, illustrating thus the urgent need for corresponding responses. The foundation of a functional dialectic is pursued through their reorientation to an undisturbed dialectic of functional augmentation. The parcels of immutability occur also in worlds that have attained a certain degree of functional depth. Only a re-regulation of the rhythm of their temporality can dissolve such zones. The proportionate effects of a temporal change would facilitate the consideration of ideas and practices as figurative stages of an amorphous fundamental process that engenders, controls, approves or discards them. In order for this process to take place, time should not be understood as the reign of the past over the present, but as the reign of functionality upon the world of human figuration.18 This is not, however, a matter of thought to decide in advance. An unchallenged idea is a product of the equilibrium of the forces of the past. Moreover, the degree of its submission to the functional process relates to the latter’s depth. Its life and time-wasting durability depend on the speed that the temporal rhythm achieves. This rhythm, in its turn, depends on the affective force of the functional field whose

18 Bergson (1912, p. 275) points out that “to perceive means to immobilise. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something that outruns perception itself.” Castoriadis (1997, p. 85) calls this an “instituting power” by virtue of which “each society is immersed in a temporal dimension which itself cannot be mastered, a time-to-come that is to-be-made and to-be-done, in relation to which there are not only enormous uncertainties but also decisions that must be taken.”

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constitutional mode does not allow the growth of lost zones – that is of unchallenged, undisturbed regimes of truth – but also of idiosyncratic modes of being that exist and take hold over a field only because temporality, by its very constitution, builds islands of functionality with a specific speed and after a lapse of time. Distorted zones are thus being effaced when the energy of conscience regulates the mode of change, and not when the frozen past imposes its energy-leaking authority.

Chapter 9

Planetary functionality

Planetary functionality denotes the spiritual energy of both the ethical and the institutional consolidation of the accumulated trans-worldly models of functionality. Such models have the propensity to apply themselves to the entire worldsphere, which becomes their entire object of thought. Planetary functionality has been produced due to the operation of a mode of temporality that cannot exhaust itself within the confines of the inner-worldly or interworldly temporality. As such, it does not permit a world to claim self-sufficiency and sovereignty as far as the accountability of the functional models by which it is governed are concerned. Instead, it points to an enlarged model of functionality that can be applied insofar as many of the axioms associated with the nation state are transcended and inclusive global institutions are consolidated. 9.1 The formation of planetary functionality Planetary islands of functionality are generated through the merging of worldly models of functionality that attain universality by virtue of their conscientious root. Such modes of functionality exclusively obey the rules of thought and move within the time of thought. The time of thought increasingly widens the scope of its reflection. Planetary temporality is exactly the rhythm that informs thought, not only of worldly and inter-worldly temporality, but also of their links and their points of contact that themselves also become its object. Worldly temporalities create models of functionality. These models then establish links with external worldspheres. These links themselves create a new object of thought and out of its examination new models of functionality arise. These models of functionality are not reducible to worldly or inter-worldly temporalities. On the contrary, they transcend them; they gain their own right to produce effects as autonomous and independent functional models that obey a dialectical development through the conscientious scrutiny of an increasingly expanding world-object. Therefore, the planetary islands of functionality are the ontological forms that the consolidation of the functional models within the energy of the functional time yield. They are the instilled essence of what the universal time has informed the reflecting consciousness, and what the latter makes out of this information. Planetary functionality,

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therefore, represents the unfolding of the time of conscience on a universal level which, as such, condenses its own material for it shares a common substance. 9.2 The unfettered flight of consciousness as a source of planetary functionality The unfettered flight of subjective consciousness is the first condition of planetary functionality.1 It is the faculty of the human mind to disassociate itself from its own products and to strive to go beyond them that makes possible the formation of trans-worldly functional models. The products of the mind may prevail and claim an independent existence through their outwardly instrumental reproduction. But reflective time always reconsiders and readjusts them by virtue of scanning and processing the disrupting effects of the functional field. It has already improved and expanded them and its reflective equilibrium, that is, its approximation to the actual reality, can be defined only by the living and evolving consciousness. The subjective flight of consciousness follows the time of thought; it knows no limits and it cannot exhaust itself within the field of the national temporality. It has already replaced it and moved forward. This flight throughout history generates its instruments, products and institutions that host planetary functional models and modes of thinking that are motivated by and reflect upon the functional field. The autonomisation of functionality from distinct worldspheres effectuates a cathartic release from any kind of product related to the energy of the instrumental time. As such, it is one of the highest achievements of the human mind, which gradually renders the whole world as the object upon which it employs and applies itself. 9.3 The corporeal functionality as a source of planetary functionality The planetary islands of functionality have been gradually formed because the objectification of the products of consciousness is a successive building processes that breathes within the flow of historical time. Yet, these objectifications appear as late historical products of a folded truth that often reaffirms itself after human suffering, tragedies and disasters have informed the mind, and in itself has been convinced about the dysfunctionality of some ideas and practices. This embedded and compacted truth is fused within the universally shared human corporeal structure.2 In real terms, the corporeal

1

Bergson (1977, p. 235) attributes this love for humanity to “the mystic impetus.” Singer (2011, p. 119) attributes it to the propensity of ethical reasoning towards universality. 2 For the universality, though for him eternal and immutable, of the human nature, see Spinoza (2004 p. 61). As Lefebvre (1991, p. 407), remarks: “Western philosophy has

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structure cannot attain equilibrium unless it synchronises with its universality. In other words, the corporeal structure is in a mismatch with exclusive ideologies. What is actually hidden is the movement of the progressive leap of consciousness within the field of history. Consciousness in its varied points of development, before reaching the outside of itself and constructing worldspheres as the sole product of its own work, affects the corporeal structure and grants it a pool of functionality. Consciousness in its multiple evolutionary forms affected the corporeality before it created the historical world. The human products, therefore, cannot escape the injunctions of the grafted corporeal functionality, and it is exactly the equal sharing of the corporeal structure that makes the equal sharing of models of functionality possible. Corporeal constitution condenses corporeal embedded functionality that is always under mutation. The very fact, despite what one might think, about the speed of the progressive evolution of conscience in historical time, always saves time. That is, it always compensates for the zones of lost time, because it can make leaps that would have been impossible only with the aid of institutions, ideas and practices; that is, with the aid of its own objectified products and the corresponding collective consciousness. No human products, tools or institutions can compensate for or replace the registered consensus granted by the common corporeal structure.3 Similarly, neither their existence nor corporeal structure’s conformity to their dialectic would have been possible without the corporeal embedded functionality in which every subjective consciousness directly participates. The commonality of the corporeal structure, the universal commonwealth of human bodies, is the condition for history. It directs our gaze and mind to a functional horizon, and none can escape its sphere. Whereas planetary functionality appears as a product of historical movement, it cannot be exclusively explained by it. Consciousness intervenes by making transgressing “ahistorical” leaps, because the energy of the forces released by corporeal structure enables it to do so. Planetary functionality is thus the future of the successively regenerated presence of corporeal functionality. It arrives from where it always begins or where it always is. The rhythm of the body and its correlated inward laws are accommodated by consciousness as its prime condition of existence, and it is interposed between

betrayed the body; it has actively participated in the great process of metaphorisation that has abandoned the body; and it has denied the body.” See also Lefebvre (2004, pp. 44-45). 3 Walzer (2006, p. 142), commenting on enemy soldiers at war, remarks: “He alienates himself from me when he tries to kill me, and from our common humanity. But the alienation is temporary, the humanity imminent.”

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the play of the subjective, worldly and inter-worldly temporality. This rhythm, composed of a functional network of injunctions, is the product of biological evolutionary time that superseded and now is synchronous with historical time. As such, it transmits functional injunctions on the basis of which consciousness commences its own journey of ingenuity. Consciousness energetically appears and anxiously disappears from the field of life. But its horizon lies dormant in the corporeal structure that biologically stores its possibilities, its achievements and its functional orientation. Worldly temporality always tries to encapsulate the corporeal rhythm, but in itself resists. Interworldly temporality compensates for the unmet corporeal functional injunctions, but still, it cannot shelter them. Therefore, in a co-evolutionary progressive shift the corporeal structure – alongside the correlated organically functional impulse of consciousness that both affects and is affected by it – breaks the limits posed by worldly or inter-worldly temporality and inclines towards an unfettered commitment to universality. The endless flight of consciousness that constantly draws upon the corporeal rhythm follows a faster pace than that of disembodied collective temporalities and their correlated products. Insofar as the latter subject temporality within spatial and mental borders that are institutionally, religiously, culturally or otherwise bounded, the corporeal rhythm resists by clearing the spatial and temporal field of functionally debased ideas and practices that oppress and blur its dialectic. In doing so, it reaches the sphere of planetary functionality. Therein, the functional dialectic rises above everything else and the borders are delineated exclusively by its own stage of development. This flight to universality is the authentic sanctuary of the corporeal rhythm, and it is towards it that is always oriented. Thus, planetary functionality is related to the corporeal rhythm that is indispensable to consciousness and is represented by it. Consciousness tolerates worldly limits in so far as they do not impede its own dialectic, which is fully advanced only by transcending them. But the home of consciousness, its functional equilibrium, is only its own distinct affective relationship with the functional field represented in a certain stage of its transgressive horizon, nothing else. And only the planetary functionality can fully accommodate the corporeal rhythm as produced by the effects of the stored functionality. The stratified functionality of the human body is the codified history of the affective relationship between the human and the functional field. This beingin-functionality is a mode of being-in-conscience whereby thought and its object have merged by becoming an organic element of the bodily harmony. Thus, the history of the creation of the corporeal functionality lies within the organic structure of the human mind. As such, it has a creative impulsion towards universality; that is, to the highest possible form of conscience and

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thus to its ontological gifts of love, goodness, compassion, justice and sensibility. From the authentic viewpoint of corporeal functionality, a worldsphere is credited with a value only insofar as it works as an educative bridge towards universality. 9.4 The technological impetus of planetary functionality The prevailing mode of temporality that regulated distinct worldspheres prior to the appearance of technology cannot be compared with the temporal rhythm that followed. Temporal shifts occur, and we should always keep them in mind when analysing the pace of change. To use old models that are annexed to a transgressed mode of temporality in order to perceive a new world is not a useful tool. As Tocqueville notes, this mode – which prevailed until the 17th and 18th centuries – followed a steady development, and its main feature was that it kept the field of reception guarded, loose and inert.4 Within this field, ontological and practical responses were fixed and naturalised, dominating the flow of the functional field and weakening its prime role. In its turn, this field was poorly constituted, thus releasing information after a long lapse of time and without any pressing intensity. Therefore, the level of functionality that worldly spheres reached was low, and neither subjective thought nor institutional devices could speed up the functional process. As a result, the territorial applicability of these worlds was limited and dead zones between different worldspheres were sharply delineated. In the pre-technological period the distorted field, without being subjected to the constant flow of the corrective signals of the functional field, neither informed consciousness of the points it had to reform itself nor its own reified world. Instead, the distorted field dominated the functional field and developed its own course that remained, to a large extent, uninterrupted. This mode of temporality was the condition of the worlds and, since the functional field was weak, it represented their developmental limits. Within these limits, they built monarchic, theocratic, illiberal, undemocratic, totalitarian and distorted societies that were fused with inequality, injustice, wars, prejudices and poverty. Change was almost non-existent, since everything remained immutable, dependent upon a fixed network of unobserved ideas that the rhythm of the existing temporality could not submit to a gradual change.

4 See Tocqueville (1988, p. 412). It was the French Revolution that became almost the first global model for spreading of models of functionality. As Tocqueville (2011, p. 19) remarks, the French Revolution “transcended all particular nationalities to create a common intellectual fatherland, which could accommodate men of all nations as citizens.”

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In this static, traditional and immutable world, only a speeding up of the temporal rhythm could ground a steady process for progressive change. Technology granted the conditions in order for this rhythm of temporality to undergo a change. By enhancing the energy of the functional field, it called for a need to readjust the reflective equilibrium with actual reality. So, worldly, inter-worldly and planetary temporalities have been augmented by the great technological advances.5 What we witness today is another temporal change, one brought about by the new technologies of the cyberworld that equip thought with an immense flow of information that multiplies the reflective exercises. Never before has the planetary world as an object of thought appeared at such a magnitude and intension. The machine and the image, as well as the communication facilitated by satellites and computers, engineer a completely different mode of temporality. In fact, there is a temporal shift that proceeds that of the industrial revolution. It is because of this new temporal rhythm that, today, everything is subject to such a pace of mutability. The reflective mechanisms have been strengthened by the overflow of the energy of the functional field. The latter consolidated its own clear dialectic that examines and tests in a rapid mode, for it has undergone the, thus far, greater enrichment. As a result, its affective energy multiplies the rate of the responses which consciousness must make in order to adjust and improve its tools and ontological products. Likewise, because of the new mode of the energy of the functional field, consciousness with an unparallel speed generates models of functionality. These models, supported as they are by the preserved and increasing intensity of the functional field, regain their sovereignty over their past, fixed, distorted and transitory stages. The balance between fixity and innovation has never before changed so dramatically in favour of the latter. Likewise, the regulative force of conscience has never before reached such a stage of crystallisation, overriding interested thought, tribal wars and unjust social practices against a segment of a marginalised population. 9.5 The monitoring attributes of planetary functionality This functional process progressively reaches a state in which it builds planetary functionality. The information flow unfolds on a global scale; it cannot affect only a community or a state.6 The functional field has been reformed so as to inscribe everything into a global scale and, as a result, it is the

5 See Bergson (1977, pp. 308-309); Dewey (1930, p. 83); Hayek (1944, p. 16); Parsons (1951,

p. 513); Popper (1999, pp. 103-104); Luhmann (2000); Acemoglu and Robinson (2012 p. 215). As Heidegger (1962, p. 140) remarks, “with the ‘radio’, for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance of the ‘world’ – a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualised.” 6 See Jaspers (2003, p. 38); Luhmann (1990, p. 178); Aron (2017, p. 373).

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planetary world that undergoes observation. Conscience responds to the global scale of the functional field by analogously shaping global islands of functionality that gain primacy over previous models of functionality in the case that they collide. The enrichment of the planetary functional field informs consciousness that proceeds to innovate new blocks of functionality. These blocks necessarily render the planetary world as both their object and their scope of applicability. The global functional models exist alongside the worldly and inter-worldly temporality. In relation to them, their scope is larger and their stage of development more advanced. Worldly temporalities exist, but they now enrich their functional field with ontological products and practices that their field does not engender. Moreover, worldly temporalities as a whole become themselves the object of the planetary functionality and by virtue of it are appraised, measured and evaluated. This very assessment occurs because of the planetary functional field that informs both distinct temporalities and a novel form of planetary functionality that directly engages in conversation with the global functional field. The planetary functional field becomes the novel testing ground from which consciousness on every level derives information that is serviceable for the construction of islands of functionality. Planetary functionality does not yet possess its own network of worldly institutions and a correlative spirit accustomed to them, apart from the United Nations, World Health Organisation, European Union, the International Court of Human Rights and some others.7 These are forms of a nascent planetary functional dialectic that encompasses the whole human sphere and constructs its own functional tools for the longterm wellbeing of humanity. Planetary functionality exists in ontological and imaginary form, and though it has not yet achieved its own place and institutions as have the worldly temporalities, it speeds up their modifiability. Kant says that, since among states the law of nature prevails, only “in a universal association of states (analogous to that by which a people becomes a state) can rights come to hold conclusively and a true condition of peace come about.”8 Planetary functionality transcends the ethical limits of the state and binds worldly temporalities on a functional alliance. What is at stake is not a world government, but a world conscience that is expressed through transnational institutions. There is not a single constitutive part of this world that eludes the transformative effects of the planetary functionality. The latter is borderless and limitless, as is the structural constitution of conscience. It transcends the

7

See Bergson (1977, p. 290); Arendt (1966, p. 298; 1964, p. 127); Aron (2017, pp. 105-107); Thompson (2012, p. 252); Fukuyama (2011, p. 477) 8 See Kant (1996, p. 119). See also Kant (1991, p. 90).

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short-term developmental range of the ethnic moral systems and directly addresses the subjective consciousness without any intermediate forces. Consciousness in its nomadic solitude now experiences the effects of a vast field of functionality, worldly, interworldly and planetarily, and it is informed by this intercorrelated network of functional fields. In doing so, it innovates functional models that go beyond the tangible effects of culture, nation, or home temporality. The roots of the functional models are almost intractable, since it is hard to trace the complexity of the responses that have been stimulated in order for them to be schematised. The functional field receives from everywhere and becomes so intense that it calls for repetitive responses. These adaptive responses improve the islands of functionality that enter the horizon of universality. Their formation and realisation in their turn enrich the functional field, sharpen its synthetic properties and intensify its corrective signals. This mutual enrichment consists, in fact, of a new stage of the great Athenian democratic revolution whereby every citizen has equal access to the transmitted data of the functional field and, through their processing, is free to build islands of functionality and in doing so to reshape its spirit. These islands cannot be easily accommodated by any worldsphere, no matter how advanced the stage of its functionality. Instead, all worldspheres are subject to the planetary functional models because they are based on a cathartic and disinterested dialectic that uses the information of the planetary functional field. In this way, world conscience from an undeveloped ideal9 that lacks the mode of the temporal rhythm that would shape and ground it upon the functional field, it becomes an actual reality grounded on powerful conditions that consolidate and constantly improve it. 9.6 Planetary functionality and planetary conscience Since the building of planetary functionality forms a global conscience, the configuration of the existing moral systems is also affected. Human history throughout its development was periodically guided by persisting modes of temporality that have supported the consolidation of various moral systems. From the tribal to the national moral system, what was at stake were some parameters of survival whose range covers a specific population.10 These parameters of survival are the outward expression of the formation of some models of functionality that set the rules of conduct for a concrete population.

