33. TECHNOLOGY, THE USEFUL AND THE GOOD

The thing that is useful to me may not be useful to you.  If "use" establishes that a thing is good, then, because what is of use to me may not be useful to you, the good for the two of us is a different good.  The good, then, as Plato would say, is not one but many.  In fact, on this personal level the notion of "good" may flatly contradict itself:  What is good for you may be outright hurtful to you.  At this point we evoke still another issue:  How may what is good for me, because it is useful to me, also be good for you?  But let us assume that what it is that we are talking about is useful to me but not to you.  Then how would it be possible for that thing that is useful to one person but not to another be also good for both.  How might we salvage out of this situation of conflict a "common good"?  There is an infinity of circumstances where humans come together, each expecting the collaboration to be useful to himself, and yet what is useful to one person in one way is useful, too, to another person in another way.  To caculate the reward to a given person is impossible, given the multitude of angles and possibilities in each instance of cooperation.  This is where the idea of "the common good" arises.  What we understand society to be depends essentially on the idea that there is something  which rewards each individual person apart from any consideration of personal usefullness.  Here, however, we have radically changed our discussion of "the good."  That is, we have separated the notion of good from the notion of use.  We have already said that the good of something follows from the use or usefulness of that thng.  Now we are saying something entirely different.  We either have to say that what is of use to me is also of use to you.  Or we must say, alternately, that the good of thing is in fact not dependent on the use of a thing.  Here we begin to talk about something vaguely as The Good. 

But before there can be such an abrupt change in human relationships a groundwork of commonality must be established.  I have already discussed this groundwork in early sections of this blog.  I will review these findings as follows. 

In this brief paragraph I am trying to bring together some of my earlier material--on agreements, contracts and the so-called Social Contract--with, on the other hand, material that is more in the area of religion.  Ideally we may strive toward a "system" such as were aspired to by the major philosophers, from Spencer to Hegel.   We are not at the point of systemitizing what is in this blog; nor do we even suggest we are close.  What I am doing now, in this "performance philosophy" (essentially, experimentation) is to run some material together with other material without however any real consciousness of the connection.  Hopefully a system will emerge.  The first interaction or relationship among humans that was purely human, and depended upon language and symbolic communication,  I call the "agreement."   This was an understanding, made possible by language--and reference to time and place and the nature of the mutual business--that only humans could have.  As an exercise in Philosophical Anthropology we begin now with a very simple situation.  On the other hand, our ultimate purpose is to move on to considerations far beyond what we'd experience in the lives of early hunters and gatherers.  I speak of government.  Could we, it is asked, find the origins of governments of advanced nations within these simple early agreements between just several men?  We aver the answer here is no.  In the agreement itself, which we call a "simple" agreement, there is no provision within this understanding as to the enforcement of it.  The agreement by itself, simply speaking, is utopian and anarchistic.  That is to say, because the agreement is just between the two or three men, and does not involve or evoke any outside authority to enforce it, the agreement "assumes" that its terms will be complied with by all parties.  There is no guarantee of compliance.  There is no guarantee, either, of compliance by citizens of any terms of a utopian or anarchistic society.  That society has no government to enforce compliance.  We move on at a brisk pace to consider one of the great social theories of all times, JJ Rousseau's Social Contract; great, we are saying, because of its extreme influence, at the criticial time of the European Enlightenment on the likewise momentous framing of the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.  Rousseau's influence is inestimable.  Our only purpose here is to point out a flaw--a major contradiction--in this theory.    That contradiction is this:  Rousseau's Social Contract theory presupposes that, just as there may be a contract between individuals that enforces their agreement, there is a contract in sensu stricto between "the people" as a whole and their "government."  That contract states that the people will do such and such and the government, for its part, will do such and such. 

