The Common Between Substance and Subject: A Hegelian Proposal for a New Social Ontology

Contemporary society reached an unbridgeable barrier, manifested in multiple crises, from economic and ecological to social and conceptual. Not only are we unable to organize effective resistance to the catastrophic path of absolute capitalism, but, what is more, we seem to have lost the capacity to imagine a common future for humanity. This impasse is contained in the modern scientific and economic ideal of domination over nature, accompanied by the social enforcement of possessive individualism. To supersede this impasse, we need a new paradigm encompassing the field of individual and collective agency and the formal and informal structures that provide for or support social cohesion. This paradigm is the common. The objective of the research project is to construct a new conception of the common. We are not considering the idea of the common in opposition to the individual, as is usually thought, but regard it as a fundamental principle that determines our relation to ourselves and to the world, i.e., as praxis. Hegel offers an elaborate effort to grasp the modern problem of how to think the interplay between the particular and the universal, the individual and the social, is most fundamentally embodied in the idea of the universal work. The idea is crucial for understanding the common while also constituting the conceptual building block of a new social ontology. According to Hegel, universal work refers to a particular political form that arises through the actions of all and of each individual, unifying and equalizing them in retrospect. Unlike his well-known model of mutual recognition, the model of universal work encompasses the process of an individual’s self-realization through the practice of artistic creation, which necessitates others while preserving the idea of one’s unique nature. In this way, the module incorporates both being and doing, the singular and the collective, and offers an understanding of one’s possibility for self-realization through involvement in the common work. The complementary objective of the project is to revisit Hegel’s idea by constructing a comprehensive new social ontology premised on the common. By revitalizing Hegel’s idea of the universal work, the project endeavours to offer new perspectives in studies of German idealism, political philosophy and critical theory, and to tackle the current crisis of the common in society. This activity will be supported by an analysis of the constantly forming nature of the common. In this regard, the labour dynamic in capitalist modernity will be examined in terms of the economic category of abstract labour and the constant valorisation of human actions through the value form. To accomplish this, three comprehensive analyses will be conducted: (i) an analysis of the forms of being together: focusing on understanding the different forms of being together and their political dimensions; challenging the assumption that the common is merely the sum of individual efforts by focusing on Marx’s concept of Gemeinwesen; (ii) an analysis of the tension between expropriation and communalisation: expanding upon the classical analysis of the tragedy of the commons by addressing the tension between expropriation and communalisation regarding contemporary political and economic accounts of the common ; focusing on Marx’s concept of the general intellect; (iii) the introduction of a new concept of the common: developing a new understanding of the common for our time; extending the concept of the common to include the entire sphere of (non)living things; analyzing solidarity as an organizing principle in various emancipatory struggles; reimagining the common for the 21st century, so that it intersects with critical perspectives in postcolonial and feminist critiques of political economy and critical ecology. The project will be significantly enhanced by a podcast, which will communicate insights into how the undoing of the common affects their life to a broad audience.