9

Hutcheson (1728, Treatise 1, sect, 2, p. 33); Butler (2006, p. 183); Smith (2002, part. 6, section 1, ch. 3, par. 1); Kant (1991, p. 51); Hegel (2004, p. 334); Tocqueville (1988, p. 627); Durkheim (1992, p. 72, 74); Jaspers (2003, p. 39); Popper (2013, p. 108; 1999, p. 143). 10 See Darwin (2004, p. 147); Roberts (1986); Tocqueville (1988, p. 565); Wright (2009, p. 206); Singer (2011, p. 170). For the parameters of survival of the Athenian polis and their limits as far as international relations are concerned, see Mitchell (2015, pp. 155-157).

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Beyond these parameters of survival, there is a vast environment in which the application of these islands of functionality is suspended. Thereafter, the concepts of the enemy, stranger, nationalism, internal sovereignty, and heroism are nurtured by this ground of ethical unresponsiveness. Planetary functionality shakes the bases of many existing moral systems. Since the world interconnects, territoriality is subject to the non-territorial energy of the reflective mechanisms. The rhythm of temporality is accelerating, the functional field transmits new informational blocks, and the functional pool is enriched. Therefore, the scope of the moral systems is under a process of expansion. The pre-existing moral systems were consolidated when the temporal rhythm was so slow that it conveyed minimal waves of signals for responses that were, after all, territorially bounded. Now, not only do the limited moral systems acquire more functional depth, but a universally inclined moral system emerges. The universally inclined moral system reconfigures the meaning of functionality. What should now work is the entire world. No worldsphere can isolate itself from the play of the world and raise claims of functional independence. Therefore, the world becomes the object of reflection and the conceived models of functionality deal with the long-term survival of the planetary world. This universal moral system, alongside world conscience, raises itself above any other narrower moral system, because it continuously addresses an expanding population. The latter is subordinated to the planetary functionality and is judged on the basis of the maxims that the latter poses. The limits of the nation-state, which represent the recent consolidation of a moral development, are transcended by the planetary functionality. Universal institutions and organisations are responses to the accumulation of a moral overflow, and they set the conditions for the establishment of moral systems and for a generation of space that address a higher functional scale that transcends the moral system of the nation state. Planetary functionality establishes itself as the new measure of moral judgment. A new functional scale is being created which measures the competing claims of functionality. This functional pool derives from the informational experience of the planetary world. It therefore devises functional models that serve the long-term survival of the whole world by setting up supervisory mechanisms that check the functionality of each worldsphere. The flow of functional models floods our conscience and leads to a higher functional scale. This functional scale sets up the new standards of adaptability and adjustability. What can survive and what can sustain itself is what can align itself with the functional scale and contribute to its evolution, augmentation and consolidation. Planetary functionality cannot be accommodated, for it will

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always signify the expanding mode of world conscience. Thus, this functional shift calls the worldspheres to be modified in order to accommodate it. 9.7 Planetary functionality as the new motor of evolution No theory or ideology can arrest the fast-paced accumulation of islands of functionality through which the process of planetary functionality is grounded. In fact, theories and ideologies never become aware of their static nature; that they are themselves historical responses to the flow of the functional field without acknowledging the fluidity of its constitution and therefore their own fixed nature. Traditional and persisting theories and ideologies were made possible because of a different mode of temporality. They have been left alone to engineer the world, ignoring the energy of the field of functionality, no matter how weak this was. Insofar as this energy was weak, the resurfacing and resistance of the functional field took time to occur, and there was a subsequent leakage of energy and time. Now that the functional field informs and tests at such a fast-paced rhythm, what is at stake is the ability of timely responses and not its subordination or its ontological arrest to predefined thought. Worldspheres and their ideological apparatus serve the functional field and not the other way around. The functional field unsettles both the accumulation and the fixity of theories because now it is powerful enough to discard and discredit them at their birth. It cannot allow them to survive for such a long time as was the case with ideas, political regimes and practices of the past. Its energy is so powerful that it reveals their inability to replace it in judging, testing and informing on the devices for long-term functionality. We live in the age of the enhancement of the dominance of the functional field upon the ontological and the reified world. That is, we inhabit the age of functional time which, by its very constitution, erases instrumental time and strengthens the conscience-building process. Planetary functionality sets up a new world play. It calls distinct worldspheres to adjust and reform themselves in reference to a universal moral core. By virtue of this, it becomes the new motor for progressive evolution. As Kitcher puts it, “continuation of the ethical project should include an attempt to frame a conception of the common good responsive to the desires of the entire human population.”11 Planetary functionality administers the functional distribution and gives a new space to modifiability. Of course, it is itself the outcome of the

11 See Kitcher (2011, p. 304). See also Wright (2009, p. 307). As D.S. Wilson (2015, p. 149) remarks: “multilevel selection theory makes it crystal clear that if we want the world to become a better place, we must choose policies with the welfare of the whole world in mind.”

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history of the subjective response to an encompassing functional field. Consciousness moves from one world to another, utilises them, rests on them and stabilising itself on their shoulders to rise higher. So, the existence of worldspheres is the condition for the emergence of planetary functionality. However, consciousness being non-territorially and non-temporally committed, shapes functional reservoirs that are not applicable in the moral spheres of distinct worlds. By its very nature it defends itself in the mental space. But it is a decoupled consciousness. Its reflection upon the functional field, while possessing islands of functionality, dichotomises itself. It becomes the carrier of functional models that obey the rules of the mental and not the territorial space. These islands of functionality, being unclaimed, grow, expand, take universal flight and end up constructing world institutions that serve a universal moral system. These institutions use the whole world as an object of reflection. Thus, though they are based on worldspheres, they transcend them. By accumulating models of functionality, they develop an internal planetary dialectic in which everything is encompassed and judged accordingly. These immense worldwide reflective mechanisms become the new motor for progressive evolution and build the conditions for the development of a world conscience. From inhabiting the silent margins of worldspheres, from being persecuted, silent and hidden in subjective worlds, planetary functionality becomes the nucleus of the world. What sprung out of distinct worldspheres and transcended them, now returns to them and redefines the rules of functional development. Planetary functionality increases the permeability of the worldspheres. By subjecting their models of functionality to the planetary functional field, it conveys signals to them that come from outside. So worldspheres become aware that a scrutinising field is at work that they do not control. Moreover, planetary functionality instils in worldspheres the art of temporal mutation. The slowed pace of worldly temporalities becomes more rapid because their functional field is supplemented with scattered information from around the world that settles in and affects the configuration of the functional models. Planetary functionality regulates, monitors, checks and corrects distinct worldspheres.12 It regulates them in the sense that they have to conform to a worldwide temporal rhythm and to the models of functionality that it yields and that embrace the whole world. It monitors them in the sense that it

12

As Lefebvre (1991, p. 416) remarks: “Nothing and no one can avoid trial by space – an ordeal which is the modern world’s answer to the judgement of God or the classical conception of fate. It is in space, on a worldwide scale, that each idea of ‘value’ acquires or loses its distinctiveness through confrontation with the other values and ideas it encounters there.” See also Leibniz (1991, p. 80).

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conceives them and evaluates the scale of their functionality on the basis of whether or not they contribute to the survival of the planetary world. It corrects them in the sense that it acquires more developed functional models that can correct those less-developed and, along with them, a chain of corresponding distortions. In this way, worldspheres are called to adjust to planetary functionality. This call for a global adjustability is a novel phenomenon. Nevertheless, it cannot bypass the progressive stages that a worldsphere must go through in order to attain it. This process may follow a faster pace, but it cannot make abrupt leaps. As a result, the call for conformity to the planetary functionality may result in conflict. But conflict is irrelevant to the inner process of mutability of worldspheres and the mechanisms that initiate their birth, they support and augment it. Conflict is relevant only to the defence of planetary functionality from an imminent threat. Walzer, analysing the case of just wars and of humanitarian interventions, suggests that “when a government turns savagely upon its own people, we must doubt the existence of a political community to which the idea of self-determination might apply.”13 As far as planetary functionality is concerned, conflict is not relevant to the evolutionary rules of the stable movement of its worldwide expansion. Rather, it is a reactive response. 9.8 Functional inequality as a democratic inequality From the point of view of planetary functionality, functional inequality amounts to democratic inequality.14 The human population does not equally share the advantages offered by the worldspheres that have been fashioned by higher stages of functionality because there is not an equal distribution of functionality. A human being considers these stages as its own as well since it participates by virtue of its corporeal and mental constitution in the universal progress of the human spirit. To live in a functional world is to live in a world that requires both the growth of one’s conscience and its own energetic contribution to its functional perseverance and enhancement. The being-inconscience, no matter the world into which it has been thrown to run the course of its life, is always attracted and oriented to the higher known stages of functionality that the human spirit has attained. The human rhythmic equilibrium is to be found in the predisposition of the human mind to energetically transform itself and the world it inhabits through a dialectical relationship with the functional field. The anger of those who revolt and overthrow their unjust and oppressive regimes that operate without

13

See Walzer (2006, p. 101). The connection between functionality and democracy can be found less in Rawls (1971) and more in Tocqueville (1988). 14

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their consent corresponds exactly to this longing for a more functional world.15 The mere adoption of a democratic constitution, however, is not equitable to the attainment of a democratic-functional depth. It is for a worldly functionality that the people of the world long for. The will of their conscience itself corrected the reified world in which they live, and thereafter motivates dissent, revolutions, emigration and varied attempts to immerse themselves into a more functional future by whatever means. But the undefined and vague will for a functional mutation and its attainment are separated by a functional process that needs to run its own course, and nothing can compensate for the conditions generated by its absence. The functional inequality among worldspheres is equivalent to an evolutionary distance of a temporal rhythm that cannot be bridged within a short lifespan. What is at stake is the mutation of their worldly temporality. Planetary functionality and distinct functional worldspheres attempt, in various ways, to improve the lives of the populations that live in worldspheres overburdened with distortions. The nature and the destination of the planetary functionality condition it to respond on a worldwide level to the call of a whole population for aid. This solidarity and care, however, are trapped in the mechanisms of evolutionary functional mutation that have not yet been fully decodified. What is missing is the discovery of the rules and procedures of a gradual functional mutation. The discovery of these rules relates to a deep understanding of the constitutive ingredients of the mode of temporality that conditions the innovative will of a worldsphere. On the basis of the knowledge of the composition of temporality, practical measures that can bind to this stage an attainable successive stage of development should be suggested. That is, it should contribute to the creation of the spatial, institutional, and educative conditions that will enable the consciousness of a worldsphere that more rapidly attains the next stage of its development. What is at issue here is not fixed value systems that are debased from their temporal condition, but the establishment of a plane that possess the necessary density to gradually generate the mode of a spirit that constantly animates and refines these value systems. Planetary functionality could contribute to the speeding up of the temporality of the functionally-lacking worldspheres by helping the consciousness that lives within them to autonomously establish its own functional process. To impose the products of planetary functionality is to provide a machine without the object of its application, manual or repairs. These products are lifeless without

15 See Locke (1980, pp. 100-124); Hume (book 3, part 2, sect. 10, par. 4); Tocqueville (2011, p. 16) Arendt (1969, p. 63); Sidgwick (1981, p. 348); Rawls (1971, p. 112); Popper (2013, p. 360).

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the proportionate stage of functionality that sustains and improves them. This stage of functionality cannot be transplanted. Thus, the art of temporal mutation that is intertwined with the shaping of a conscientious spirit that evolves alongside it, is applied to the unique conditions of each worldsphere after an assessment of their functional scale. This art is intended to facilitate the autonomous fabrication of its own functional models that would be correlated with its own functional stage. 9.10 The global yardsticks for a functional convergence Planetary functionality sets up the global measures of a functional convergence. It serves as a planetary functional barometer on the basis of which the position of each world in the functional scale, that is, its functional proximity or distance, is measured. Functional worlds converge with the planetary functionality and are adaptive to its ethical maxims. In fact, it is from the functional worlds that the flight of the subjective consciousness departed, to arrive at the formation of a planetary conscience. Due to this very evolutionary closeness, the functional worlds serve the planetary functionality and empower its dialectic. Distorted worldspheres or worldspheres with a functional distance not only impede its dialectic but are the less able receptors of its functional models. In fact, some distorted worlds threaten the planetary functionality because they are not positive carriers of its progressive movement. From the preceding remarks it is concluded that any form of assemblage of worldspheres in order to be sustainable in the long run, should be based on the separate convergence of its constitutive parts with the planetary functionality. Worldspheres with evolutionary proximity on the functional scale form a community of conscience. These communities serve the enhancement of the planetary functionality and it is by addressing it that they form functional assemblies. The addressing of the planetary functionality is the condition of the communities of the future. No assembly of national interests can endure unless it addresses and is motivated by planetary functionality. Similarly, no assembly of distorted worlds can survive, because it will face the corrective effects of the energy of the mechanisms of planetary functionality and, as a result, will ultimately be superseded by the movement of its powerful dialectic. 9.11 The evolution of planetary functionality By utilising the planetary world as its field of reflection and by drawing from the pool of an expanded functional field, planetary functionality constantly consolidates, enriches and renews itself. Globalisation and new information technologies provide great impetus to planetary functionality as a force that will gradually set up a functional field that will call for greater adjustive responses aiming at a more advanced functionality. Distinctive worldspheres

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co-evolve alongside the planetary functionality, but the limits of the nation state are not fully compatible with the planetary models of functionality. The dialectic of the planetary functionality subjects the distinct dialectic of worldspheres and reopens them to a wider functional field. This field effectuates a functional mutation so as to accommodate worldwide functional models. This may lead to the formation of functional families that will gradually absorb the remnants of worldly moral systems. Functional resemblance would be the new parameter for worldwide assemblies, and it is around this dialectical force that the world would proceed. Their schematisation, scope and applicability depend upon the energy that the planetary functional field procures, the corresponding responses that would be configured to its corrective signals and the formative effect they would have on the renovation of the human material. The existence of a planetary functional field with an increasing intensity is not tantamount to the unimpeded development of planetary functionality. There needs to be an agreement with a determined commitment, which is structurally crafted on conscience both as the balancing force and the motor of development. There is also a need for an art of deciphering the signals of the functional field and responding accordingly. To decodify its signals, it needs a worldwide knowledge and experience of the human presence through which its essential elements are to be distilled. That is, it needs a pedagogical culture that historically registers and transmits an accumulated stock of functionality to the generations sequentially inhabiting the earth. It also needs a cultivation of a consistent, and an undisturbed watchful attitude towards the corrective force of the functional field which is often blurred with fixed, frozen and asynchronous responses of the past. As humans, we are not the moderators and the rulers of the world because we cannot be a substitute for the functional field.16 Rather, by means of our corporeal constitution, we are condensed responses in time and space and, as a consciousness, we respond to the needs of the accumulation of the human activity and its products. The whole talks to us with multigenic voices, its “gaze” is fixed upon us, our being constitutes a response to its gaze; but it is up to us to comprehend what it really says. This means that change and mutation is in the nature of the world. Current and potential crises exist. But if we have had grounded a firm conversational

16 According to Spinoza (2004, p. 202), “nature is not bounded by the laws of human reason, which aims only at man’s true benefit and preservation; her limits are infinitely wider, and have reference to the eternal order of nature, wherein man is but a speck.” See also Spinoza (1996, pp. 68-69). As Lefebvre (1996, p. 207) illustrates, “Like the flower which does not know it is a flower, self-consciousness so much vaunted in Western thought from Descartes to Hegel (and even more recently, at least in philosophy), misapprehends its own preconditions whether natural (physical) or practical, mental or social.”

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relationship with the functional field, departing from and arriving at islands of functionality, crises will not constitute the negative side of life, but the positive one that we should always welcome. Becoming aware of a crisis means becoming aware of a specific need to modify, to correct and to restructure the functional models we have at our disposal. Therefore, by becoming aware of a crisis, we begin the process of its resolution. The functional field is the diagnostic table upon which corrections are to be devised. That means that there is no possibility for an absolute fixed system, ethical, political, economic or of any kind whatsoever. Hegel’s absolute knowledge becomes possible because consciousness becomes identical with essence and actuality, irrespective of the properties of the functional field.17 The struggle for recognition, the relationship between the lord and the bondsman, the universal appearance of the world spirit throughout history, the end of history and the final reconciliation of consciousness with reality, are all concepts that owe their existence to the absence in Hegel’s account of the functional field. From this perspective, world history could be written only in terms of models of functionality that regulate specific spheres of moral response and always adjust to the flow of the functional field. Therefore, clashes between different worldspheres are not due to “wars of prestige” as Kojѐve18 argues, or wars of recognition of one’s worth and dignity as Fukuyama19 claims, but due to the collision of models of functionality that regulate different worldspheres. The conversational relationship of conscience with the functional field makes both the absolute ethical knowledge and the unity of the ethical consciousness with the objective world impossible. The energy of the functional field interposes itself between thesis, antithesis and their final abolition through synthesis, and renders absolute and universal fixity impossible, since creative divergence, accumulation and solidification cannot be suspended. The endless activity of the functional field – especially one with a fast-paced rhythm – cannot fix responses and render them instinctual. The human mind evolved exactly because the calls for adjustive responses lost their long-term persistence; they constantly changed and required a flexible adjustive machine. Being aware of the energy that the functional field conveys means understanding that it is irreducible to our adaptive responses that take the form of ontological or practical configurations. The genealogy of our adaptive responses exists because of the functional field. Thus, we cannot capture, neutralise and supersede this external force of corrective calls. On the contrary, it is because of it that we are able to articulate responsive attempts.