This is a fallacious theory; there is a flaw in the theory that has become a general flaw in human thinking about government.  Indeed it is remarkable that such a flaw in such a major piece of writing, and one whose attempted application is to such a wide segment of humanity, could remain so long unnoticed.  That flaw is this:  while an agreement itself is anarchist and utopian, its terms may be enforced by submission of the agreement to a "third party," stronger than both principle parties, for enforcement.  That is, if I have a large dispute with my wife, the State of illinois, through police and judges, may step in to enforce the original marriage contract.  What makes our agreement of marriage a contract of marriage is the provision of enforcement from outside the agreement.  This is a point that is easy to understand.  But, in the instance of an "agreement" between the so-called "people" and the people's government, who is to enforce that agreement?  Since there is no agency larger than either party that could step in  to enforce the agreement, the agreement cannot be called a contract.  Rousseaus Social Contract is a categorical impossibility.  But there is more.  The relationship between the people on the one hand and government on the other, if this relation is to be called an agreement, is an agreement in every sense.  It is unenforcable, lacking a third party.  The agreement is in every sense of the words anarchistic and utopian.  In fact, lacking a power higher than government to enforce the "agreement" government has with the people, there is no real government at all; and the people live, perforce, in a state of utopian anarchy.  This state is utopian because all one can hope for is the good will of his neighbor.

Finally, The Good resolves--symbolically and in theory only--every issue raised by the contradictions of human interaction.  That is, among humans there can be an understanding--but just as likely a misunderstanding.  The Good resolves the discrepancy between my use and your use; and my good and your good.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-10-06 14:14:19)

First this blog talked about the human being's own conception of man, or of himself generally.  There have been several ideas of Man that emanate from various sources.  Philosophical Anthropology admits to only a very speculative notion as to Man; but PA also is the most aggressive critique of existing concepts of Man.  These other conceptions arise from the individual himself as to who he is.  Psychologists see now, through compelling research, that a human must have an image of himself, programed in his psyche, before he can function.  This image of himself is a goal to aspire to and an orienting feature of the individual personality.  But there is more.  Culture provides everyone with a conception of Man.  Here we have a goal, too, or an image of perfection or "the good" that humans can aspire to as members of a group.  Finally, anthropological and biological science contributes a conception of Man.  This conception is the least important in the thinking of humans.  I have already said that the conception of Man is regarded by political and religious leaders (who work closely together) as much too important to be left to mere scientists.  The conception of Man is central to the unity of society.  This idea is close to, or even identical with, the idea of "the good."  Man here is a moral being rather than (we are saying) a real or scientifically describable being.    But there is more.  We interject at this point with some general considerations of Philosophical Anthropology The self-concept of Man is not science; rather, more correctly, the idea is religious.  That is, the human being actually has forever had scarcely any idea of himself as a biological species.  We find a strong imago humani in Greek philosophy; yet these same Greeks had little notion of their species as a whole.  Even while they had a concept "man," they had no sense in their time of a species as such; such science waited until Linneaus, much later.  Where we talk about a concept "man" we must understand that the biological concept and the (essentially) religious idea paralleled one another in their change and development but did not intersect.  Biology and culture had in principle and ideology no bearing on one another.  We have passed from early knowledge to that of today without any greater connection of species taxonomy to our cultural and societal conception of man.  That is convenient for social ideology.  The concept of human equality or human justice makes no sense for a taxonomic species being; such idealism has meaning only for a purely religious and metaphysical being.  Here we may say that the moral man and the real (scientifically describable) man are categorically distinct from one another.  The real man categorically cannot be the moral man and vice versa.  This is what we mean by categorical:  the one cannot be the other; neither can be the other one.  That the Man is a moral entity means he cannot be a factual man.  We have already spoken of Carnap's dictum that a value cannot be derived from a fact.  It follows that a moral man cannot be derived from a factual man.  To separate spheres of reality into moral and factual spheres is to separate them absolutely.  Ironically, on the other hand, in the popular and scientific literature we have before us we find a certain casualness as to this point.  There is a certain lapsing back and forth between the two fields wherein moral ideas appear to be factual ones, and vice versa.

