An Invisible Global Social Value

Abstract

By remaining blind to an invisible global social value, we are unable to face up to the challenges posed by today’s world. We do not ask insistently enough who we are, remaining content with traditional answers starting with those inherited from the Greeks: we are a species of animal, the rational animal, a social animal, a political animal, and proceeding to later answers in the modern age, including: we are individual subjects endowed with inner consciousness or free subjects with innate individual rights. This paper aims to lift the veil on some of our Western delusions about individual freedom in private-property owning, more or less liberal democracies in a globalized world — a world whose movement is constrained by a ceaseless, subterranean, circular, movement of thingfied value that is never adequately conceived and named as such. To conceptualize it as such, and thus bring it to light, is the task of hermeneutic phenomenology. Doing so reveals that we are not free subjects, but players in a game whose movements we only darkly surmise, reduced to mere character masks in a farce.