17

See Hegel (1977, p. 482, par. 794; 2004, p. 50). See Kojéve (1980, p. 49). 19 See Fukuyama (1992, pp. 170-180). 18

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The conscience-centric approach of economy

Conscience achieves a holistic view of the human games of life and monitors their regulation. This is pursued by virtue of it being the compulsion that is distilled out of the dialectical relationship with the functional field and which is constituted, among many other things, by a multiplicity of games of life. Economy is a game of life, probably one of its most influential; yet it has no meaning in itself. It is neither self-sustained nor unrestrained by the dictates of the functional field, but it rather relates to all other games with which are composed an intertwined whole. The aggregate of these games is subjected to the islands of functionality that are built in conscience as a response to the sum total of the challenges that are posed by the functional field. There is not one island of functionality that is an ingredient of conscience and applies separately to a game of life, including that of economy. Therefore, what is at stake is the subjection of the economic game to conscience and not the absorption of conscience by the former after being seen as an autonomous game. Economy augments when motivated, regulated and synchronised with the objective and the subjective roots of conscience and insofar as these pass a threshold of functionality. Any autonomisation and detachment from the islands of functionality result in a disparity between the laws of conscience and the independent laws by which the economic field is assumed to be regulated. Such laws are isolated from conscience, so they become mechanistic, being assumed to be detected in the autonomous field of economy. Insofar as they supersede conscience, the latter is rendered defective. Conscience is a force that none can dispense with. It is the perpetual and regulative presence of a combined and embedded force without which there is no future. 10.1 Economy and the functional field Economy is a combined activity that involves all members of a population aiming at satisfying an aggregation of realised human needs. Everyone is obliged to participate in the economical game and therefore everyone possesses a degree of observability as far as its operation is concerned. Since these needs are mutually shared and satisfied, there is a need for a common measure of all human work aiming to help oneself with its value and others

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through its supply. This measure needs to represent a moral leap in which chance, human malleability and variation in judgment should be surpassed. It needs a moral code that provides a fixed price that is unquestionable, uniformly recognised and applied. This code needs to be disembodied and symbolical since the subjective embodiment never frees itself from arbitrary judgments. This measure would be continuously in use, therefore changing hands according to the fluency of needs. Thus, money has been used as the measure of all purchasable things and, as such, consists of a moral leap, and facilitates economic transactions by erasing the possibility of subjective moral judgment. As E.O. Wilson points out, money is the “quantification of reciprocal altruism.”1 None disagrees as to the value with which money notes have been credited. Economy, through the use of money as a medium of exchange, represents fixed trust and agreement. Money exists in order to promote incorruptibility. It is, in fact, the mediating management of ethical conduct that includes shared material needs that cannot be addressed through a materially unequipped conscience. In this way, economy is the close binding of a value system with money. The latter is a common medium, it has the same value for all, and it thus blocks off the interpolation of inconsistency and unreliability. The invention of money is, per se, a leap towards a secured trust in economical transactions. That means that money carries an ethical substance. It facilitates human interaction; it enhances cooperation and continuously tests one’s moral integrity. Moreover, it secures for all the ability or the possibility to measure all things equally and to enter into an economic relationship. Money generates money. A product that is manufactured for a common use is assigned an additional value. That is, it is presented to others differently than it is presented to oneself. Investing a product with an additional value is to be added to the value of the collaborative work of all parts involved in the process of its creation. Thus, a price is an assimilative entity as for the value of the work of a contributing population.2 The adjoining of a value to a product is considered a right. It is the right to create surplus from a single thing or a configuration of things, either human or natural products. This right is measured against the subjectively estimated need for the accumulation of wealth that would be utilised by a number of parties that are involved. Thus,

1

See E.O. Wilson (1980, p. 276). See also Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1133a 20); Adam Smith (2009a, book. I. ch. IV, pp. 126-131); Weber (1978, p. 22); Parsons (1951, p. 424) and Marx (1976, p. 227). Kant (1996, p. 69) defines money as follows: “It is the universal means by which men exchange their industriousness with one another.” 2 Adam Smith (2009a, book I, ch. V, p. 133) remarks that “the real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.” See also Ricardo (2004, p. 260).

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the creation of a product is preceded by a chain of different, ascending representations that each expresses subjective claims for the satisfaction of one’s needs. Monetary value accumulates until the product is sold in order to serve the common needs both of the producers and the users. It is a help offered to someone conditioned to paying money. One who pays money in order to purchase a good has been similarly aided by another process in the economic field from which the supply of money is enabled. The configurated value yields a profit that is shared by all those who are involved in the chain of the adjoining value process. As thought never identifies itself with its object by seeking an agreement and as conscience augments through the use of rough elements, likewise the good is never identified with its value.3 The latter is the outcome of a successive series of representations that are affected by variations in the conscientious disposition. As thought splits in order to adjust and thus attain viability, likewise value accumulates in order to provide the necessary profit. But as thought divides itself responding to the rules of the functional field, similarly money should divide itself in response to a fair allocation of the profit. No representation remains unchecked by objective reality. That means that there are laws that govern an adjusting split, whether it pertains to thought or to money. And insofar as these laws undergo the scrutiny of conscience which, in its turn is liable to a conversational relationship with the functional field, they cannot result in monopoly or manipulated reduction of supply in order for the demand – and accordingly the value of the product – to be increased. The aforementioned laws appeal to human wickedness whereby the value of the product is subjugated to one’s moral system, as in the case of the usurer, and the less-developed this moral system, the more profit one earns. The subjection of the laws of economy to the moral system of mafia illustrates how economy is conceptualised and represented by a defective moral system. Economy relies upon condensed values; it exercises values and is suspended by the greatest of values.4 There is no economy without moral values acting as intermediaries, because economy means collective growth through cooperative and conjoined work and only moral values can serve the scope of shared growth. The more moral values the economy displays, the more trust is

3 See Derrida’s (1994, p. 166) critique of exchange-value of the commodity in Marx. Arendt

(1958, p. 108) locates the existence of surplus also at the level of a living organism to multiply itself. 4 See Smith (2009b, book IV, ch. IX, p. 255); Tocqueville (1988, p. 285); Weber (1994, p. 90; 2001, p. 19, 21, 116); Hayek (1944); Almond and Verba (1963, p. 224); Rawls (1971, pp. 492493); Huntington (1968, p. 262); Dore (1983); Becker (1993); Fukuyama (1995, p. 37) and D.S. Wilson (2015, p. 130).

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assigned to it and the less arbitrary the value that is assigned to a product.5 Moreover, the more binding the ethical substance between cooperative arrangements, the more productive the working association becomes. When a producer sees us as moral beings who communicate our ethical substance, the value process is overruled by conscience. We correspondingly select the value process that is regulated by conscience as the only cohesive force of the economic transaction. When there is a communication and affection of consciences, value sometimes evaporates and is disengaged from the product. The regulated exchange recedes under the energy of conscience that provides moneyless aid. The mediating role of money in the process of mutual help is always under the suspension of the commands of conscience, which is immeasurable in regards to money. When we love or when we are overwhelmed with compassion, the rules of conscience take hold of us. We cannot let ourselves be absorbed by the game of economy. That means that economy is subjected both to conscience and to the functional field. Conscience measures things that are unmeasurable through money and, in doing so, delineates a space that unfolds beyond the game of economy and that suspends it.6 Not only does conscience lie outside the game of economy but, to measure the worth of maternal love, of friendship and prudence through money is considered a great evil. The moral deficit transfigures itself as an economic deficit. What remained unchecked and has not been rectified by the mechanisms that should be populated and intensified in aiming at its tracking and correction, prompts the formation of a sum of habits and practices that go against the dialectical movement of the functional field. Every economic crisis is due to the accumulation of unaddressed corrective messages that the functional field conveys and, correspondingly, to the distorted practices that are employed in their place. An economic crisis is more visible because it affects us all. Excess in conscience and excess in money are incongruent. For conscience as a child of the functional field returns and diffuses its accumulated wealth instead of gathering it in its own hands. In other words, an abundance of wealth is balanced by an abundance of conscience, and only through its management by the energy of the latter can wealth gain its proper meaning. Likewise, only conscience can minimise the scope of an economic crisis by dislocating in the moral deficit without delay and thus impeding the accumulation of distortions. No matter how fast or slow a worldsphere is in accommodating these corrective demands, the accumulation of the energy of conscience will propagate crises; that is, it will convey more and more corrective messages that

5 6

See Dore (1983, p. 476). See Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1164b5).

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call for adjustment. The adjustive responses concern the reforming and enrichment of the islands of functionality and this, in its turn, creates a functional economy. Thus, the value system that also governs economic disposition undergoes improvement and refinement and aims at monitoring the economic field. Economic crises are signals transmitted by the functional field, and the corresponding responses they generate amount to the modification of the islands of functionality. That is, the economic field generates a command that transcends it. This command concerns the clearing up of distorted islands that do not serve the goal of the functional field. These distorted islands have been produced by a defective moral system that superimposed itself upon the functional field, losing in this way its structural communication with its very dialectic. 10.2 The invisible hand submitted to the functional field Historically, economy has been mainly subjected to two philosophies: communism and capitalism. National socialism has also subjected economy to a specific philosophy but did not endure for long. Communism, the least of all economic theories, failed to grasp the role of economy as an indispensable ingredient of the functional field. The axioms and the theories that Marxism annexed contained a powerful benevolent moral element, but the source of this moral element was not recognised as an offspring of the conversation of conscience with the functional field.7 In fact, Marx colonises the functional field with his idea of historical materialism, material practice and material intercourse, and deprives it of its energy as if it consists only of material relations.8 Therefore, a state-owned, centrally-planned economy was bound to enervate the functional field, as Hayek brilliantly and judiciously stated. For Hayek, collectivism as a complete planned economy gradually debases the processes that generate and sustain the moral sentiment of the people and values, such as those of independence of mind, tolerance, respect for truth, humanitarianism and internationalism.9 This is, however, because such a form of collectivist economy deprives subjective conscience – equipped with the sum of its liberal rights – of receiving the synthetic effects of the constituent parts of the functional field and the corresponding energy that calls for adjusting corrections. The structural composition of the state in the communist countries was quite illustrative. A system of ideas overwhelmed the

7

As Popper (2013, p. 407) notes, “in this sense on might say that the early Marxism, with its ethical rigour, its emphasis on deeds instead of mere words, was perhaps the most corrective idea of our time.” See also Boehm (2001, p. 256). 8 See Marx (1998, p. 42, 58) 9 See Hayek (1944). See also Aristotle (Politics1260b-11264b), Popper’s (2013, pp. 98-99) critique of Plato’s collectivism and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, pp. 132-133).

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functional field and attempted to subjugate it. Instead of conversing with the functional field, it conversed with the dogma, the party and the historical perspective for universal justification. As a by-product of this, subjective conscience, being under a ruthless system of surveillance, was deprived of the right to be constantly bound to a fully developed functional field. In fact, the configuration of the functional field was for it the responsibility of the party and therefore it did not accept any responsibility or ability in the formation of it. Consequently, the communist human type was gradually deprived of the intensive energy that yields conscience. In fact, this human type was lacking in conscience or was forced to disobey conscience; it was trained to adjust to the peculiarities of a game of life that was favoured by an untold, hidden, concealed and uprooted management of truth. Arendt comments on the totalitarian regimes that: “Its member’s whole education is aimed at abolishing the capacity for distinguishing between true and falsehood, between reality and fiction.”10 Capitalism, or free market economy, is a term that does not represent any reality whatsoever, for there is no capitalist society in which money reigns over everything without government regulation. What is at work is what Popper calls “democratic piecemeal interventionism.”11 The concept of capitalism displays a mental tendency that attempts to subjugate society to the economic field which, in itself, develops a propensity to expand its rules on the other games of life or on the functional field as a whole. Such a tendency, which is encountered with so much resistance, consists of identifying the functional field with what is probably one of its most fundamental parts, that is, the economic field. Functional economy seems to be a more employable term because it accommodates the contribution of the free-functioning economy to the functional field without being reducible to it by attributing all moral advances to the uninhibited rules of economy. Functional economy is one in which the economic field is recognised as a highly important plane in the functional field, without this plane being allowed to dominate the functional plane. That is, it recognises that a world without a developed functional depth cannot have a wealthy economy. Similarly, a distorted world cannot, in the long term, possess a viable economy.12 In this case, the economic field is regulated by islands of

10 See Arendt (1966, p. 385). This mindset permeated the whole society where mistrust was a very distinct element. As Aron (2017, p. 501) remarks about the communist regime, “the people endure it without recognising themselves within it.” Popper (1999, p. 129), referring to the Soviet communist regime, says that “the difference between lying and speaking the truth disappeared.” See also Castoriadis (1997, p. 67) 11 Popper (2013, p. 398; 1999, p. 135). 12 See Acemoglu and Robinson (2012, p. 151, 398, 430).

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functionality that are positioned outside the game of economy and, each time they are applied, there is nothing beyond them. The functional view approaches economy as a moral problem that is liable to conscience, to the formation of which it ultimately contributes. Since economy is part of the functional field, its energy and intensification convey corrective commands to consciousness. This is the great contribution of the economic liberals who detected the essential role that economy plays in the functional field and the corrective demands that are thereby transmitted. The problem in their accounts is the independence and the dominance they seem to attribute to the economic field – without a comprehensive understanding of ethical structures of the liberal state – that, ultimately, result in its autonomisation from the functional field of which it is just one part amongst many.13 Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which fully operates under the conditions of equality, liberty and justice, suggests that humans promote ends that were not part of their initial intentions but that are guided by an external natural force that has a perspective of the whole.14 In this analysis, humans cannot control the operation and the synthetic effects of the functional field, but they themselves perceive its signals and adapt accordingly. The invisible hand is part of the functional field, but only insofar as consciousness de-codifies the compressed information it transmits. Adam Smith is against the mercantile system and the regulation of prices either by the state or the merchants themselves because they impair competition which, he suggests, serves the common national and transnational interest and retains prices at a natural level. Within the spirit of this analysis, these incorrect economical practices try to fix the relationship with the functional field and manipulate its effects. Competition, in other words, is a mechanism that facilitates the releasing of the disinterested effects of the functional field as far as the economic game is concerned. As such, it neutralises the motives of the merchants who try to

13

See Hayek (1944). Popper’s (2013, p. 33) analysis can be conceived as a critique of the unrestrained capitalist system and its tendency to situate itself outside the functional field. Foucault (2008, p. 32) encapsulates this tendency of the economic discourse to submerge the functional field as follows: “The market must be that which reveals something like a truth,” especially concerning the governmental practice. As a result, ordoliberal theorists argued for a “state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state” (p. 116). Luhmann (1990, p.176) calls economy one subsystem among many others. Durkheim (1992, p. 15), commenting on classical economists’ remarks, says that they studied economic functions “as if they were an end in themselves, without considering what further reaction they might have on the whole social order.” Fukuyama (1995, p. 13) argues that economy “cannot be divorced from culture.” That means, as Lefebvre (1991, p. 353) says, that humans are in great need of a “quality of space” that is not economically determined but answers to the accommodation of their rhythms. 14 See Smith (2009b, book. IV, ch. 2, p. 32). For a critique of Smith’s invisible hand from the perspective of evolutionary biology, see D.S. Wilson (2015, pp. 104-108).

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manipulate the prices at their own unfair advantage. And the free international trade that Smith rightly advocates, places the economic game in a planetary functional field wherein the corrective messages are multiplied. A conscientious economic game transcends the limits of any established moral and ideological system because it grounds the actors upon the commands of the functional field and the functional dialectic and creates transnational ethical bonds by enlarging the parameters of survival and thus the sphere of ethical responsiveness.15 In order for the global economic place to operate, it needs peace, cooperation and mutual ethical codes. The laws that regulate the economy are transmitted by the functional field that contains all the games of human life, but also the world of nature that specifically pressures the economic game to rehabilitate itself within the context of ecological preservation.16 Therefore, economy is only one constitutive part of the functional field. Necessarily, the laws regulating economy are indeed enlightened by competition but are themselves laws that regulate the functional field of which economy is only one part. Thereafter, it is consciousness that conceives the laws and establishes the rules of the economy which, per se, cannot be self-regulated. Hence, the invisible hand is the law that governs the functional field as a whole, and that law is conscience, for when the functional field is at work, the dictates it releases appeal to the disinterested conscience and not to the interested judgment of merchants and manufacturers. 10.3 The minimal and the strong state The size of the state should be minimised only insofar as this serves the acceleration of the energy of the functional field, which as such includes the economic game. Any other ideology of state-phobia, though quite understandable because of the historical experience of the monarchical, Nazi, fascist and communist states, becomes an unwired ideology that unravels irrespective of the functional field.17 What is the relationship between the state and the functional field? The state should always aim to serve the common good as perceived by an advanced and institutionally embedded common sense of justice, and also protect the freedom of the subjective conscience.18 The state serves this aim through its auxiliary institutions, its constitution and its laws. So, the state is charged with the storing up and the condensation of the ethical input that the functional field yields in a depth of time, a thing which is

15 See Smith (2009b, book. IV, ch. III, p.72); Ricardo (2004, p. 81); Mill (2004, p. 445); Tocqueville (1988, p. 175); 660); Aron (2017, p. 248). 16 See E.O. Wilson (1984, pp. 119-140, 1999, p. 318). 17 For the roots of the state-phobia of liberalism, see Foucault (2008, pp. 76-95). 18 See Kant (1996, p. 89); Popper (2013, p. 333; 1999, p. 87); Mill (2004, p. 279).

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irreducible to one’s thought, will, calculations and experience but also to the very structuring of the state itself. Fukuyama rejects the ideology of the minimal state exactly because state institutions reflect the culture of each society and, moreover, because extensive human cooperation cannot be explained through self-interest.19 The state’s adjustability is distinct from the independent operation of the functional field. Consequently, in the structuring of the state, the functional field should maintain its independency, primacy and irreducibility both to the state and to the economic game. Correspondingly, the size of the state would relate only to the sharpening and refining of the collective and massive mechanisms and places necessary for the processing and storage of the messages of the functional field. It is certain that a big, bureaucratic, centralised collectivist, immersed in a culture of militarism, all-regulating state that aims to monitor the whole field of life through a fixed compound of ideas that claim to regulate once and for all the relationship with the objective reality will ultimately weaken the functional field. Moreover, it contributes to the formation and diffusion of an ethical mode of being that opens the door to totalitarianism.20 In itself, the state does not think, so it always delays responding to the series of corrective demands that initially achieve a configuration in the subjective conscience. As Smith remarks, the state has a decreased observability and care and cannot impose the rules of the economic game upon the actors who have the privilege of an increased observability.21 Therefore civil society with its own institutions also acts as a mechanism of processing functional models that are used for the correction of the state itself or for the employment of practices that the state cannot pursue because of the limits of its observability of the functional field. Moreover, when the state accumulates its own logic of growth and independent life by projecting itself over the functional field and expands in a self-referential mode, it oppresses everything that does not obey this logic. When a state proclaims that its interests are above everything else, above citizens and above other states, it loses contact with the functional field and follows a dysfunctional dialectic.22 The state exists for the promotion of the common good regulated by the laws that prescribe the ethical environment in which a community lives.23 The state

19 See Fukuyama (1992, p. 327; 2011, p. 442, 479). See also Hegel (1977, p. 282, par. 475); Durkheim (1992, p.29); Huntington (1968, p. 7); Macintyre (2007, p. 259). 20 See Arendt (1966, pp. 260-263); Tocqueville (1988, p. 96, 692-695); Parsons (1951, p. 530); Popper (2013, p. 107). 21 See Smith (2009b, book. IV, ch. 2). 22 See Kant (1991, p. 49); Weber (1978, p. 54; 1994, pp. 310-311). 23 See Plato (The Republic 420b); Aristotle (Politics 1328b); Spinoza (2004, pp. 249-331); Tocqueville (1988, p. 234); Durkheim (1992, p. 60); Rawls (1971, p. 453).