It remains finally to talk about the underlying relationship between the species being and the religious one.  In pursuit of this understanding I began studies at Tubingen University in Germany under Otto Friedrich Bullnow, who was then a ranking leader and writer in the area of Philosophical Anthropology.  Through him, as readings for my course, I became acquainted with the writings of Gehlen, Plessner and Scheler.  I still after 45 years have and read these books.  Bullnow's writing was clear but specialized; the other writers have been turgid in an irritating German sort of way.  There is much to be said about these writngs.  My own point here is very simple and straightforward, yet is receptive to Hegelian dialectic.  I said earlier that Philosophical Anthropology begins its conception with a man--a man of some early sort--walking somewhere in Africa, but, unlike other animals, this man holds a stick.  We are inclined to deprecate this mere stick.  But the stick is of decisive importance to the evolution and progress of culture.  Culture begins with the stick and, always, has .within it the idea of the stick as something possessed and something used.  We are suggesting that there is nothing to culture, very much, other than this same original stick.  A branch off a tree or some hard object lying one day in the path of our ancient pedestrian.  Thus--now returning to our theme of societal man, as he is conceived not through real observation but through religion--we see that that conception, "man," has a long history as a development of culture.   We may continue.  Our basic assertion is a simple one.  Under the heading of Force Theory we say only that the "man" of culture, today and always, is "other" than the taxonomic species being.    But we may draw upon some general small facts relalted by anthropologists.  Two Aborigne men meeting, strangers to one another, begin a discussion of kinship.  Were these individuals animals, which they are not, they would simply look at each other and wonder; but probably there would be no violence between them.  With humans it is different.  The Aboriginals discuss their ancestry in order to determine whether they have a common ancestor and are therefore related.  I call this discussion "categorical."  That is, they seek to know whether they are related or not.  If they are not related, they try to kill one another.  We disparage this simple encounter and call these people savages; yet they are already on a clear humanoid path.  Thinking in terms of absolutes--absolutely a kinsman and a friend or absolutely not--determines what their mutual relations are going to be.  So-called civilized people are the same way.  The chain of categorical relations among civilized people is much more nuanced and specialized; but the logical stipulation in these relations of "either this or that, but not both" is far more sophisticated than it is among Aborigines. 

We are not being fanciful in saying that the origin of the categorical way of thinking was prefigured, in pre-stone age times, in the mere implementation of a stick as a tool.  Human thought takes its model from technological thinking at this early stage of development.  To use a stick as a tool is already to "think."  The motions of the stick as it is swung about prefigure the motions of cerebralised psychology.   As we just finished saying, the stick was not originally the man, really, nor was the man the stick.  By the same token the man who evolved from the stick was not really the original creator of this technics, who was still, for his part, a species-man.    Societal man and species-man were categorically other than one another, that is they were not one another.  This "not-ness" has become, through time as a development or evolve-ment of culture, an oppositional force to the species Homo sapiens and every member of this species.  Klages was right on this point.  Culture opposes life, in this case the biological man who was the originator of culture.  There is a long literature, of which we are altogether familiar, of the destructive effects that go along with the beneficial effects of culture.  But we are talking here, not of proposing any grand salvation of humanity from the destructive effects of his own technology, but of foreseeing a chain of events in the future.  We will see that the species principle gives way, as it must, to the race principle.  Human history moves forward dialectically, as the first opposition--of the man and his own stick or tool--plays out over and over throughout the course of human history, in wider events involving ever larger populations.  In all, the collision of societal man and species-man is the theme of human history.  Progress, so-called, is simply the resolution of unresolvable contradictions.

The life of animals is not entirely "red with tooth and claw."  Sometimes the lion does lay down with the lamb.  Our picture of the creatures of the woods and fields has possibly been distorted by Darwinism.  Rousseau has also contributed to this lopsided assessment.   Our picture of relationships in a so-called State of Nature should not be overdrawn to emphasize the carnage of it.  Sometimes an animal will simply take a nap in the cool shade of a tree, unaware of any "state of nature."    We are suggesting simply that among animals there is not always Darwinistic "struggle for survival" but rather a certain give-and-take to relationships.  I want to stress that there can be here mutual accomodation and a live-and-let-live attitude, if not downright peace, in the way animals live.  Nature seems softened by a certain flexibility and even lackadaisicalness.  Also, for humans the fact of society came as no panacea.   Humans did not escape the alleged carnage of so-called nature when they passed into a "state of society."   Human beings can think; and through their thoughts they form relationships.  These are not so much thoughts of peace and mutalism as they are, simply, categorical thoughts.   Humans think in terms of, if this not that.  Animals do not think this way.  Animals rather think of this and that at the same time and in the same way.  As animals became humans their relations of give-and-take became, as abstract human ideas, those more absolute and absolutist ideas of either/or.   Human relations were simply cast in the same categorical or absolute terms as the rest of their culture.  Where humans are concerned there is not so much a mutuality of relations so much as, what I will call, as I say, categorically "either" or categorically "or" relations.  That is, the relations were either one thing or the other, but not both. These bonds are not so much instinctual or familial relations as the logic of society.   In this dichotomy there is to be no compromise.  The idea of an absolute peace brings with it, as a categorical "other," the idea of absolute hostility.  And indeed we find the politics of human beings take on such uncompromising terms such as would be unthinkable among animals.  We find such an idea only in the lives of humans, not among animals.   In the earlier sections of this blog I discussed the way human beings think; and the way they think often determines their social relations.  Thus, as we said, human beings think and come together according to their thoughts.  But there is more.  The things that humans think of and constructure form a nexus of interpersonal relationships.  Humans come together through the things--artifacts or machines or whole infrastructures--that they think of.  Finally, the things humans think of are themselves thoughts of human beings, or the materializations of such thoughts, and, as such,  can essentially be relationships.  Christianity has proposed a religion of absolute peace.  But such a concept also evokes another, mediating term we may call, in Hegelian terms, the Absolute itself and all the negativity--the negation of the negation--that the Absolute evokes.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2010-10-02 16:52:14)

