On Economics Considered as a Metaphysics

Something “produced” is “supplied” to meet the “demand” for “consumption”, and this is a “market”.   
What the sentence before this one says stands as a philosophy of economics which treats the vague   
every-day words, those said in scare quotes, as the “why” or “cause” in the opinion of the many for their  
existence in the decisive respect. One exists, then, so far as commodities exist, and one is such a being  
as to have commodities available to it in the widest sense. One lives in “the market”, such is   

the marching order, and there it seeks according to the truth which is unconcealed 

according to the being of Dasein. Only in a mythical sense can one say that “once upon a time” the word  

economics was a word that named the household of a Greek, and pointed to the subject matter of  
it management as in the work by Xenophon, Οἰκονομικός.

Looking forward, into memory, Hobbes appears as one who groped, half-way in every respect, towards 
reality. He was, by mythos, “the first economist”, yet, needless to say, he missed the mark in every 
serious sense and never grasped the nature of commodity properly. For in Hobbes, the life of man is
still higher and more serious than commodity itself, as what stands alongside commodities in the market 
 forever.

An episteme proper to the truth of Dasein was not available to Hobbes. He fundamentally 

misunderstood truth. For Hobbes, truth was a matter of “self preservation”. Power, in Hobbes, still had a
mythical and fairytale like unclarity. Power, and that meant, man’s ability to think possibilities. The, I take
pride in my ability to generate new possibilities. In Locke, a step towards reality is achieved when he

 modifies the notion of self preservation as the essence of man’s telos and speaks of “comfortable self 

preservation”. Power, in Locke, is now achieving a kind of reality, for Locke takes over the possibility 

and endows it with reality when he says: happiness is to have the ability to command the things that 

bring happiness rather than the enjoyment of them. In this, he begins to set aside the mythical “self 

preservation”, for, to be sure, no one ever did calculate on the basis of the belief in their own death. 

Momentous he prepares to set aside the possibility as human, and lets power be ability to move 

commodity as such. Here we begin to understand the market as the situation of Dasein. The truth 
that is uncovered is the ground and source of Dasein itself.

Truth means what is forever, what is always available to found a science on, it is what “everything relies

 on”. Economics regarded metaphysically points to a philosophic wisdom. At first, one thinks of a

 dialogical arrived at orientation towards the market. Does the market belong to force called “the

 invisible hand”? Or to a “spontaneous” dispensation? To be sure, in a sense, everything is set loose,

 the producers, the supply side, with their hopes to capture some part of the demand of the average

 Dasein in its essence as consumer who looks about shrewdly with eyes clear for some clearance sale

 at a Walmart. Everything comes forth as it does and can never be set down as a orderly rule. And yet,

 on the other hand, a very few individuals, according to a special hexis, an ethos, which is the essence

 of their being, deal with themselves to produce the core of the supply and all serious innovation. If this

 ethos is a phronesis, for instance, in that of Wall Street, or of the modified and differing ethos of Silicon

 Valley, takes hold of capital flows, interjected the university and its research laboratories, and its link to 
the market, of all capital gains as a running ahead of all beings including those of university endowments,
 of a constant whirl of capital pointing obliquely towards massive military requirements, whereby all 
value gravitates and accumulates in armed core stores of value, for instance in offshore ventures 
which are bought back by the core managers after an initial offering, then we see the ragging 
of power in its real and no longer mythical form (one should note: the ability to obliterate from the 
face of the planet obstacles to the flow is not the reality of the commodity, for it is assured by the 
human being itself and only visible what the human is no longer seen a "subject" alongside its 
"commodity", but as what allows commodity to come forth at all in a market world: this sense of 
the form of truth moves in a fundamentally different way than the Marxist notion that capital was 
overemphasis at the expense of other forces due to polemical extremes between Marx and his 
contemporaries, rather, here, what is at stake is thinking phenomenologically in the proper sense of 
a "phenomenology of the inapparent"). 

So far as this power sets aside all possibility of confusing itself with nineteenth century mythical notions

 of natural value, and becomes “air”, set loose from all benchmarks, from all reserves, from gold, from

 the “real economy”, moving according to the last airy myth of its positive externality and its visibility as a

 gigantic planetary ponzi scheme, one begins, at length, to see the arche or origin of economics, the

 primordial “why”. This why is being itself. So far as Descartes speaks of the cogito ergo sum, such that

 in each experience there is the cognition of the universal, of commodity, in each commodity that sits

beside other commodities, the sum, the consumer, is supposed to be the ground that essentially allows

 the market to come forward. And yet, phenomenologically, is the consumer even any more necessary?

 “Logically” the consumer is the one who may be deceived by the notion that they have there something

 they might conceivably demand. The very fact that they could be mistaken in the belief that they 

demand something proves that they are consumers. This is not only a epistemological truth, a truth

 stable as a syllogism which might be discussed in the shadow of the houses apart form “actual life”,

 but, rather, at first, the contradiction, is alive in common dealings, in life. The contradiction in ordinary

 life is the mistake or lie. I don’t demand this thing, but I am such to know that I don’t demand it. I believe

 myself to demand it, but I'm such to be confused or mistaken about this belief. And, therefore, I am a 

consumer, one who has been mistaken in what I am to demand. Yet, did Husserl really make this 

mistake? Perhaps so. It is so in Husserl that something mysterious and worthy of our consideration 

occurred. Husserl produced outstanding students which later in turn influenced his own thinking. In his 

final works he showed the fruit of this influence, having gleaned the essence of his great student 

Heidegger. Thus, again, in Husserl, there is a consideration of the: it can not be a “mistake”: the 

Cartesian formula, I doubt, but, by this, am such to doubt, I am such to be fooled, and so am. A genuine

 phenomenology, it comes clear, through Heidegger, can not be bound by the ”mistake”. It outstrips the

 possibility of any science. Thus, its truth is not forever. In thinking over the essence of the uberhaupt, 
of the philosophy of uberhaupt, of overhead, of everything, of the “framing”, Heidegger lets being be, 
not by refusing the noumenal , but, rather, by letting the noumenal be as what is untouched by pathos, 
by pathe, by the cycles that move the moon and the emotions that are, for man, interest, the interest of 
a mother in her children, of a man in his country, of the philosopher in, what?--at length, the letting be 
of any philosophy. 

It is a strange thing that the word “bitte”, translated in English as “please”, has for its essence 

something like command. At bottom it is a command, and is felt often as simple rudeness. Where the

 word please is essential an extension of the region of courtesy holds sway. It may, at times, be felt as something

 formal, something that enforces a removal from the other, but it is rarely felt as rude, the very opposite

 of its essential meaning. If the German language has no word for please, is this simply explainable by

 means of “action”, of behaviour? Isn’t it that behaviour already names a mode of Dasein? Is

 financialization to be set aside in different languages, and shown not to exactly hold, in this or that

 “culture”? Or, does it already point to a concern with truth? What kind of truth? A truth that is eternal,

 and that all humans should seek to grasp in their hexis, in their ethos, in their being? But, is this at all

 what is at stake for a being thought in the sense of a phenomenology which is without the possibility of

 a mistake? Here we are drawn to consider how thinking differs from knowing, and come to the translucent

 crystal of the saying that “we are not yet thinking”--indeed!, we still want to know!