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is a cooperative venture that enhances the quality of the responses to the energy of the functional field, being subjected to its processing properties and supervision through the effects it releases to consciousness. The citizen contributes to the enrichment of the functionality of the moral sphere of the state and retains its right for freedom to establish its own relationship with the functional field. This does not mean that the common good is pursued when the state is big. It has to do with the spirit of the people, a kind of collective manifestation of a moral quality that is uniformly displayed and which is composed of many diversified elements. Therefore, the state, in order to act as the source of the common good that is regulated by a developed sense of justice, does not need to be big. It just needs strategically positioned auxiliary institutions and laws immersed in a culture of acute watchfulness that validate the subjective and objective sense of justice. As Mill remarks, the state can benefit from the experience of non-governmental institutions and enterprises: “What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials.”24 Similarly, Tocqueville says that “a central power, however enlightened and wise one imagines it to be, can never alone see to all the details of life of a great nation.”25 Hence the role of different associations that enhance the collective observability that does not emanate from a centralised power. As Huntington points out, “the institutions are the behaviour manifestation of the moral consensus and mutual interest.”26 But again, the institutions do not function because of their size but because of their quality and their binding energy, and insofar as this quality is empirically and practically shared by the body citizen. The issue about the proper size of the state and the great importance that has been assigned to it in the context of Western liberal democracy does not seem to protect us completely from the menace of totalitarianism. This menace can derive from both a minimal and a maximum state, for its roots are often found in the generalisation of an unconstitutional and stateless minority moral system that finds its way to emplace a hold over people’s minds. 10.4 Functional economy Conscience does not have an outside. Economy is a game and as such its outside is conscience. When economy is seen from outside of this, correspondingly its view may also change. To understand a game means to see it from the outside. Analogously, in order to be understood, economy should be deprived of the obsessive view of itself as a game without an outside. The awareness of time is

24

See Mill (1974, p. 181). See Tocqueville (1988, p. 91). 26 See Huntington (1968, p.10). 25

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the awareness of the evolution of conscience, and it is when economy is thrown within this evolutionary perspective that it acquires its proper meaning both within the functional field and the conscientious responses that have been devised in relationship to it. The functional deficit of society becomes an economic deficit. In this environment, dishonest economic players are more likely to survive than those who are honest. Honest players can survive only when there is fair play in the economical game. That is to say, equal access to free competition for existing economic players or to newcomers is in itself an ethical problem that conditions competition itself. Moreover, the exploitative attitude towards one’s labour is enabled by a deficient moral system. Economy becomes a distorted field whose roots are clearly understood as a moral deficit. Yet, this economic deficit is not to be counterbalanced with the abolition or radical change of the configured rules of the economic field. Instead, it can be transformed with the intensification of its own energy that would deliver to consciousness the analogous corrective messages in order to adjust itself as far as the conscientious management of the economic field is concerned. In fact, the demands of the poor workers for accommodation in the world began amongst English workers themselves long before Marxist theories.27 Through the formation of associations and political organisations, and through the development of self-government and self-education, these workers attached their right for a functional contribution to a dialectical process of a functional democracy that would reform the established morals of economy beyond the ethical limits of their age. The workers started their own independent process of immersing themselves in a conversational relationship with the functional field. Historically, the responses to the demands of the functional field were annexed to its advancing scale. Therefore, the prolonged freezing or registering of the economic rules – despite the mutation of the functional field and the ensuing ontological formations that are always at work – comprise a weakness of the economic theory. The more economy evolves, the more corrective signals the functional field will convey, and these signals pertain to the evolution of

27 Thompson, E.P. (1963, p. 101, 155, 183, 292) shows that the workers articulated their demands in terms of a more democratic and egalitarian society that would reform the economic practice on the basis of the values it would generate. As Castoriadis (1997 p. 61) remarks, “the nascent’ workers movement thus appears as the logical continuation of a democratic movement broken off midway.” Thereafter, “Marxism replaced this individual with the militant activist who is indoctrinated in the teachings of a gospel: who believes in the organisation, in the theory, and in the bosses who possess it and interpret it” (Castoriadis, 1997, p. 64). See also Arendt (1958, p. 216).

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established economic theories.28 From the point of view of our own standards, our human ancestors lived in extreme poverty, and past understanding of economy, for the most part, naturalised this condition. Thus, the future understanding of economy always discloses the misery of the past both by virtue of ethical and technological evolution. However, when the energy of the functional field enables humans to conceptualise the immiseration of their lives, it calls on them to proceed to make the corresponding corrections. Since the prescriptions of the functional field are functional-ethical demands, an attentive culture of scrutiny could receive such corrective messages. As the energy of the functional field yields conscience, it also yields wealth as the means for conscience to employ itself. Accumulated conscience uses accumulated wealth for the service of the islands of functionality, its structural grounding and the intensification of the energy of the functional field. The mode of being in poverty historically robs the functional field of its energy and smooths the way for its subordination to the distorted arrangements of tyrannical, oligarchic, aristocratic or other dysfunctional regimes. The functional field needs, as equally as possible, able actors to contribute to its intensification and receive its commands. Poverty29 weakens the functional field, as does oligarchy or aristocracy. As Smith puts it, “what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole.”30 Thus, the functional field is fertilised by intensity that is attained through the endowment of the human actors who aim at their own growth and, through this, to the growth of the functional field. Functional economy is that which aims at the enhancement of the energy of the functional field through securing the equality of participation in the process of its solidification. This equality concerns a threshold of equality in material conditions through a fair wage or the abolition of poverty.31 Where there is

28 Tocqueville (1988, p. 576) had already noticed that in conditions of democratic equality distinctions due to birth, wealth and class diminish and the economic game is pursued in a mobile and shifting environment of relationships. 29 See Plato (The Republic, 555a-556d); Aristotle (Politics 1320b); Marx (1976, p. 615); Mill (2004, p. 146); de Waal (1996, p. 213); Kitcher (2011, p. 317) and Butler (2006, p. 348). For Arendt (1958, p. 65) poverty means “being forced by necessity” and to free one from poverty means to free oneself from necessity and “enter the world all have in common” which, as such, accumulates durability and permanence. 30 See Smith (2009a, book I, ch. VIII, p. 181). 31 Ricardo (2004, p. 52) refers to the “natural price of labour” as one that satisfies the labourer’s very basic needs and is fully regulated by free competition. On the contrary, Smith (2009a, book I, ch. VIII, p. 184) refers to the “liberal reward of labour” that procures public prosperity. Marx (1976, p. 346) introduces into the discussion about the fair wage, the issue of the “surplus labour”, the unpaid labour time. Tocqueville (1988, p. 582) connects the rise of the wages with the democratic process and democratic equality. Rawls (1971, p. 100) refers to the “equality of opportunity” understood as the aid that

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poverty, there are waves of corrective messages that anticipate their ontological configuration. Profit should be meaningful since whatever is part of the functional field is meaningful. That means that a meaningful profit is a virtuous one that maximises one’s abilities to benefit the goodness of the world. As thinkers, innovators and scientists utilise every means at their disposal in order to serve a disinterested functional dialectic that traverses the generations, likewise the conscientious actor in the functional economy uses its accumulated wealth to benefit others and, by doing this, boost combined efforts towards the progressive evolution of the energy of the functional field. None who places money above values can serve the functional economy. 10.5 The great philanthropist as the offspring of the functional economy The progressive approximation of the stage of the functional economy would give birth to the great philanthropist as a corresponding embodied response of the watchful consciousness. It is the energy of the economic field itself that would progressively nourish its correction and subjection to conscience. By the subjection of economy to conscience one goes beyond the economic game, it cannot let oneself be absorbed by it. Instead, one places the accumulated capital in the service of the accumulated energy of conscience, whose sole aim is to accommodate the demands of the functional field and contribute to its sustainability. The economic field does not yield only profit or forms of exploitation of the poor by the rich. That which it produces is only relevant to the stage of its development as is conditioned by and, in its turn, conditions the prevailing ethics of a social group. An advanced stage of the development of the economic field produces and would increasingly produce conscience. The corresponding generation of conscience is affected by the fact that economy is a constituent part of the functional field whose corrective messages, when organically adjusted to the functional deposit of conscience, bind the whole without discrimination. The armies of philanthropists are motivated to play the economic game only by the perspective of an outside, and in order to reach its outside.32 They accumulate wealth in order to distribute it without any external compulsion to

should be given to groups of society that begin their life with social and economic disadvantages. See Also Kitcher (2011, p. 374; 2014, p. 117). 32 Singer (2010) argues that helping the needy, especially from developing countries, is a moral obligation. This can be done through donations to charities and aid agencies just by giving a portion of one’s income that would, in most cases, be spent on unecessary purchases. See also Spinoza (1996, p. 157); Kant (1996, pp. 156, 198-203). For the role of philanthropy in Athenian democracy, see Mitchell (2015, p. 247).

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the society’s army of the poor, so to become by themselves energetic contributors in the vast workplace of the functional field. Only the great philanthropists could distribute wealth without depriving the others who are entitled to it.33 For one’s soil or property is the place of one’s stable and rooted visibility, but also the place where – in freedom of space and time – one can establish and cultivate one’s relationship with the functional field and sustain its possibility for becoming a creative divergence. The distribution of wealth on the behalf of philanthropists aims at the minimisation of the army of the poor that would result in an enhancement of the energy of the functional field. Aristotle refers to the “liberal man” who gives “to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time”, pointing out that “it is not easy for the liberal man to be rich, since he is not apt either at taking or at keeping, but at giving away, and does not value wealth for its own sake but as a means to giving.”34 A world packed with poor people is a world with an enervated functional field.35 The gaze of the impoverished and the hungry, the gaze of one whose life has been ruined, is staring at us and calls us to adjust accordingly. And if we do not adjust now, we will one day, since the gaze of other subjectivities is part of the functional field that conveys messages to us and calls us to adjust. The ultimate meaning that conscience assigns to economy amounts to the nourishment of an assembly of philanthropists who would willingly accumulate wealth in order to maximise their ability to serve the common good.36 For if the mind that is fixed on profit declines the effects of the dialectic of the functional field, the mind that is fixed on the distribution of wealth is attuned to its prescriptions. Such maximisation is only possible through the accumulation of wealth that

33 The right of possessing property means creating a sphere on the earth which facilitates, guards and roots one’s personal freedom. As Kant (1996, p. 50) says, the right of possessing soil on earth is a right and connects with personal autonomy. All human beings have “a right to be wherever nature or chance (apart from their will) has placed them.” See also Aristotle (Politics 1263b); Spinoza (2002, p. 336); Arendt (1958, p. 64). Rawls (1971, p. 158, 258, 274) by being unable to make a qualitative distinction between private-property economy and socialism, does not take into account the relationship between justice and the functional field since the latter is seriously weakened by any kind of publicly-owned economy. Kitcher’s (2011, p. 398) suggestion about placing limits on the intergenerational transfers of property would equally enervate the functional field. 34 See Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1120a25, 1120b15), See also Aristotle (Politics 1320b); Sidgwick (1981, pp. 324-326, 436). 35 This is something that Haxley (1893, p. 34) calls “fanatical individualism.” For example, Spencer (1904, p. 204) comes to the point of referring to the “altruistic aggressor.” For a different account of individualism coupled with altruism, see Popper (2013, p. 98). Tocqueville (2011, p. 5) talks about a narrow individualism that “stifles all public virtue.” See also Fukuyama (1995, p. 272); Dewy (1930, p. 303). 36 As Mill (2007, p. 32) says, “money is desired not for the sake of an end, but as a part of the end.” Depending on one’s understanding of ethics, which as Mill rightly points out is always at work irrespective of moral theories, in this case, money is put at the service of the general good.

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the economic game produces. So, the great philanthropists are those noble players of the economic game who consider it meaningful insofar as it enhances their ability to realise the precepts of their conscience. In other words, they reattach the economic field to the functional field through the force of conscience which, by its very constitution, is uniformly employed to all subdivisions of the functional field. Conscience always strives to free those who are in debt. The great energy of the Athenian functional field was preceded by the enactment of Solon’s new laws.37 In Athens, before the enactment of the constitutional laws that led to democracy, the majority of the poor were serfs to the few landlords. Solon was assigned to solve the strife that arose between the rich and the poor, and he did this by subjecting justice to the functional dialectic and not to the interests of any specific class. Solon, by virtue of a brilliant decodification of the corrective signals of the Athenian functional field, cancelled all debts and made it illegal for one to take a loan in which one’s freedom was the security. At the same time, he liberated all those who had lost their freedom because they could not pay their loans while, at the same, declining to redistribute the land. In fact, Solon, created the conditions for the intensification of the energy of the Athenian functional field. He subjected economy to the functional field and created the conditions for free citizens to contribute to its preservation and enhancement. The beginning of democracy is indissolubly linked with the rehabilitation of the poor within the functional field.38 Being in debt means a constant being in necessity; it weakens one’s potential for immersing oneself in a conversational relationship with the functional field. It means that the economic game colonises the functional field, and when the being in debt is generalised, it threatens a world with collapse. Likewise, the great philanthropist strives to release those people who carry the load of a great debt because, by releasing them, it releases a subjective conscience that can be part of a collective conscience. Conscience does not tolerate the misemployment of wealth, nor does it ascribe any meaning to the possession of wealth that one does not really need. A very wealthy individual is a burden for the functional field and is of no use if overloaded with a symbolic wealth that cannot be employed in the service of the functional field. Moreover, this overloading separates one from the pure dialectic of conscience. Those who are addicted to the economic game for the sake of unrestricted wealth do not differ from those who are addicted to

37

See Aristotle (The Athenian Constitution, book II, Ch. 5-13); Jaeger (1946, p. 146); Mitchell (2015, p. 28, 245). 38 See Plato (The Republic, 557a); Tocqueville (1988, p. 219); Acemoglu and Robinson (2006, pp. 34-36).

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gambling.39 For a conscience that has reached a certain stage of growth, unlimited wealth is meaningless and generates absolutely nothing as far as its configuration is concerned. Magnanimity and virtue have nothing to do with the possession of wealth unless it is employed for the growth of one’s conscience and for the intensification of the energy of the functional field. The mere possession of a material product of this world cannot compensate for the uncompromised search of justice. Thus, for conscience, wealth appears as a great means to realise its compulsion to put it into the service of the common good and facilitate the life of the unfortunate; to enable them to enjoy the hitherto unrecognised unassailable right of founding their own autonomous conversational relationship with the functional field.40 Therefore, conscience validates the economic field as an indispensable part of the functional field and, at the same time, subjects the material products of economy to the overriding rules of conscience. Conscience aims to accommodate the economic field within the functional field. Money-making can easily distract one from the pursuit of good. On the other hand, liberty is the greatest asset of the functional democracy and should remain as such. That means that economic freedom should be cherished and yet be liable to conscience. The latter is not reducible to the state or to any binding assemblage. Since the first creative divergence of conscience is localised in the subjective sphere, liberty should be preserved as the uncompromised right of the individual to search the functional field and fashion itself upon it.41 Likewise, the subjection of the economic field to conscience is not a matter of forced regulations or political agendas. It is to be achieved by the outward expressions of conscience when it would progressively manage to gather a collective force and embedded modes of arrangements that may now seem unthinkable. On the other hand, liberty commands that economic transactions need to be scrutinised by conscience. Dishonesty and lawlessness are sometimes considered as parts of a free economy, but the latter truly operates as an integral part of the functional field insofar as it is regulated by conscience.

39 See Plato (The Republic, 553d; The Laws 743c). Spinoza (1996, pp. 139-140) considers one’s stubbornly fixation on money as a species of madness. For him money serves one’s needs and necessities. See also Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a5; Politics 1258a, 1324b); Hutcheson (1728, treatise 1, sect. 6, p. 174); Butler (2006, p. 326); Rawls (1971, p. 290); Mill (2004, p. 105). 40 Aristotle (Politics 1329a) frequently mentions leisure as a secured reflective time for the attainment of virtue. See also Adam Smith (2009a, book I, ch. VIII, p. 185); Mill (2007, p. 9); Nozick (1974, p. 34, p. 328) 41 See Spinoza (2004, pp. 118-119); Kant (1991, p.55); Tocqueville (2011, p. 6); Mills (1974, p. 68,136).