The public or "the people" is only incohfate and  is not a well defined entity.  This public or populace is therefore not logical or dialectical until blundering into a categorical situation such as the word "never" suggests.  To force an incohate being into a categorical mold is to force a categorical--that is opposite--response.  Thus by this logic never becomes forever.   Humans through political machinations create abstract and uncompromising contexts into which other humans seem compelled to enter.  They define an otherwise incohate mass as a thing with an also defined status within a dialectical system.  The response of this entity is not to confirm what is proscribed for it but precisely the opposite, to negate.

What is useful to me is good to me.  I accept this as a categorical statement and basic to the ensuing argument.   We are talking here about "the useful" and "the good."  At the risk of appearing to fall in a Platonic or objective idealist mode of thought I speak of usefulness and goodness as qualities that may be abstracted from real situations and things.   But there is more. We need not qualify this idea but we must go beyond it.  There is here no assertion that the useful, in itself, is also the good.  Mediating in our initial assertion is "me" or the self as what stands between the useful and the good.  The good to me is what is useful to me and vice versa.    But what is useful to another person may not be good to me.  If this other person is my enemy and wants to hurt me, a tool or weapon or leveraged social principle in his hands will be, inevitably, hurtful to me.  I need not dwell on this painful point.  In the earliest days of humanity, every useful act was a good act inasmuch as, as I've already said, the human agent using the tool, and finding that artifact useful, could say of the tool "it is good."  As use became general use, however--as the tool was of use to the general community and the tool's use was a general use--the relation of that same, general tool was only of ambiguous use to the individual.  These points have been widely raised in classical economic theory.  Where we may add to the discussion is in the point that here, in the general use of tools, the notion of usefulness and goodness have become separated.  There is now no primal "me" or, in Heidegger's terms Being, connecting the use of a thing and the good of the thing.  Use and good, or Platonic "The Good," are separated and, depending on the context of their co-existence, categorically opposed to one another.  I must be more specific on this last point.  If the good is not my own good, but someone else's, the good may actually oppose me or be antithetical to me.  This good is now a "limited" good, or what is good about a specific instance of use or usefulness; and what is good for one man need not be good for another.  We still may assume the existence of a good that, as a general good, may be good for you and me both.  There may well be, and probably is, such a thing as a general good that is good for "humans in general."  This good was talked about by the Utilitarians as a basis for morality and human behavior, not merely your behavior but mine as well.  But we are not Utilitarian in our point of view.  The only point to remember is, and we invoke this point as basic to Force Theory, is the obvious one that your good and mine may be the same, but may not be the same.  A contradictory situation appears; and failure to mediate or reconcile this situation means in effect to dissolve society.      We are now moving toward a final conclusion.    Again, we are not Utilitarians.  We propose that the idea of the personal good that mediates between the person and his own technics is now opposed by the good that, once his own good, now is antithetical to him.  A resolution to this conflict may be necessary.  The idea of The Good is invoked, in short, when the good that was once inhered in something's usefulness to one person now becomes, finally, a good in the hands of this person's enemy and thus constitutes a usefulness that opposes the person.  This is not a question of empirical truth but of logic.  The Good is a logical concept that mediates in the context of  estrangement wherein humans are separated from the technics and objects that, once their own, are now their inimical "other."  This is the way The Good appeared.  The Good does not exist apart from the human agency or thought process that produced The Good.  But The Good nonetheless has a majesty that sets it above other human productions and machinations and that allows it, in its transcendence, to "mediate" in antithetical relationships which would otherwise deprecate, degrade and destroy human collective existence.  The next point we will raise is this:  how does the "doing" of Good degrade that same Good?

