‘SOVEREIGNTY’ AND ‘OWNERSHIP’ AS THE ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

Abstract

The paper endeavors to offer a justification of social ontology as a true and universal form of philosophic thinking. As the two backbone notions of it I suggest ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ownership’ that are held in agreement by ‘activity’. In the introduction, an axiomatic assumption is introduced that asserts the essential identity of thinking (consciousness) and communication, which is a universal and integral handicap of activity that transforms the spontaneous uncertainty of being into the arranged certainty of the world. In the context of such an approach, thinking as communication is understood not so much functionally as substantially. At the same time, communication as thinking embodies the principle of a sovereign personality, which, in the horizon of social space, is carried out in the institution of property, covering both the totality of a person's inner content and the system of his relations with the surrounding world. Moreover, the ‘surrounding world’ is interpreted in the broadest sense as a set of indefinite objects translated into a system of broadcasting things. Herein I try to demonstrate the historical retrospective of social ontology through contemplation of these categories. A particular importance is given to the substance of ‘ownership’ and to modernity in the bourgeois civilization pointing to the fundamental contradictions in their respective actualization. In particular, the article emphasizes that in the era of modernity of postmodernity, in the conditions of bourgeois and post-bourgeois society, the mechanism of ‘mastering’ as a form of actualization of the institution of property and the assertion of a sovereign personality is consistently transformed into a mechanism of ‘appropriation’. This mutation becomes the cause of personality desuverenization. According to the authors, the desuverenization of personality is carried out in the mode of ‘alienation’ or exploitation, in the broad sense of the word, of the basic content of a person as a being who maintains the order of being through free implementing activity.