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The conscience-centric approach of economy creates a new culture of money spending. Spending means contributing to the balancing and the enrichment of the functional field. Creative human beings released from the state of being in poverty are the main agents in the functional field. The new money-spending culture therefore consists of diffusing money by measuring its widespread circulation. That is, to financially contribute where needed so that each agent in the functional field enhances its activity, which would lead to the intensification of the energy of the functional field. This includes a fair wage regulated in each instance by the attained sense of justice within a worldsphere. The fair wage would procure the consent of the agents with this sense of justice after attaining a mental and moral growth also facilitated by the fair wage. All economic players, especially manufacturers and employers know deep inside what constitutes a fair wage and a fair price. Conscience also scrutinises the utility and the necessity of surplus- value.42 The effective involvement of conscience in the economic field is always oriented by the fixation of the fair price.43 As a result, parcels of conscience venture to be present in all stages at which a price is formed. The fair price is that in the formation of which no stage remains hidden and unmonitored by conscience, and where free competition is seen as a part of the functional field and not as a self-regulating mechanism. Each stage of its accumulation is informed by the need for a fair wage that binds the producer and the buyer to the common goal of the rhythm of the functional field. The price we assign to goods or services should be transparent and accountable to the shared sense of justice. As for the economic field, justice prescribes to providing humans with all the material conditions necessary for their equal activity and contribution to the functional field. Thus, in the value-adding process, each additional rise in value should be examined, explained, agreed and justified. Moreover, the whole chain of value formation should become collectively known in order to facilitate the judgment or the decision of the buyer and to illuminate the obscure sphere of crediting monetary value to a good or an activity. In other words, economy should be subjected to the monitoring effects of visibility, and information technologies contribute greatly to the scrutinising of economic play. One cannot hide behind a product or a service and thereafter add a value in obscurity. On the contrary, economy needs to be submitted to a different visual relation, wherein the value a thing acquires passes in all of its stages through a visual monitoring though which the judgement on just price is enlightened.

42

On the issue of surplus value, see Marx (1976, p. 301, 325) On the issue of just price and fair wage, see Plato (The Laws 920c); Sidgwick (1981, pp. 286-290); Arendt (1968, p. 164); Rawls (1971, pp. 304-309); Durkheim (1992, p. 211, 213). 43

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The affective energy of conscience is unmanageable; it is the most difficult energy of those forces that combine corporeal, mental and psychic mechanisms to comprehend and analyse. It is combined of autonomous, fixed, constantly working islands of functionality that impel, check and inspect. The autonomous function of conscience exceeds spatial and temporal confines. Conscience becomes worldly while yet remaining otherworldly, for its perpetual energy can never fully materialise itself. As such, it is the functional surplus that constantly divides itself from its actualisations. The actual world shares with conscience its structure, but conscience is in itself always more advanced than this shared materialised structure. As such, it is the topical accumulation that initiates the recomposition of the world. We waste time insofar as we are not regulated by the distilled islands of its functionality. That is, when we are absorbed by the arrangements of the independent affective relationships that the objects and the products of this world may develop. In this case, losing time means losing the track of the dialectic of conscience. It means to be absorbed by the vanity of the world and its arrangements that do not derive from the prescriptions of conscience. God appears in human historicity as the notion that grounds a pure dialectic of conscience and clears up all ideas, arrangements and institutions that impede the dialectic of conscience towards universality. As Locke maintains, God is a complex idea that collects and combines many other simple ideas. Locke connects the ideas of infinity, eternity and that of God with the ideas of number, space, power, knowledge, existence, duration and so on through their repetition and enlargement in our mind. That means that the notion of God responds to a vast amount of human questions and cognitive processes that are addressed and answered through this very notion, including the question of the beginning and functioning of the universe and also the event of death. 1 Yet, our grounded existential relationship with the idea of God is pursued by virtue of our conscience. Functional time dematerialises worldly things and rescues their conscientious root. In this case, God is the registering in the human consciousness of the only viable motor of evolutionary development:

1

See Locke (2008, book II, ch. XXIII, par. 33-36; book. IV. ch. X, par. 3-8); See also Feuerbach (1980); Butler (2006, p. 141); Dworkin (2013); Atran (2002); Boyer (2001).

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that of the dialectic of conscience. That is, Christian religion with its institutions and the mode of spirit that animates, sets up a functional plane that shapes the human material on the basis of an intense field of forces that exert pressure upon it in order to reach high levels of conformity. 11.1 The identification of God with conscience The gradual conceptualisation of the one God represents the localisation of the moral sentiment into the autonomous individual due to the pressing commands of an all-expanding functional field to which conscience is the best possible responsive gathering. Conscience, unlike any other human element that is perishable, seems to drive us to a boundless infinity due to its irreducibility to the present and its divisibility. It is what longs to live in the lives of the succeeding generations. The more human corporeality declines, the more the conscience is augmented. What one can want to rescue is one’s conscience. There is nothing else in the human constitution that presses for a disembodied continuity and relates to a dialectical process that is prior to or succeeded by it. The mechanisms that capture what is functional create a plane of continuity whose life transcends that of the individual. The functional models concern the rules for the survival of the human, and it is exactly the islands of functionality that so concern the human that they resist their own dissolution. Since conscience condenses islands of functionality that appeal to the viability of human deportment in the world, what one wants to rescue are the parameters of survival of a moral community. The human resistance to death is equitable to a refusal to accept that the subjective worldsphere of conscience as unregistered by its very constitution would vanish. Conscience articulates the meaning of the human presence in life; to imprint into the collective conscience its own ethical instilment. Under the energy of this will for rescuing the ethical essence, subjective conscience, in its attempt to escape oblivion, inserts its values into the functional deposit of the world. By virtue of this, it adjoins the collective objectified conscience, which becomes institutionalised, is grafted in knowledge and its work each time is to generate the mode of the spirit that would nourish it. The functional deposit of the human experience is founded upon the lives of all previous generations that succeed one another by rescuing and sharpening the islands of functionality. Both subjective and objective conscience are thus the generational gift that the sum of the human experience delivers to us each time. Christianity gathers and cultivates subjective conscience as a worldly affective presence. It represents the property of conscience to transcend and subjugate human reason. For this very reason, ethics cannot be fully autonomous as Castoriadis argues, for example, by rejecting Christian ethics. Rather ethics oscillates between autonomy and

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heteronomy, between conscience and the deliberate effort to sharpen the mechanisms that generate it.2 By virtue of this, it becomes unintelligible and unassailable. Conscience accumulates the religious feeling and vice versa. This historical interfusion of religion with conscience results in an institutional adjustment of the attributes of conscience. This binding, as a great historical arrest of the properties of conscience and their fusion into the functional field, solely concerns the moral input of religion in the worldly sphere. As Durkheim says, there is no society without religion and without a God, and this very fact is based on ever-present causes.3 In real terms, there is no society without ingrained mechanisms that activate and are activated by the compulsions of conscience, no matter how developed or less developed its functional depth. 11.2 God The eternal, immutable, supremely perfect, omnipresent, omniscient, most merciful, all forgiving, all inspecting, all loving, infinite and just God are attributes ascribed to the faculties and the process of growth of conscience which, thereafter, are projected onto God. Kant connects conscience, “the internal court in us,” with the idea of God. Since conscience is a “scrutiniser of hearts”, commanding and following us everywhere “and since such an omnipotent moral being is called God, conscience must be thought of as the subjective principle of being accountable to God for all one’s deeds.” 4 Of course, Kant clarifies that we are not entitled, even if our conscience may lead us there, to assume the existence of God. Conscience is the interhuman and intergenerational bridge and is both subjectively and objectively communicated. It is also the animated bridge between human and nature, since the human is the response to the commands of the functional field. Conscience is not to be met as a fully worldly reality, for it is reproduced, always

2

See Castoriadis (1997, p. 120, 319). As Heidegger (1962, p. 320) puts it, conscience “calls against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.” Similarly, Durkheim (1995, p. 213) referring to a moral tone stimulated by society, remarks that “we readily conceive of it in the form of a moral power that, while immanent in us, also represents something in us that is other than ourselves.” 3 Durkheim (1995) understands religion as a collective moral community with institutionalised rules, which is a product of the collective force society’s impersonal consciousness upon the individual consciousnesses. As such religion cannot be dismissed as a mere illusion but it has ever-present causes, and hence its durability, because it expresses something real. See also Kitcher (2011, pp. 111-115). In this analysis, I focus mainly on the Christian conception of God because as Durkheim (1995, 129) says “to find a god constructed entirely out of human elements, one must come almost to Christianity.” 4 See Kant (1996, p. 190). For God’s properties see Saint Augustine (2002); Aquinas (2003); Leibniz (1991); Descartes (1968); Butler (2006); Feuerbach (2008); Kierkegaard (1991).

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being subject to the effects of the functional field. Conscience is not identical to our rational faculties for they cannot subject it fully to rational analysis by examining its constituent elements. Instead, it commands, it judges; we have been created and recreated by it, firstly as a corporeal functional force and then as innate conscience that draws from the energy of the latter and affects reason. We cannot gather, monitor and regulate conscience in ourselves as we cannot regulate and monitor our corporeal functionality. The condensed and compressed islands of functionality both in the subjective sphere and in the human experience of all the previous generations cannot be represented and appropriated by consciousness. If there is one substance that condenses proximity and distance, past and present, it is conscience. Reason per se is unable to do so due to its constitution. By virtue of the fact that conscience is composed of layers upon layers of functionality both corporeal and mental, it transgresses per se the short lifespan of the subjective human experience. Therefore, the depth and the temporal dimension of its accumulative growth render its manageability elusive to consciousness. God represents exactly the attributes and the effects of conscience on us and, more importantly, its endless splits and autonomisations that generate in us the very human idea of immortality, eternal life and a horizon of perfectibility. Conscience is fed by its own growth; it is self-generated, and no other law can appeal to conscience as more worth pursuing than this. It is something that wants to grow, and the more it grows the more intense this will for growth becomes. The more one immerses oneself in the mechanisms of conscience the less mastery one has of it. It creates a feeling of perfection and an otherworldly sense of justice. The affective force of conscience creates an infinite sublime feeling wherein the human finds its equilibrium. The feelings of infinity and endless perfectibility of conscience within a finite human lead to the idea of God as the spirit that inhabits us all. The mastery of conscience that we are lacking, we concede to God as the name conceded to an unmasterable and incomprehensible spiritual exteriority that is supposed to be the source of the absolute good, of blessedness and righteousness. As Descartes remarks, “I observe that it is not only a real and positive idea of God or of a supremely perfect being which presents itself to my mind, but also, so to speak, a certain idea of nothing, that is to say of that which is infinitely distant from all sort of perfection.”5 God is conceived as our being at home. We are at home when we are in conscience since the order of the world never corresponds to our conscience. We experience an existential disagreement with the world, we are in the world,

5 See Descartes (1968, p. 133). Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics 1158b p. 15) says that gods “surpass us most decisively in all good things.”

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but we also feel we are strangers. This feeling of being at home, that is always suspended and interrupted, we assign to God. God is a being at home without the injustices, the defective consciences and the instrumentality of the world. God protects and legitimises our being at home and saves us from the uprooting into instrumentality. By virtue of our conscience, we are both connected and disconnected with this world. The world has always been corrected into our consciousness, but we know that the social and historical temporality follows a different pace. Thus, we acquire the feeling that the government of conscience is not of this world. Thereafter we accede this government to God. Worship, prayer, meditation, or contemplation of God are exercises of the conscience. We immerse ourselves in the hardwired network of functional models and we sense its energy. Through the inward movement of meditation, we reach and bind ourselves to the functional field since we are its embodied and disembodied affects. Prayer or spirituality address conscience wherein the human equilibrium in the functional field is affirmed. That is, to position oneself in an orderly manner as far as conscience is concerned. The inadequate idea that always accompanies our conception of God is an inadequate idea of conscience that surpasses our reason and cannot be articulated in notions and ideas. Thus, contemplation upon conscience is an opening and remodelling of oneself on the pure and unconstrained link with the functional field. This existential bonding with conscience does not allow concepts and ideas to fabricate a human-made and human-centred reality, irrespective of the genealogy and constant activity of the functional field. The independence of conscience amounts to a pure dialectic of functionality, as does God. 11.3 God as a fixed creative divergence As far as the creative shifts of the human are concerned, the historical registering of conscience through the idea of God means that animality cannot control the movement of history without crashing upon the laws that are designed to expel it. The evil beast within the human appears as a retrogression and rudiment, and cannot consolidate its own lasting and binding law. Whenever collective ideologies that draw from and recall bestiality attempt to seize control of history, they crash upon the laws of conscience, which themselves restore the dialectical relationship with the functional field.6

6 Freud (1962, pp. 58-60) refers to an instinct of cruel aggressiveness that threatens civilisation. Plato (The Republic, 571b) talks about a “terribly bestial and immoral type of desire.” See also Nietzsche (1984, p. 46); Bergson (1977, p. 276); Jung (2003, pp. 172-179); Derrida (1994, p. 173); Aron (2017, p. 344); Ruse (2019, pp. 219-220). E.O. Wilson (1978, p. 101) rejects the existence of an aggressive drive. For him Nazism and racism are expanded forms of simple tribalism.

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Conscience marks the threshold for a spiritualised world and acts against the forces that act towards its despiritualisation. As conscience marks the threshold beyond animality and governs the mutation both of the human to the human and to the beyond of the human, God signals the reaching of the threshold towards the functional route of the conscientious governance of history. Conscience represents the endless attempts of humans to fix a creative divergence as an affective response to the signals of the functional field. Humans, due to the affective relationship of conscience with the functional field, want to become other than human and conceptualise that the only force that can govern their mutation is conscience. God, through the institution of religion, expresses the attempt to register and fix this non-anthropomorphic shift. Alexander, in connecting the biological origins of morality with indirect reciprocity, encounters great difficulty in connecting the concept of an impartial God for all humanity with the evolution of morality. Hence his definition of conscience as “the still small voice that tells us how far we can go without incurring intolerable risks. It tells us not to avoid cheating but how we can cheat socially without being caught?”7 Similarly, Dawkins – by reducing religion to child indoctrination and to an accidental by-product of something useful – considers the concept of God as a mere delusion, depriving it thus of any relevance in the evolution of morality whatsoever.8 On the contrary, D.S. Wilson argues that “most enduring religions promote altruism expressed among members of the religious community, defined in terms of action.”9 As the functional field constantly informs conscience and as conscience in its turn subjects reason to an outside which is always being driven to reach, God crystallises this perpetual feeling of being-driven by the outside of the human which is not yet comprehensible and thus considered part of the human. And as soon as the progress of conscience is infinite, a being towards perfectibility, its independence and superiority upon the consciousness is expressed through the incomprehensible externality and supreme intelligence of God.10 11.4 God as the functional time By addressing conscience and by being addressed by conscience we are possessed by the sum of the fixed functionality, be it corporeal, mental, psychic or historical. Its successive layers in the dimension of time, which as humans we are not accustomed to perceive in its completeness, are irreducible to the

7

Alexander (1987, p. 254). See Dawkins (2006, p. 188). 9 See D.S. Wilson (2015, p. 79). 10 Saint Augustine (2002, p. 114) remarks: “I had found the unchangeable and true Eternity of Truth above my changeable mind.” 8

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present. In this way, the accumulated functionality transcends both us and the present. It adheres to another form of time, the conscientious-functional, which our consciousness cannot comprehend. We cannot decodify the vast process of the accrued functionality by employing the tools of the superfluity of linear time. This is because we are what we have attained, not what has been discarded as no longer functional. We are moved by functionality, but we cannot understand its laws as we are moved by corporeal functionality, but neither can we imagine the process of its formation across a vast period of time nor its operation at each single moment. We know that functionality points towards continuity that breaks both with its temporal and spatial dependencies, whose perception is anthropomorphic, as well as with the human lifespan and all that has been formed because of its confines. This vast feeling of functionality generates in us the desire to reconstitute its original chain. God is the name given to this never-closed, passive mediation and immersion into the traces of a fixed functional thread that is everywhere, both inside and outside us. The idea of God is effected in us by the combined energy of all the strata of the functional models as they intersect and merge. God is the name attributed to the energy of the constitutive parts of conscience that seize hold of us each time, to its psychic and mental affects and its origins both internal and external. The deployment of conscience is associated with self-transformation, for we are challenged by the energy of the functional models to form responses by means of shaping ideas and values that aim to accommodate their attributes. By addressing conscience, we address a substance that is nowhere; it is invisible and dormant, and yet we cannot dispense with it. This substance accompanies us as the energy of a plane that is both subjectively and objectively grounded, and never ceases to release its effects. Paradise, eternality, inalterability, the day of justice that compensates for the injustice of this world, revelation and the absolute good, are merely terms that have been employed to express the humanly impossible; the way that conscience would be fixed in a perfect state once and for all. This fixity of the concept of God is supposed to be possessed by us, operating as the supreme force of government of all of the regulation outside, and in spite of the functional field which, on the contrary, is supposed to subject and condition.11 Subjective conscience, that which functionally saves within its lifespan, cannot itself be saved. Thus, the concept of God compensates for the feeling

11 See, for example, Leibniz (1991, pp. 22-23); Descartes (1968, p. 55). As Bergson (1946, p. 200) points out: “Nature is what it is, and as our intelligence, which is part of it, is less vast than nature, it is doubtful whether any one of our present ideas is large enough to embrace it.”

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that conscience will terminate its operation. It stores up the distillation of the ethical essence of the human life, denoted as soul, which only alone survives death and is thereafter measured against the absolute good. God is employed for the arrest and fixation of the subjective conscience that disappears. It is the way consciousness believed that conscience would survive death. This conscience duplicates within it the effects of the corporeal functionality that is compulsively oriented to prolong itself and, likewise, it wants to operate in the same manner. But since conscience is not yet fully fixed biologically in a developed stage, God represents an external selection pressure that operates as a desire for fixity and its will to live and survive death. Thus, the concept of God represents the arrest and deposition of a common shared ground, a universal community of subjective consciences and its worldly aura in which everyone participates by virtue of its communicability. It is an engagement in a community of consciences whose gathering creates a plane that is irreducible to the worldly reality. 11.5 God as the future of conscience God is the evolutionary future that consciousness conceives for itself as a result of the effects of conscience’s constitutive faculties. It thereafter measures itself against with these maximised attributes that it assigns to God. It does so both because of conscience’s incommensurability, and the intensification of its affective relationship with the functional field. God is a concept that the accumulated energy of the functional field throughout time has yielded to consciousness. And yet, paradoxically, God is perceived to exist outside the functional field and to be eternal, immutable and without beginning. But it is because of a certain mode of configuration of the functional field and its correlative effects on consciousness that the complex idea of God exists. A God outside the functional field is and will remain a paradox, for it represents the attribution of the structural traits of the human conscience to God.12 Reason facing up to the uncontrollability of conscience due to its distinct constitution classifies it as a part of the Godly zone. Therefore, God is a word used to conceptualise the inexpressible effects of conscience that resist their analysis as a distinct idea. As such, however, God exists because of the history and the intensification of the affective relationship within this world and not outside of it. Every attempt to subject conscience to a permanent ideal fixed state,

12 The genius of Spinoza (2004, p. 45), though his account of God is based on an immutable and fixed nature, understood this impossibility of the mode of thinking. As he says: “To say that everything happens according to natural laws, and to say that everything is ordained by the degree and ordinance of God, is the same thing.” Thus, for him the law of God is the law of nature and the more we understand the laws of nature the more we reach the highest and divine good.