Philosophical Anthropology does not take its main ideas from philosophy or anthropology either one.  Both disciplines are emeshed in their own ways in onerous restrictions.  Anthropology has laid down for itself draconian empirical rules and has thereby become lost in its own details.  Philosophy has experienced much the same things.  In pursuit of so-called truth philosophy has reduced itself to the uncontrovertable propositions of mathematics and logic.  Philosophical Anthropology on the other hand, perhaps simply out of youth, is both unrestricted and undisciplined in its mode of experimentation.  Philosophical Anthropology is only a relative few years old.  It has taken from anthropology only a break from philosophy, which is thousands of years old and is the accumulation of that many years speculation.  This--a primarily negative one of escaping philosophy--is what PA has taken from anthropology.   Having done that, however, having that is separated itself from the evoloved commitment to logic, Philosophical Anthropology has played fast and loose with the rules of anthropology, or commitment to anything empirical.  PA is an entirely new line of speculation.  The original propositions of this field, which were those of Scheler and Plessner about some so-called "essence of Man" come as refreshingly vague but suggestive.  PA  we are saying has no sense of its own limitations.  It does what philosophy should do, rebel against all limitations to thinking whatsoever.  This was once the paradox of philosophy:  that it set up rules to study rules; that it laid down restructions to think about what is boundless.  Philosophy has resolved itself into a final contradiction of an entrapment within the law of non-contradiction.  PA has declared its freedom from this law or any laws of thinking, really, whatsoever.  But there is more.  PA has assumed a revolutionary role in attacking the core of any civilization, which is a concept of Man that is not an empirical concept but rather a "moral" concept closely connected to, as I say, the idea that a society has of "The Good."

What is useful to me is good to me.   This I said earlier and I will stay the course on this theme.   We are saying that an idea of the good--not as a thing but anyway as a quality--has its source in my own life. Good is the subjectivity in my experience.   At the risk of appearing merely philosophical, it seems that usefulness and good are two sides of the (Schopenhaurian) world, as object and subject.  The geneology of so-called The Good is not a particularly auspicious one, beginning as The Good does, in my own or someone else's most humble life experience.   We are suggesting that The Good is simply an abstraction from your experience or mine.   The august concept The Good does not exist from eternity in some Platonic zone but as a genesis but has a rather ordinary and humble family history.   As Bruno Bauer said, the critique of religion is the history of religion.  We propose to show the history of The Good.  The real role of The Good the disputes and contradicitions that arise between the good of you versus the good of me.  These disputes are inevitable. Human beings however, to preserve the continuity and efficacy of their relations, create the idea of The Good that suggests that in every instance of good there is a universal Good that unites every person in every relationship.  The Good is an abstraction from my good and yours.  That said, The Good is a high and transcendent idea that stands over society.  We could suggest, at the risk of raising still another controversy and diverting attention from our basic theme, that The Good and God are the same.  In English and German the words are similar; also these words already have a rather obscure origin which leaves us room to speculate.  At the present stage in our discussion of The Good we have said nothing controversial.  But we are about to.  We are going on, finally, to suggest that "doing" The Good degrades and deprecates The Good.  Our basic argument is that in the "doing" of The Good it is necessary to translate a hypothetical and abstract idea of The Good back whence The Good came, into, in other words, the particular Good of you and me.  In that case, what is good for me might not be good for you.  And vice versa.  In its particular expressions, The Good actually contradicts itself categorically. 