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amounts to breaking with the effects of the functional field, the withdrawal of conscience and thus of God. In other words, every concept of ideal state attached to conscience creates the conditions for both a desynchronisation from conscience and the functional field and, ultimately, results in a recession of the force and vitality of conscience. It is only because, by virtue of our conscience, we have been hypervigilant and receptive of the here of the functional field that we are able to develop a propensity to be elsewhere. To depart from the elsewhere, which is a generative effect of the here, and form a will to manufacture – in a spirit of a very human understanding of time – the combination of forces that synthesise the functional field is to betray a pathology of the human mind that began with Plato and results into the misalignment with the dialectic of conscience.13 Reminiscence, the world of ideas and Plato’s reformation of God14 on the basis of his own conscience, was initialised and conditioned by the intensification of the Athenian functional field. Nevertheless, Plato sought to substitute the actualisation of the conversational relationship of conscience with the functional field with the sphere of immutable and absolute ideas. Plato, trying to bypass the Heraclitean flux, located absolute, eternal and immutable, divine form of the good outside time and space.15 This effectuates the colonisation of time and space by Plato’s laws16 which, through multiple supervisors, regulate all aspects of life of an extreme quasi-spartan collectivist system, irrespective of the energy of the functional field on which they superimpose themselves. Popper is fully justified in calling Plato’s political programme, that of “arresting change”, “totalitarian.”17 A lesson to be learned from the subsequent effects of this pathology is that a pre-planned dissolution in a predefined period of time of the independent

13 As Bergson (1946, p. 193) remarks: “The whole of that philosophy which begins with Plato and ends with Plotinus is the development of a principle that we should formulate thus: ‘there is more in the immutable than in the moving, and one passes from the stable to the unstable by a simple diminution’.” See also Dewey (1930, p. 77); Castoriadis (1991, p. 8). Leibniz (1991, p. 252), in agreement with Plato, argues that “reflection is nothing other than attention to what is within us, and the senses do not give us what we already bring with us.” Jung (2003, p. 9) understands Plato as one thinker who touches the a priori structures of cognition and namely, a priori psychic functions. 14 See Plato (The Republic, 378a-391e; Phaedo 73c; Sophist 267c); Jaeger (1947, pp. 286288; 1986, p. 242). 15 See Plato (The Republic, 479e, 505e, 517c; Theaetetus 156c); Popper (2013, p. 20); Jaeger (1947, pp. 217-220). 16 As Plato (The Laws 807e) puts it, “there should be a schedule regulating how all free men spend all their time, beginning almost at dawn and extending to the next dawn and rising of the sun.” See also Plato (The Republic 457c-461c, 5963-597c; Phaedrus 249c); Jaeger (1986, p. 219). 17 See Popper (2013, p. 84).

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effects of the functional field of which the historical world is one part of and which are irreducible to our own concept of time, would certainly signal the recession of conscience. Equal result would have the dissolution of combined intentions or forces, or even the attenuation of its accumulated energy through the abolition or replacement of the historical arrangements that are utilised by its mechanisms.18 The energy yielded to us by the historically crystallised combination of forces that are called a “polis” cannot be delivered either by the “desert” or by the prefabrication of the arrangement of the functional field on the basis of our own fixed ideas, despite the corporeal, mental and psychic functionality, nor by historical accumulation. We cannot change the world at once because it has been formatted on a lifespan that exceeds the human temporal perspective. Our attempts to restructure it will always crash upon the temporality of the laws that exceed our own mental and temporal horizons. Therefore, whenever the sum total of that which was acquired because of the existence of the “polis” aims at dissociating itself from its source and attempts to gain supremacy, it breaks with the dialectic of conscience and the latter becomes acclimatised. God is, in each instance, perceived as the process of all the imagined development of conscience and, under the energy of it, the process of the corresponding mutation of human nature. It is a drive generated by conscience, a being-driven-to God, and consists of a will to be other than the human whose rules, however, would be regulated by the progressive growth of conscience.19 We are ready to flee the confines of our human corporeality and reason, but we are not ready to abandon our innate conscientious impulse. The imagined mutation of the human under the progressive affective relationship with conscience is called God. The psychic and the mental effects of the energy of conscience are merged with the effects of corporeal functionality and the combination of these forces generates the impulse of conscience. This results in a divine sense of charitable disposition, sanctity and perfection that never loses sight of functional time; to which reason is subject and that is, per se, affixed only to functional time. Thereafter, these effects allow the individual to form an infinite number of functional models, to view the world under the absolute supervision of the highest stage of attained functionality and, therefore, to long for a pure evolutionary time which is conscientiously governed.

18 Merleau-Ponty (1968) describes the debasement of conscience in Soviet Russia, but he tries to understand it within the logic of the Marxist theory. For a more refined analysis of totalitarianism see Popper (2013); Aron (1968); and Arendt (1966). 19 See Leibniz (1991, pp. 39-40); Shaftesbury (2000, p. 182); Hutcheson (1728, treatise 2, sect. 6, p. 298); Feuerbach (2008, p. 6); Hegel (2004, p. 51); Sidgwick (1981, p. 455); Tocqueville (2011, p. 16, 140); Fukuyama (1995, p. 286).

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Institutionalised Christianity strongly affected the worldly institutional arrangement of functionality and, thereafter, of justice and the corresponding spirit by which it is animated. More than any other movement of ideas, Christian religion points to the universality of ethics because it has been firmly grounded in conscience both as an innate moral sense and as a potentiality. The historical gathering and accumulation of conscience has instilled its attributes in the inner spirit of the Christian religion and the functional dialectic of this spirit. Badiou encapsulates the universalism of Christianity as “the overhumanity of which humanity is capable.”20 Religion evolves when do the subjective and collective conscience, and insofar as their growth has been instilled within it. Since religion through God grafted the drive for a human mutation being completely ruled by a pure accumulation of conscience, it will always belong to the future to mark and gather the various stages of the development of conscience, as well as the motor of human development. Tocqueville emphasises the permanent function of religion as an otherworldly moral force that exactly preserves and progressively enhances its universality by remaining distinct from a community or a nation.21 The cruel dogmatism, instrumentality and oppression of institutionalised religion, known as the Dark Ages, has been rehabilitated in the functional field – especially by virtue of protestant liberalism – and lost its all-encompassing hold on it.22 Yet, the complex synergy of forces that will always lead us to conscience and thus to the idea of God are always present, and even burgeoning. That means that God will always lie in the future both as an idea that would be subject to an evolutionary enrichment but also as the rule that governs the mutation of the human towards a more conscientious disposition that might reshape the human constitution. Aristotle cites the belief of the Greeks that “men become gods by excess of virtue.” Aristotle proceeds to connect reason with the divine and, therefore, as humans we must “so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it

20 See Badiou (2003, p. 72, pp. 57-58); Butler (2006, p. 226); Kant (1998, p. 132); Hegel (2004, p.334); Bergson (1977, p. 78); Thompson (1963, p. 42); Luhmann (1990, p. 152); Tocqueville (1988, p. 12, 288); Parsons (1978, p. 174). 21 See Tocqueville (1988, p. 297). See also Durkheim (1995, pp 224-225). From this perspective, God can never be reconciled with the spirit of the community and become actual universal self-consciousness and therefore be pronounced as dead, as the “death of the abstraction of the divine Being”, as Hegel (1977, p. 476, par.785) argues. On this see also Kojѐve (1980, p. 67). 22 For this dogmatism and suffocation of the functional field by the instrumentality of the church, see Spinoza (2004, p. 7); Shaftesbury (2000, p. 377); Smith (2009b, book V, ch. I, p.391-393); Mill (1974, 89-93); Hegel (1977, p. 226, par. 377; 2004, pp. 374-381, pp. 412413); Weber (2001, pp. 40-41, 98); Parsons (1978, pp. 194-199); Popper (2013, pp. 240-241).

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be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.”23 Conscience is the link towards the human, between human and nature, and God as the future marks the evolutionary path towards homo-conscientious. Religion signifies the historical great arrest of the hitherto fluid yet persistent demand of the functional field that concerns the augmentation of conscience and, through this, the solidification of the principles that could govern the progressive mutation of the human. The reward of the good and the punishment of the wicked denotes the arrest of the parameters of survival of the human. Conscience is the product of the reward of the good. Similarly, justice and judgement in the afterlife denote the functional stage where what now is undetected, in the future will be discarded as no longer functional.24 There can be no other governing principle for any evolutionary process that is applied to the human apart from conscience. This is the great achievement of the Christian religion which, through the concept of God, reaches the nonoutside of the games of life and addresses the innate predispositions of conscience towards justice and infinity. Religion arrests the mechanisms for human evolution. We cannot perceive any other ruling principle for human evolution because conscience will always be the perceivable limits of our thought. Conscience will always be the last voice we hear and the last gaze that is fixed upon us, consistently calling us to evolve on the basis of its own maxims. Conscience is both an internal and external force that persistently calls us to adapt to its own prescriptions. Conscience begins where all games of life lose their autonomy. It creates in us the feeling that after all games, in which we may lose our absorption, there is that outside that constantly yields meaning. Meaningful life means, in a strict sense, a life which is synchronised without any deflection from the dialectic of conscience.25 All the ideologies of progress, of human emancipation and transformation from the Athenian democracy to

23

See Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1145a25, 1159a5, 1178a). As Socrates remarks: “God is in no case and in no way unjust, but as just as it is possible to be, and nothing is more like him than whichever one of us succeeds in becoming as just as can possibly be,” in Plato (Theaetetus 176c). Hegel (1977, p. 397, par. 655) says that conscience “is in its own self divine worship, for its action is the contemplation of its own divinity.” See also Hegel (2004, p. 324); Kojѐve (1980, p. 67); Feuerbach (1980, p. 229). Durkheim (1995, p. 430) through this binding of religion with the collective forces of society, understands religion as something that evolves, transforms itself and does not disappear. As he puts it, “there are no immortal gospels and there is no reason to believe that humanity is incapable of conceiving new ones in the future.” See also Wright (2009). 24 As Plato (The Republic 613b) says, “for the gods will never neglect the man whose heart is set on justice and who is ready, by pursuing excellence, to become as like god as man is able.” See also Plato (Phaedrus 248a-248e; Gorgias 523b; Phaedo 107d). 25 As Spinoza (2004, p. 60) suggests, through the perspective of his own understanding of God: “The idea of God lays down the rule that God is our highest Good – in other words, that the knowledge and love of God is the ultimate aim to which all our actions should be directed.”

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the Age of Enlightenment, from the French Revolution to liberalism and Marxism, have been motivated by a specific mode of conscience. If we attempt to substitute the ruling principle of human evolution, we would regress to deliberate evil. Conscience has no outside, for the former compulsively tries to accommodate the corrective signals of this outside. Conscience is the bridge to the outside of the functional field and the reaching out of the outside amounts to the enlargement of conscience. Those who attempt to reach that outside by ignoring the objective commands of the functional field and replace it with arbitrary successive discursive mutations that can be arranged and deranged at will, reduce themselves to the level of animality that led to the worst of the monstrosities. Nietzsche, employing a genealogy of morals through etymology and psychology, disregards the laws of the creation of the functional depth and the energy of the functional field.26 As a result, by silencing the energy of the functional field, whose complexity and the reflective relationship with it defies any genealogical account, he discredits conscience as “bad conscience” and “guilt” created by the ascetic ideals of what he calls the slave morality of the weak and the sick invented by the Judaeo-Christian tradition.27 By considering conscience as a social and historical construct and not as an innate predisposition, he deprives God and Christianity of any lasting meaning and, instead, invokes the repressed aristocratic morality that releases “the lifeaffirming” will to power that revaluates all values. In fact, Nietzsche, by virtue of the transvaluation of all values, looks backwards in history and, the more he looks backwards, the narrower the sphere of our ethical response becomes.28 By trying to go outside conscience, he invokes the drives for domination, powerful self-affirmation of the healthy, the creative nature of war, the historical mission of the healthy, violence, spontaneity, and the welfare of the few. He goes against what he calls “herd democracy”, the common good and the equality of rights, the Enlightenment and the French revolution. In reality, Nietzsche, calls us to go back to deliberate evil. The outside of conscience is simply the earlier stages of its development and its surviving rudiments.29 Thus, it is to be reached only via a retrogression or reawakening of rudimentary forms of moral and mental attributes. And those who deliberately situate themselves in this outside distort the functional field

26

See Nietzsche (1984, p. 43; 2008, p. 8, 19). See Nietzsche (1984, p. 93; 2008, pp. 42-43, 64-68, 107). 28 See Nietzsche (1984, p. 85; 2008, p. 26, 48, 74). As Kitcher (2011, p. 279) points out, “although one may challenge parts of the ethical practices we have inherited, there is no escaping the ethical project.” See also Kitcher (2014, p. 47); Blackburn (1998, p. 21). 29 Spencer (1904, p. 357). 27

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as well. They attenuate its corrective force, they weaken the collective conscience, but they do not manage to stop the energy of the functional field that is always defiant, and it resurfaces. It then compels conscience to readjust by reasserting its dialectic of development through a conversational relationship with it by means of which it receives its corrective signals and accordingly adjusts itself. In philosophical terms, conscience creates the notion of God and not vice versa. The lasting existential bonding with the notion of God could not have survived without the close binding with conscience. Conscience is the limits of the human that cannot go beyond or outside since it is in our mental, psychic and corporeal constitution. Any attempt to go beyond conscience discredits the work of conscience in its interaction with the functional field and the ensuing functional depth. Conscience is our personal sanctuary. Our subjective liberty against any law and system of justice, against any oppressive government and constitutional arrangement, against the instrumentalism and ethical insensitivity of an organised church, derives from the dictates of our conscience.30 Thus, the law of conscience has been ascribed to divine law, which will always superimpose itself upon the human law and will safeguard an island of inner freedom. Freedom of conscience means that conscience, through processing human laws, creates its own laws that are more powerful. The adherence to the laws of conscience is stronger than the adherence to the laws of humans. This instituting faculty of conscience has been identified with God but, in fact, God functions as the guardian of the freedom and equality of subjective conscience from all sorts of oppressive powers that have historically ruined lives. Freedom of conscience is the perspective from which we perceive the human institutions and government. It conditions us against any despiritualised association that is based on the sacred nature of our ancestors, the customs and the soil for which we are called to sacrifice our lives in order to flourish. Through the universality of subjective conscience, we reach the universality of religion and we resist the blind love for tribal nationalism or any other ideological schemes. Conscience regulates the rule for associating and disassociating, and this rule is identified with the divine rule. The forgotten souls within the course of the prevailing understanding of history were moved by their own conscience, which prescribes what must be done beyond fame, success and recognition. The human imprints itself upon history through conscience in the silence of documenting and witnessing. And the authentic Christian ethics are the ethics of conscience.31

30

See Childress (1979, pp. 332-333). As Popper notes (2013, p. 481), “we need an ethics that defies reward and success” and Christianity at least at the beginning taught this ethics. 31

Chapter 12

A philosophy of the future

A philosophy of the future is absorbed by and immerses itself in the pure dialectic of conscience; that is, the endless pursuit of construction and reformation of islands of functionality by virtue of a vigilant attitude towards the imperatives of the functional field. As such, it deals with events or ontological formations insofar as they are perceived as attempts to respond to the functional field to which they are subject. In doing so, it examines the progressive shifts that occur in the process of accumulating islands of functionality. In this sense, a philosophy of the future takes on its proper meaning. It respects the functional field as the prime mover of functionality and situates the ontological, corporeal or other functional attempts as adaptive responses to an informational structure that is always on the move. Finally, a philosophy of the future is an ascetic reflection on time, and a reflection on the benefits that such a reflection could yield. Time is understood here not only in years or centuries but as the highest possible immersion in the horizon of the future. Humans need to situate themselves before the incommensurability of the future and by virtue of it, enlighten their presence in history. By focusing on the functional field, we gain a different perspective of the future. It is not the great unknown; it is the field where the progressive functional dialectic will always take place according to the great functional laws. Moreover, by focusing on the functional field, we comprehend better our roles as solitary beings who are destined to be effaced from the field that traverses time and develops itself. By comprehending this field, we surpass our constitutional formation, and we use it as the vehicle for progressive divergence. We are thus attracted to the moment of the creative shift and, in so doing, we save energy. We also may be able to keep to the minimum the recurrence of the dreadful feeling of nothingness1 and fulfil to the fullest our living opportunity.

1

For Hegel (2004, p. 21) the “pain occasioned by our individual nothingness” is firstly articulated and expressed by the Jewish religion.

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12.1 The zones of lost time The field of the process of functionality within the human cosmos is filled with zones of lost time. These zones are not simply the necessary stages through which consciousness has had to pass in order for the emergence of functional calling signals and the corresponding consolidation and establishment of progressive blocks. They are not simply the product of a weak functional field that transmitted its signals at long intervals and a low intensity. The zones of lost time are also due to the lack of an understanding of the relationship between the products of human activity, mainly ideological, with the functional field. As Locke remarks: “We should have a great many fewer Disputes in the World, if Words were taken for what they are, the Signs of our Ideas only, and not for Things themselves.”2 These products have been – and still to a large extent remain – considered as a judgment of themselves without recognising their direct reference and dependence on the functional field. By considering themselves as such, they have the propensity towards the silencing of the functional field. They ignore it and they aim to monitor and control it by superimposing their fixed and unprocessed nature on the constant flow of the functional substance. They perceive themselves as autonomous theoretical totalities that can follow an autonomous dialectic on the basis of how they preconceived themselves unfolding in space and time. Instead of being watchful in regards to the functional field and receiving its signals in order to modify themselves, they aim to arrest reality on the horizon of their own unexamined, baseless and unchecked maxims. According to Arendt, “the curious logicality of all isms, the simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbours the first germ of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality.”3 Of course, they are able to do this only by accommodating distortions, which thereafter become parasitic parts of their essence; that is to say, by delaying the adaptive process. In this case, the correction comes after a great deal of human suffering and immiserisation, or even after the collapse of the worldsphere in which distortions unfold themselves.

2

See Locke (2008, book. III, ch. X. par. 15). Moreover, “the want of ideas of their real Essences sends us from our own Thoughts, to the Things themselves, as they exist. Experience here must teach me, what Reason cannot”, Locke (2008, book IV, ch. XII, par. 9). Jaspers (2003, p. 28), moving along the same lines, points out that “every world system is a segment of the world. The world itself cannot become a system.” 3 See Arendt (1966, p. 458). Lefebvre (2001, p. 152), addressing the same issue, comments that philosophers who believe they can enclose the world within a system “assume that their system is based on precedent, since it includes everything and is hermetically enclosed. Yet there is always more in the world than any philosophical system.” See also Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1179a 20); Castoriadis (1991, pp. 8-10); Parsons (1951, pp. 356-357).

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Marxism and the communist reality by which it has been inspired would have been unthinkable if the prime role of the functional field had been recognised. Aron refers to this as “ideocracy” that has lost any link with reality; “the communist regime does not wish to be judged by what it is but by what it will be; communism is defined less by its actual practice than, in its own eyes, by its self-image and by the goals which it claims it will reach.”4 The awareness of the role of the functional field would advise a gradual acceleration of the human action so as to accelerate the transmission of its corrective signals and not an attempt to subject it, to damage and derail it, simply because of a will to impose on it a mere human philosophy or ideology. The constitutional properties of the functional field teach us that change is gradual; that ideologies are schemes that aim to substitute the functional field and that everything should pass through a process of application and testing. Popper defines this process as “piecemeal social engineering” as opposed to totalitarian-like utopian or holistic engineering, the “reconstruction of society as a whole.”5 Per definition, a whole system cannot pass through an application and testing because, from the very beginning the corrective signals that would be conveyed would dismantle its assumed coherence and all-encompassing nature. Therefore, the implementation of a whole ideology cannot be pursued without suspending the energy of the functional field. As Bergson remarks, “it is understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thought from the mobile reality; but there is no means whatever of reconstituting with the fixity of the concepts the mobility of the real.”6 Dogmatism, as the constructor of systems, has nevertheless always attempted this reconstitution. Once an ideology is activated, corrective signals for its readjustment appear on the horizon of the functional field, disarticulating it from within. But because it claims to possess a whole sphere of interdependent beliefs it throws itself into a course through which the corrective signals are silenced instead of being processed. It can only be applied as unchecked, unmonitored claims that find their way to external reality without being submitted to the process of functional competence and performance. Similarly, dogmatic religions would have been unthinkable in many of their maxims. In this environment of sealed thought and habit of the mind, the ontological and practical field of responses gains dominance over the

4 See Aron (1968, p. 160). These regimes were living in a fictitious world and their whole structure served the perpetuation at any cost of a world shut off from reality. Aron (1968, p. 195) stresses the link between totalitarian regimes and “the will to transform fundamentally the existing order by means of an ideology.” Arendt (1966, p. 333), referring to both Nazism and Stalinism, points out that “the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and repetitions.” See also Castoriadis (1997, p. 59). 5 See Popper (2013, p. 151; 1964, pp. 64-70; 1999, p. 38). See also Dewey (1930, p. 56). 6 See Bergson (1946, p. 189).

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functional field. It does not understand itself as a mode of a response that could never be absolutely successful and definite, but as the only right one that discards the field that makes its existence possible. The complex of ideas and ideologies, the theoretical world as a whole, always lives more than the functional field permits it to, and at the expense of the functional dialectic. The mere juxtaposition of different responses that are detached from the functional field and their subsequent internal struggle create a “mini game” that seeks to replace the proper place of the ideological world, which is that of the always unfinished relationship with the functional field. This mini human game delays a series of adjusted responses; it allows the return of unworkable ones; it does not cultivate the educative art of an attentive attitude towards the functional field and, as a result, it accumulates distortions. Thus, any attempt to subject the functional field is pursued by its very disfiguration; that is, by it becoming populated by a static system of ideas and arrangements that aim at the formation of the functional field at one’s will. 12.2 The nomadic nature of conscience Conscience is nomadic, non-temporal, non-territorial and without spatiotemporal limits. The functional field endlessly transmits adaptive prescriptions. But these are perceived – strictly speaking, always with great delay – by agents of conscience who are constantly on the move without being subject to territoriality. When the adaptive signals are perceived and applied, there follows another process of divergence whereby, through an external examination of their relation to the functional field, they are further improved. It is to a large extent the uncontrolled product of the history of human creativity that obtains a global scale. Moreover, the functional field also undergoes a process of reconfiguration and in itself changes as far as its configuration, depth and intensity are concerned. A worldsphere with a developed functional field may as well lose its rigour and thereafter degenerate, as occurred with the Athenian polis. Mill points out one world loses its rigour when its ideas become mechanical, “and unless there were a succession of persons whose everrecurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would not be no reason why civilisation should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire.”7 On the other hand, another worldsphere could manage to build a more advanced functional field and fashion itself upon it. As for the planetary functionality, wherein there is a constant play of a global functional field, those who could shape advanced responses could be everywhere and everybody. Above all, conscience is

7

See Mill (1974, p. 129).

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nomadic, because what remains stable is only the differentiated energy of the functional field. The responses to it are never, and can never, be fully successful. They change constantly and, in an endlessly adaptive game, one parcel of functionality is replaced by another. Therefore, none can claim the possession of an enduring functionality, because as such it would be replaced by a more advanced one in other carriers of conscience. In this way conscience constantly moves and changes carriers. Those who move and are watchful are being granted conscience, and because some always wander, its conveyors are nomadic. Finally, conscience is nomadic because its bearers and servants appear in the functional field, participate, contribute and disappear. Consequently, it constantly changes carriers through the succession of generations that internalise the stage of its functionality. Apart from that, by disappearing from the sphere of life, a great many functional achievements that will remain lost for ever are buried with them. The effacement of a being-in-conscience always ensues the loss of a functional root. 12.3 Functional time Time is employed as a human measure that is linked to the conditions of the human lifespan. But time exceeds our lifespan and exists only insofar as there is functional progress. It is on the basis of the configuration of the structures of functionality that we should perceive time and only to the extent that it serves and is congruent with the emergence of a creative divergence. By understanding time as the process that serves the moment of the functional threshold, we spare decency, energy, and life and we erase the zones of lost time. The understanding of functional time that has as a measure the stratified and embedded models of functionality helps us to realise the real dialectic of time. This in turn helps us to serve this dialectic by collaborating on the strengthening of the mechanisms and forces that accelerate functional time, that is, they bring about new models of functionality. This also means getting rid of lost time, the interdependent assemblage of distorting zones that have departed from the functional field and followed a functional-less dialectic. These zones of lost time, by annexing themselves to the exhaustive dialectic of distortions and the habitual absorption, attendance and participation in the mini games that often dominate the functional dialectic, supersede it and follow a path that will, ultimately, prompt disequilibrium. It is only by dispensing with the residues of the pre-existing condition of time and its blurred relationship with the functional process that we might contribute to the consolidation of a functional creative divergence. Otherwise, we would only deal with functional time when we struck by crisis and when reality discloses itself to all of us as unbearable, defying our words that manufactured a manageable world. But in this case, the distorted field would be dispersed to

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such an extent that the pursuing of functionality would appear as an enormous task for the successive generations. 12.4 The future as the future of conscience The future may only be theorised as a future of conscience. Of course, this does not mean that we can perceive the future as such, but rather as the mechanisms that would increasingly affect its successive formations.8 These are the mechanisms for the production of models of functionality and there is no other conceivable alternative power for historical movement. That is, the future would obey the functional dialectic that reaches richer and higher stages of development. It is impossible to imagine the future and the functional thresholds that humanity would reach in the ethical, institutional and the technical field. At least, we could serve the functional dialectic by guarding it from derailing, by cleansing its path from the pathologies of the ontological and the ideological sphere and thus by facilitating the deepening of its dialectic. Time understood as the progressive development of the functional shifts means that vast periods of history would serve as the testing ground for the invention of islands of functionality.9 We would reflect on them, we would be living in them, but we may not grasp the movement of the functional dialectic, since it is itself the combined energy of the sum of the whole that is external to us; it follows a formative process and it takes time to form adjusting responses to it. Above all, at each time we may consider our age as our exhaustible limits, as the most perfect one or as immutable. But independently of us and our humanly-bound concept of time, human history would always begin anew and it would always begin now. As Aron remarks, “humanity is still in its childhood, if we refer to the time which it still has to live.”10 None can stop the functional dialectic and none can predict the functional creative divergence. All moral

8 Bergson (1977, p. 257) remarks: “Beings have been called into existence who were destined to love and be loved, since creative energy is to be defined as love.” Luhmann (1990, p. 42) points out: “The future is, thus, no longer that which is moving toward us, but instead the open horizon into which, choosing our direction, we are moving.” Tocqueville (1988, p. 549) indicates that “in accustoming the citizens to think of the future in this world, they will gradually be led without noticing it themselves towards religious beliefs.” 9 Popper’s (2013, p. 474; 1964, pp. 99-104, 143) generalised critique of what he calls “historicism” erases the synthetic effects of the functional field and the relationship of conscience with it upon a plane on which islands of functionality are conceived, tested and adopted. When Popper says that “history has no meaning,” he also erases the possibility of understanding history as the field of pain and suffering upon which the conscience of mankind progressively unfolds. 10 See Aron (2017, p. 786). See also Kierkegaard (1994, p. 108). Kant (1991, p. 58) puts it as follows: “If it is now asked whether we at present age live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.”

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systems, religious or otherwise, and all ideologies have dramatically failed to fix an absolute binding morality.11 At the moment it would appear, we would consider it as the starting point of history, shifting our attention from what we have achieved to what we are achieving and to what we yet have to achieve. We are accustomed to perceiving history as the energy of a changeless mass of human subjects. Yet, humans are subject to mutability as well no matter how and when change can be perceived by a subject that in itself undergoes a change.12 Humans have to respond to the imperatives of the functional field and this adaptive process may cause many correlating changes over the human mental structure and, thereafter, on corporeality. Thus, the pursuit of functionality never ends. Of course, it is the functional field that would bring about these human changes and they themselves would aim at adapting to its informational pool. That is, any kind of mutability, even that of the human nature, would be governed by conscience, the motor and the force of all human mutability. In the course of human history, the crucial question pertains to which way we might render moral senses – such as those of justice, equality and fairness – pressing. The functional field always informs on the need for adaptive corrections, no matter how weak its energy appears to be. The corrective signals always precede us and they have an unseen life of their own awaiting receptors. The problem appears with the making up of the human consciousness and the mode of the responses it figures out through this reflective encounter with the functional field. Consciousness always delays in its responses. Human history is both a progress and a delay. There is not a worldsphere, including the rhythmic ones, that responds in a timely manner. They accumulate a distorted

11 As Mill (1974, p. 148) remarks: “There must be some length of time and amount of experience after which a moral or prudential truth may be regarded as established”, and moreover (Mill, 2007, p. 21) that “the corollaries from the principle of utility, like the precepts of every practical art, admit of indefinite improvement and, in a progressive state of human mind, their improvement is perpetually going on.” That means there cannot be a stage where we reach absolute truth or absolute good. On this, see Sidgwick (1981, p. 22, 246, 379); Tocqueville (1988, p. 453); Durkheim (1992, p. 68); Macintyre (2007); Kritcher (2011, p. 285). The practical ethics of moral philosophers firmly ground this view. Plato (The Republic, 459e) suggests a eugenic breeding organised by the state. Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1161b5) calls the slave “a living tool.” Spinoza (2004, p. 387) argues that “women have not by nature equal rights with men,” and Kant (1996, p. 109) says that “a child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law (for the law is marriage) and therefore outside the protection of law.” As far as the death penalty is concerned, Kant argues that a murderer should be condemned to death because “this is what justice, as the idea of judicial authority, wills in accordance with universal laws that are grounded a priori” (1996, p. 107). 12 As E.O. Wilson (1978, p. 42) remarks: “The species remains capable of both genetic and cultural evolution.” See also Wilson (1999, p. 276); Darwin (1985, p. 459).

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structure and what they finally do always appears as if it could have been done earlier. The question that emerges is how long it would take for the mind to respond and by what mutations. Very clearly there is a responsive defect that may possibly increase as the functional field expands and accrues more energy. Each expansion of the functional field stresses the enduring need for building or rebuilding the models of functionality. And while it sends mass data of information, their frequency is greater than the frequency of the corresponding adaptive responses. In order to remedy this, humans would have to devise new adaptive mechanisms that would enable them to conform to multiple challenges and carry out great changes through a mode and at a pace very different from those employed in the past. Only a conscientiously regulated, watchful attitude towards the functional field and a persisting and industrious refinement of the relationship with it could furnish thought to adjust to its injunctions and lessen the zones of lost time. Of course, humans can accelerate the energy of the functional field through the intensification of their activities, the production and ordering of ingenious space and the acceleration of time. Such a thing would result both in the generation of a greater pressure to respond and to a greater level of functional responses. But humans can neither conceive functionality without the autonomous processes of the functional field, nor can they predict the functional signals it would transmit. The functional field is the energy of the sum of the whole that is outside of us and establishes an affective relationship with our conscience and corporeal functionality and, as such renders any act independent of it meaningless. We act because of it, in response to it and in the limits that the stage of its development poses.13 12.5 Politics as a mini game in the functional dialectic The politics of power, party politics or ideological camps dominate the time of the creative field of human energy. Reality is conflated with their sayings and strategies while at the same time there is a whole human population that lives energetically and builds the conditions and the object of the reflections of politics. This kind of politics is a mini game that, with the lapse of time will ever lessen, losing the power to attract the attention of both the participants and the watchers. As Kant puts it, “a true system of politics cannot therefore take a

13 As Spinoza (1996) says, “human power is very limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. So we do not have an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use.”

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single step without first paying tribute to morality.”14 Above all, this kind of mini game disrupts the functional dialectic. It raises itself above everything else and presents itself as the most important aspect of reality, aiming to manipulate the process of reflecting upon and understanding reality. As such, it does not and cannot work. Western liberal democracy is a great human achievement and one of the finest achievements of the progressive work of the human spirit. It is the only political system that has grounded a conversational relationship with the functional field. However, it conceals its motor and its historical dialectic. Very often, it subjects itself to independent values or axioms and in itself does not prudently immerse itself in the energy of the functional field. As a result, Western liberal democracy does not respect the fusion of functionality that is shared by everyone and in which everyone has the right to participate and contribute equally. The human subject that takes itself on an independent flight of functionality by trying to adapt to the constant shift of the functional field is “protected” by the static idea that the liberal democracy has for itself, which is due to the lack of understanding of the energy of the functional field. It seems that it is not aware of its inability to objectify consciousness and imprison it into a world that is under mutation. 15 Politics is in great need of realising its essence. Politics’ essence is to be retracted through an undisturbed affective relationship with the functional field. This means that politics should place itself in the service of the functional field by addressing it and by understanding itself as a responsive attempt to its varying configurations.16 Politics has to serve the functional dialectic by restricting itself to the role of a cooperative organism that raises claims of functionality that undergo examination by the functional field. Thus, politics cannot isolate itself from the fusion of islands of functionality spread throughout the social body by hindering their objectification and implementation. Only a culture of a disinterested, watchful attitude and a deep understanding of the process of the functional dialectic can give politics its lost meaning, which includes of course, the delimiting of its role in the social body.

14 See Kant (1991, p. 125). See also Aron (1968, pp. 134-146). The problem that Aron addresses is whether political parties act always in the common interest. See also Tocqueville (1988, p.175); Rawls (1971, p. 289); Huntington (1968, p. 91). Foucault (2008, p. 191) argues that totalitarianism is connected less with the state itself and more with the subordination of the autonomy of the state to a party ideology. See also Popper (1999, p. 95). 15 Hayek (1944, p. 17) says that “there is nothing in the basic principles of liberalism that make it stationary creed, there are not hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all.” Nevertheless, liberalism unfolds as another fixed ideology. On this see Foucault (2008). For a more moderate account of liberalism see Tocqueville (1988). 16 As Bergson (1946, p. 89) remarks: “Out of ten political errors, nine consist simply in believing that what has ceased to be true is still true. But the tenth, which might be the most serious, will be no longer to believe true what nevertheless, is still true.”

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Politics tend to replace the actual world, to see it through its own frozen maxim that remains unchecked, outdated and that aims to dominate the functional field. Since political participants are just some of the very many carriers, bearers and receptors of functional models, it cannot present itself as the manager of the functional process. Politics can only be utilised as the servant of the functional process. 12.6 The functional chain and being-in-nothingness The future is always haunted by humans’ increasing awareness of their “almost nothingness” amid the endless march of a functional dialectic, the traces of which are lost forever and will never be controlled. Humans are the humble servants of the evolutionary chain that unfolds in the vast historical workplace. It is through their work, ideas, failures, pain, immiseration, impoverishment and death that the first lights of functionality begin to shine. The blocks of functionality at our disposal have been formed through the sacrifice of decency and the life of an incalculable, successive series of past generations, and through their collective thought and representations. Durkheim points out that “we speak a language we did not create; we use the instruments we did not invent; we claim rights we did not establish; each generation inherits a treasury of knowledge that it did not itself amass; and so on.”17 We owe a great debt of gratitude to the ancestors of humanity because, in each instance, they serve as the ground upon which models of functionality that regulate our own improved lives have been devised. Likewise, succeeding generations should feel deep gratitude to us, for the energy of our presence on earth unveils new functional models. The fact of being a tiny part of the great evolutionary machine that builds upon the successive lives of generations, but also the sense of being unnoticed, subject to unjust arrangements, not being remembered and moving towards death, sometimes prompts humans to individually suspend both evolutionary time and the impulse for evolution. The sense of meaninglessness applies to the functional determination as well, the last fortress before helplessness. The feeling of individual nothingness amid the impersonal accumulation of islands

17 See Durkheim (1995, p. 124). See also Mill (2007, p. 13); Kant (1991, p. 44). As Hegel (1977, p. 492, par. 808) states: “The Realm of Spirits which is formed in this way in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor.” Tocqueville (1988, p. 208) puts it as follows: “One man in the short space of life notices a fact and another conceives an idea; one man finds a means and another discovers a formula; as life goes on, humanity collects various fruits of individual experience and builds up knowledge.” Rawls (1971, p. 285) points out that each generation must not only preserve the just institutions it has inherited from past generations, but also has duties towards the future generations.