What is useful to me may not be useful to you; in fact, what is useful to me may be hurtful to you.  On its most basic level, where any good is connected (as subject and object) to a useful act, any idea of must include the many and opposite ways that what is useful can be good, and conversly what instances of good can be useful.  On the primal level what is good is diverse; when abstracted, on the other hand, "the good" or The Good would be categorically self-contradictory.  The ordinary good exhibits itself and exhausts itself in its particular manifestations.  On the abstract level, on the other hand, The Good can be called consistent with itself and not self-contradictory.  But this is on a transcendental level of thought wherein no particular displays of The Good are suggested.  The "doing" of The Good would change this:  doing would bring The Good down to earth as the everyday good of you or the good of me.  We are now no longer doing something that is useful but something that is first good.  "Doing" was originally an act that was useful and, as a consequence of the usefulness of what was done, became a good act.  We have already concluded this to be true.  But there is more.  When the usefulness of what is done becomes in fact antithetical to the person who does this useful thing, that thing that is done is no longer good to the person.  Is there anything to suggest that it is possible simply to do The Good?  The assumption here among people who "do" The Good is that there will also be good that is done that may be translated into something useful.   That is to say, they assume that "good" can be "done" that is also something useful.  Here is where the whole human mentality that produced technology and technical progress--the whole entity of industrial civilization--started from a "moral premise" or idea of "doing" Good.  In fact, this civilization was the consequence of humans who were doing something useful but which something was connected to anything good only through their individual selves.  Creative people first of all act out of self-interest (this is all, disappointingly, that we may be saying!).  Is The Good at all something that can be "done"?  We have already said that the fundamental essence of The Good is its role in re-connecting (in the sense of religion or religare) the useful and the limited or personal good that, under conditions of mass society, are estranged and disconnected from the individual.  What we would be saying is that in "doing" Good we would be restoring the individual connection between the useful and his own good.   We have already said that The Good appears after, first, an individual has produced a thing that is useful to himself and is thus called good.  The Good has a general existence.  But its role is to mediate in situations of estrangement.  It is not simply something to be "done."  In "doing" good that is supposed to be a good derivative of The Good, we have degraded The Good and demoted it from its majestic transcendent position as uniting persons.  Now, because doing is always individual doing, the same disputes arise between individuals that resulted, in the first place, the estrangement of use from the good of use.

What is useful to me is good to me.  I accept this as a categorical statement and basic to the ensuing argument.   We are talking here about "the useful" and "the good."  At the risk of appearing to fall in a Platonic or objective idealist mode of thought I speak of usefulness and goodness as qualities that may be abstracted from real situations and things.   But there is more. We need not qualify this idea but we must go beyond it.  There is here no assertion that the useful, in itself, is also the good.  Mediating in our initial assertion is "me" or the self as what stands between the useful and the good.  The good to me is what is useful to me and vice versa.    But what is useful to another person may not be good to me.  If this other person is my enemy and wants to hurt me, a tool or weapon or leveraged social principle in his hands will be, inevitably, hurtful to me.  I need not dwell on this painful point.  In the earliest days of humanity, every useful act was a good act inasmuch as, as I've already said, the human agent using the tool, and finding that artifact useful, could say of the tool "it is good."  As use became general use, however--as the tool was of use to the general community and the tool's use was a general use--the relation of that same, general tool was only of ambiguous use to the individual.  These points have been widely raised in classical economic theory.  Where we may add to the discussion is in the point that here, in the general use of tools, the notion of usefulness and goodness have become separated.  There is now no primal "me" or, in Heidegger's terms Being, connecting the use of a thing and the good of the thing.  Use and good, or Platonic "The Good," are separated and, depending on the context of their co-existence, categorically opposed to one another.  I must be more specific on this last point.  If the good is not my own good, but someone else's, the good may actually oppose me or be antithetical to me.  This good is now a "limited" good, or what is good about a specific instance of use or usefulness; and what is good for one man need not be good for another.  We still may assume the existence of a good that, as a general good, may be good for you and me both.  There may well be, and probably is, such a thing as a general good that is good for "humans in general."  This good was talked about by the Utilitarians as a basis for morality and human behavior, not merely your behavior but mine as well.  But we are not Utilitarian in our point of view.  The only point to remember is, and we invoke this point as basic to Force Theory, is the obvious one that your good and mine may be the same, but may not be the same.  A contradictory situation appears; and failure to mediate or reconcile this situation means in effect to dissolve society.      We are now moving toward a final conclusion.    Again, we are not Utilitarians.  We propose that the idea of the personal good that mediates between the person and his own technics is now opposed by the good that, once his own good, now is antithetical to him.  A resolution to this conflict may be necessary.  The idea of The Good is invoked, in short, when the good that was once inhered in something's usefulness to one person now becomes, finally, a good in the hands of this person's enemy and thus constitutes a usefulness that opposes the person.  This is not a question of empirical truth but of logic.  The Good is a logical concept that mediates in the context of  estrangement wherein humans are separated from the technics and objects that, once their own, are now their inimical "other."  This is the way The Good appeared.  The Good does not exist apart from the human agency or thought process that produced The Good.  But The Good nonetheless has a majesty that sets it above other human productions and machinations and that allows it, in its transcendence, to "mediate" in antithetical relationships which would otherwise deprecate, degrade and destroy human collective existence.  The next point we will raise is this:  how does the "doing" of Good degrade that same Good?