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of functionality, to live a life and through the necessary interval of the process of their own life to pass on to others great achievements, is a painful thought that suspends creativity.18 The feeling of nothingness can temporally impair the creative impulse and lead to an unfocused inertia. It is a human condition of living at the borders with the human. Outside the borders there is nothingness because, as humans, we measure everything through the limits of our own lifespan. Perhaps it is forgetfulness that guards us within its borders. As Bergson says, “a certain ignorance of the self is perhaps useful to a being which must exteriorise itself in order to act.”19 The effect of being-in-nothingness as a state of mind can also strengthen the devotion to the functional dialectic. It could enable us to grasp the essence of the human condition; a predisposition to ground a conversational relationship with the functional field that brings about innovation and actualises a constant drive to enhance functionality that is equivalent with the human equilibrium. The human only breathes in a culture of mastering reality through its transfiguration. Thus, the sense of being-in-nothingness could aid us to crystallise and firmly ground the commitment to place ourselves in the service of the life of functionality to which everyone is fit to contribute. Once the human-bound feeling of nothingness strikes, an awareness of long-term dialectic compensates as a remedy. It is upon this long-term dialectic that one reaffirms its will to live more. In other words, through the cathartic meditation of the being-in-nothingness, the remnants of the bonds that make the effect of any type of mini game possible could be erased as something with which thought could no longer occupy itself. It could help us in a quasi-mystical mode to sharply conceptualise functional time and thus to direct ourselves only to the pure functional dialectic.20 The feeling of nothingness never abandons us; it comes back and strikes us. Unlike the moment of joining time with our birth, the moment of disjoining it with our death is dreadful. But each time it recurs, we go through a consciencecleansing process in which time detects only what is essential, abandoning thus the remnants of disuse and instrumentalism that divert us from the functional dialectic. The being-in-nothingness is a bridge towards a being-in-

18

See Schopenhauer (1966, p. 359); Bergson (1977, p. 130); Dworkin (2013, p. 150). See Bergson (1946, p. 41). 20 Socrates’ fearless view of death is interlinked with his belief in after life justice: “It is wrongdoing that is to be feared; for to enter the next world with one’s soul loaded with wrongdoing is the ultimate of all evil” in Plato (Gorgias 522e). See also Plato (Phaedo 67b), where he connects death with absolute and pure truth since the immortal soul is freed from the body that impairs knowledge. The same function of religion to answer to human’s longing for immortality and to the acceptance of death is also ascribed to by Tocqueville (1988, p. 299). For a secular humanist account of death see Kitcher (2014, pp 100-104); Damasio (2003, p. 273); Barnes (2008). 19

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conscience that we cross and re-cross many times. The being-towards-death21 is compensated by the being-in-conscience, by means of which the human life realises the predominance of functional time. The more intensive the beingtowards-death remains, the stronger the commitment to serve the progress of conscience. Conscience, at any rate, compensates for individual death and can possibly remove the fear of death. The moment we die the functional field grows. It grows because we ourselves are servants of it, contributing to its enlargement and yielding each time by virtue of our death a powerful reflection about the functional dialectic of life. Thus, conscience is constructed upon pain, death and human misery. The feeling of nothingness draws us always closer to the functional dialectic whose life becomes our life. Arendt remarks that “birth and death presuppose a world which is not in constant movement, but whose durability and relative permanence makes appearance and disappearance possible, which existed before any one individual appeared into it and will survive its eventual departure.”22 Suspending by virtue of a hypothesis our presence in the world, we can easily understand that the world flows without any change at all. The world is indifferent to our distinct existence. A future without us can only be conceived as a future of conscience, of a spirit whose constituent elements are reproduced and refined. Through the imaginary perspective of a world without us, we may probably enlighten the most pure and disinterested ethical attitude: our interest in the future pertains only to our interest in the progressive growth of conscience. A philosophy of the future and our reflection about the future in which we will not exist is an exercise upon the dialectic of conscience. By exercising ourselves in the thought of a future in which we are absent, we also abandon the elements of our lives that are not aligned with the functional dialectic whose lifespan and structural laws exceed ours. In such a case, death is seen from the point of view of conscience. The being-in-conscience releases

21 Heidegger (1962, p. 295) defines the anxiety of being-towards-death as the “anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-being which is one’s ownmost, non-relational, and not to be outstripped.” Spinoza (1996, p. 151) argues that “a free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.” See Also Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1114b 25). Arendt (1969, p. 68) remarks that “death indicates extreme loneliness and impotence.” For Tocqueville (1988, p. 487), “man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears for ever in the bosom of God.” 22 See Ardent (1958, p. 97). Arendt (1969, p. 68) also says that “it was the certainty of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed and word and prompted them to establish a body politic which was potentially immortal.” Hegel (1977, p. 18, par. 32) says that “the life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and manifests itself in it.” See also Kojѐve (1980, p. 57, 257).

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itself from its selfhood, losing itself by becoming part of the functional time.23 The dialectic of conscience needs the energy and the reflective re-grounding of successive waves of generations in order to unfold. In this sense, the “history of conscience” encapsulates the history of every single individual who has lived upon this earth. It consists of the eternal presence of the individual presence hiding within itself the pain, the suffering, the helplessness and the tragedy of humans. Conscience grows after the withdrawal of eternally silenced humans. 12.7 Storing up the functional leaps The functional shifts and leaps are stored within the field of human historicity. They are registered within the institutions, the constitutions, the juridical system and the entire field of the human world. The succession of one generation by another regenerates and revitalises these functional shifts by means of internalisation and refinement. But still their permanence and durability depend upon a process of indoctrination and adjustment on behalf of the successive generations of subjectivities. What is still functional should continue its application, and what is not should be reshaped. However, the configuration of all the component parts of actual historical reality cannot be considered a permanent guardian of the functional leaps.24 The cause and the prime mover of the functional achievements themselves exist in the multiplicity of the constitutive elements of the collective spirit of a worldsphere. It is in its temporality that meaning is given to their reification. The reification itself does not guarantee a stable process of the functional shifts. It needs an accompanying collective spirit that has been shaped accordingly and modelled upon great functional thresholds. This spirit needs to preserve an active and meaningful holistic affective relationship with the world of reification that is effected by the formative effects of a network of forces. Once the collective spirit that vitalises the attained stages of functionality loses its vitality and hence its functional deposits, modifiability and adjustability, the institutions themselves can neither rescue nor regenerate it. That is, once the actual reality of functionality loses the spirit that harbours and sustains it, it cannot itself regenerate, reorient or replace the prime role of this

23 Parsons (1978, p. 346) maintains that “from an evolutionary point of view, which we have contended is basic to all modern science, death must be regarded as having high survival value, organically at least to the species, actionwise to the future of the sociocultural system.” Schopenhauer (1966, p. 351; 1969, p. 276), along the same lines, understands death as the return to nature, to the indestructible “objectified will-to-live”, to the “thing-in-itself to which the individual partakes of by being itself a will to live.” Thus, “if only we saw deeply enough, we should certainly agree with nature, and regard life or death as indifferently as does she.” (1966, p. 474). 24 See Bergson (1977, p. 82, 127).

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spirit. On the contrary, the actual reification of a functional stage will gradually lose its functional charge as well. Apart from that, there is a historical delay in the process of acceding to the stage of consciousness that supports and is supported by the reification of the functional leaps. We cannot disperse the products of the work of a creative spirit in a worldsphere and expect an accompanying mode of being to form automatically. This educational training upon the moulding of the spirit fitted to conform to the stage of functionality, this recurring process that lasts for years and starts at every single moment from the very beginning of one’s life, is a unique human trait. As humans, we have constructed a historical world – more recently than we normally assume – that has not yet acquired deeply-embedded mental or corporeal roots. That is, we do not carry, deeply fixed inside us by our birth, the compressed possibilities of this world as a backing. We cannot save time by invalidating from the beginning or even not consider any tested and failed detours of the past. And, since fundamental functional leaps have not yet been fixed and stored in the human mind, their subsistence depends to an extent upon the contingencies and setbacks of the actual reality. Thus, there is the danger of them being degraded. Humans are possibly in great need of devising ways to store up the generative core of the functional stages into their consciousness. Thereafter, this developed spirit that grounds functionality in a compacted form should pass from one generation to the other. That is, the functional progress and whatever it can procure of the reproduction of its mental achievements in the future, should obtain a mental and corporeal root as well. As Darwin points out, “looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.”25 This would result in a great saving of time-consuming energy and would lessen

25 See Darwin (2004, p. 150). Wilson (1999, p. 276) notes that “it is to be expected that in the course of evolutionary history, genes predisposing people toward cooperative behaviour would have to predominate in the human population as a whole.” P. Thompson (2012, p. 255), along the same lines, remarks: “That human populations can change fitness parameters through cognitive abilities that transform the evolutionary environment and mould behaviour in fitness-enhancing ways changes dramatically the way in which natural selection can be applied.” Singer (2011, pp. 172-173) says that “in the future we will be more aware of the genetic consequences of our practices and will be able to take deliberate steps to see that our culture not only encourages ethical conduct in the present generation but enhances its prospects of spreading in the next.” From the point of view of pure biology, Kojѐve’s (1980, p.159, note 6) and Fukuyama’s remarks (1992, p. 311) about the disappearance of the human who negates the given reality, the lack of change in the human itself that the end of history brings about and the return to the human to animality, seem logically impossible.

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the dependence of the process of functionality on the reified world. We lose time because what we once achieved, we do not yet have the means to imprint in time and place and, in so doing, prepare the next functional leap with a crystallised evolutionary consciousness but also with the empowerment of the preceding and registered stages of functionality. 12.8 The ethical limits of the functional dialectic There can be no other impulse for historical progress other than conscience and the network of core values that have been ontologically conceived and applied as a practical moral system. Theories about the end of history and the reconciliation of all subjective desires with the objective reality exist because they omit the energy of the functional field and the relationship which conscience as a constant creative divergence establishes. It is only under these terms that the articulation of an “absolute knowledge, that is, a universally and eternally valid knowledge” becomes possible. Kojève argues that for Hegel the motor of history is the desire for recognition that can be absolutely satisfied in a universal and homogeneous state devoid of any contradictions heralding the end of history.26 The same view is also adopted by Fukuyama27 who argues that the desire for recognition would be satisfied by the universal and homogeneous western liberal democracy. Absolute knowledge also includes the reconciliation of philosophical anthropology with religious theology through the perfect man who no longer opposes objective reality, that the end of history reveals.28 In this analysis, the conversational relationship of conscience with the functional field, composed by both the natural and the historical world, renders the functional dialectic as the motor of history which, because of its very constitution, including subjective reflection upon the objective reality, never ends. No other practical moral system affected the progress of functionality more than the Christian moral system. It installed a functional orientation that motivated and, in its turn, was enriched by the practical energy of the human spirit that achieved an autonomous dialectic. This practical moral system does not belong to the past, since it little affected the preceding actual reality, but lies in the future, which reveals more and more clearly its long-term functionality.29 The limits posed by this moral system that became the regulating force of Western societies seem to be the evolutionary limits from

26

See Kojѐve (1980, p. 33) See Fukuyama (1992, pp. 201-202). 28 See Kojève (1980, p. 67, 135, 149, 237). For a critique of Hegel’s treatment of the morality of conscience, see Popper (2013, p. 278). 29 As Tocqueville (1988, p. 486) maintains: “Just when every man, raising his eyes above his country, begins at last to see mankind at large, God shows himself more clearly to human perception in full and entire majesty.” 27

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which, no matter how hard we try, we cannot think of any possibility of transgression. They seem to be the only proper way, carrying the compacted thought of a mass data of experience of the people of the past. Only an audacity and hubris that could detach us from the long detour of the evolutionary chain could make us go beyond them.30 And even if we go beyond them, we would be judged and corrected by the re-emergence of the effect of the functional field, losing functional time in the meantime.31 The complexity of the responses that the functional field calls for render the mind a great adaptive machine. By exercising its adaptability and conformity, the mind builds models of functionality – that is, conscience – which always appear, not only as a partial response, but also as a response that is called once more to readjust itself. It is from this moment that the mental world evolved, having conscience as the motor of its evolution and following a progressive evolutionary mutation. It is the motor of historical progress that only the powers of earth, sky and sea can destroy. Thus, we should find a way for the islands of functionality to be joined, rather than allowing them to depend on us, the world and the time in which we live. We may, at times, lose our achievements of the actual world, but we should preserve inside us the traces of our functional stage. We are in great need of attaining a being-in-its-spirit. That is, we should in every instance be the universal spirit of this world.

30 Nietzsche’s (1984, pp. 31, 34; 2008, pp. 22-25, 59; 2002, p. 7) theory equates with this attempt. The long-term effect of Nietzsche’s disregard of objective reality leads to the Nazi axiom that everything is possible. See also Heidegger (1962, p. 332). As Arendt (1966, p. 387) remarks: “What binds men together is their firm belief in human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.” For the inversion of values in the communist regimes, see Aron (2017, p. 670). 31 Kant (1996, p. 231) alludes to the corrective effects of the functional field as follows: “Instead it is justice – as if it were a substance (otherwise called eternal justice) which, like the fate (destiny) of the ancient philosophical poets, is above even Jupiter – that pronounces on rights in accordance with an iron, inevitable necessity which we cannot penetrate further.”

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Index A activity of thought, 1 Alexander, 174 animality, 173 anthropomorphic, 175 Arendt, 1 Aristotle, 6 Arnold and Verba, 88 Aron, 96 arrhythmia, 22 Athens, 99

B Badiou, 179 being in enhanced conscience, 43 being-driven-to God, 178 being-towards-death, 194 Bergson, 3 biological survival, 52

C calendar time, 52 capitalism, 155 Castoriadis, 69 Christianity, 170 Cold War, 120 collective evil, 30 collectivism, 83 communism, 155 conscience, 2 conscience-centric, 167 consciousness, 138 consilience, vii conversational relationship, 153 corporeal constitution, 149

corporeal functionality, 12 corporeal harmony, 56 corporeal rhythm, 138 creative divergence, 1 creative shifts, 173 crisis of conscience, 14 cultural evolution, 9

D D.S. Wilson, 174 Damasio, 106 Darwin, 5 Dawkins, 174 de Waal, 10 Democracy, 101 democratic inequality, 146 Descartes, 172 dialectic of the development, 34 dialectical relationship, 83 distorted worlds, 69 distortions, 69 Dogmatism, 185 drive, 2 Durkheim, 64

E E.O. Wilson, 8 economic game, 165 Economy, 151 end of history, 197 ethical selection, 9 eurhythmia, 67 existential conditions, 57

Index

208

F fast-paced rhythm, 94 flow of reality, 3 Forgiveness, 16 freedom, 164 Freedom of conscience, 182 Fukuyama, 120 functional alliance, 125 functional barometer, 117 functional convergence, 148 functional deposit, 170 functional depth, 87 functional dialectic, 131 functional difference, 119 functional distance, 119 Functional economy, 156 functional field, 3 functional leap, 111 Functional resemblance, 149 functional scale, 122 functional threshold, 187 functional tide, 128 functional time, 84 functional world, 87

G games of life, 151 Globalisation, 148 God, 169 great philanthropists, 164 Greeks, 16 guilt, 14

Huntington, 120

I Ideologies, 116 idio-rhythm, 57 idio-time, 57 imagination, 2 individual biorhythm, 58 intersubjective communication, 60 Inter-worldly temporality, 138 invisible hand, 157 Islands of functionality, 7 islands of resistance, 85

J Jaeger, 99 Jesus Christ, 16 justice, 98

K Kant, 141 Kitcher, 9 Kojѐve, 150

L lapse of time, 114 Lefebvre, 8 liberal democracy, 160 Locke, 169

M H Hayek, 155 Hegel, 108 Heidegger, 4 Heraclitean flux, 177 human evolution, 180

Mafia, 78 Marx, 155 mechanical thoughtlessness, 28 Mill, 42 minimal state, 159 money, 152 moods, 4

Index

209

moral leap, 152 moral response, 46 moral system, 142 mutability, 70

N Nietzsche, 181 nomadic, 186 nothingness, 192

O objective time, 74

P parameters of survival, 9 parrhesia, 20 Parsons, 87 philosophy of the future, 183 Planetary functionality, 135 Plato, 24 politics, 190 Popper, 156 poverty, 162 Profit, 163

Q qualitative time, 112

R Rawls, 66 Reflection, 3 reflective rhythm, 71 responsive defect, 190 Revenge, 19 rhythmic equilibrium, 59 rhythmic harmony, 67, 93 Richerson and Boyd, 9

S Sidgwick, 98 slow rhythm, 77 Smith, 157 sociobiology, 8 Socrates, 1 Solon, 165 Sparta, 82 Spinoza, 47 spirit, 195 state, 158 subjective evil, 27 Subjective temporality, 108 surplus, 152 surplus- value, 167 survivability, 33

T technology, 139 temporal divergence, 109 Temporal heterogeneity, 122 temporal leap, 45 temporal mutation, 145 temporal rhythm, 46 temporal shift, 140 temporality, 46 The aura of life, 64 thought, 1 Time, 183 Tocqueville, 96 Trivers, 10

U unity of virtues, 24

V value, 153

Index

210

W Walzer, 37 worldly temporality, 117 worldsphere, 69

Z zones of anomy, 80 zones of lost time, 131