Philosophical Anthropology does not take its main ideas from philosophy or anthropology either one.  Both disciplines are emeshed in their own ways in onerous restrictions.  Anthropology has laid down for itself draconian empirical rules and has thereby become lost in its own details.  Philosophy has experienced much the same things.  In pursuit of so-called truth philosophy has reduced itself to the uncontrovertable propositions of mathematics and logic.  Philosophical Anthropology on the other hand, perhaps simply out of youth, is both unrestricted and undisciplined in its mode of experimentation.  Philosophical Anthropology is only a relative few years old.  It has taken from anthropology only a break from philosophy, which is thousands of years old and is the accumulation of that many years speculation.  This--a primarily negative one of escaping philosophy--is what PA has taken from anthropology.   Having done that, however, having that is separated itself from the evoloved commitment to logic, Philosophical Anthropology has played fast and loose with the rules of anthropology, or commitment to anything empirical.  PA is an entirely new line of speculation.  The original propositions of this field, which were those of Scheler and Plessner about some so-called "essence of Man" come as refreshingly vague but suggestive.  PA  we are saying has no sense of its own limitations.  It does what philosophy should do, rebel against all limitations to thinking whatsoever.  This was once the paradox of philosophy:  that it set up rules to study rules; that it laid down restructions to think about what is boundless.  Philosophy has resolved itself into a final contradiction of an entrapment within the law of non-contradiction.  PA has declared its freedom from this law or any laws of thinking, really, whatsoever.  But there is more.  PA has assumed a revolutionary role in attacking the core of any civilization, which is a concept of Man that is not an empirical concept but rather a "moral" concept closely connected to, as I say, the idea that a society has of "The Good."

What is useful to me is good to me.   This I said earlier and I will stay the course on this theme.   We are saying that an idea of the good--not as a thing but anyway as a quality--has its source in my own life. Good is the subjectivity in my experience.   At the risk of appearing merely philosophical, it seems that usefulness and good are two sides of the (Schopenhaurian) world, as object and subject.  The geneology of so-called The Good is not a particularly auspicious one, beginning as The Good does, in my own or someone else's most humble life experience.   We are suggesting that The Good is simply an abstraction from your experience or mine.   The august concept The Good does not exist from eternity in some Platonic zone but as a genesis but has a rather ordinary and humble family history.   As Bruno Bauer said, the critique of religion is the history of religion.  We propose to show the history of The Good.  The real role of The Good the disputes and contradicitions that arise between the good of you versus the good of me.  These disputes are inevitable. Human beings however, to preserve the continuity and efficacy of their relations, create the idea of The Good that suggests that in every instance of good there is a universal Good that unites every person in every relationship.  The Good is an abstraction from my good and yours.  That said, The Good is a high and transcendent idea that stands over society.  We could suggest, at the risk of raising still another controversy and diverting attention from our basic theme, that The Good and God are the same.  In English and German the words are similar; also these words already have a rather obscure origin which leaves us room to speculate.  At the present stage in our discussion of The Good we have said nothing controversial.  But we are about to.  We are going on, finally, to suggest that "doing" The Good degrades and deprecates The Good.  Our basic argument is that in the "doing" of The Good it is necessary to translate a hypothetical and abstract idea of The Good back whence The Good came, into, in other words, the particular Good of you and me.  In that case, what is good for me might not be good for you.  And vice versa.  In its particular expressions, The Good actually contradicts itself categorically. 

What is useful to me may not be useful to you; in fact, what is useful to me may be hurtful to you.  On its most basic level, where any good is connected (as subject and object) to a useful act, any idea of must include the many and opposite ways that what is useful can be good, and conversly what instances of good can be useful.  On the primal level what is good is diverse; when abstracted, on the other hand, "the good" or The Good would be categorically self-contradictory.  The ordinary good exhibits itself and exhausts itself in its particular manifestations.  On the abstract level, on the other hand, The Good can be called consistent with itself and not self-contradictory.  But this is on a transcendental level of thought wherein no particular displays of The Good are suggested.  The "doing" of The Good would change this:  doing would bring The Good down to earth as the everyday good of you or the good of me.  We are now no longer doing something that is useful but something that is first good.  "Doing" was originally an act that was useful and, as a consequence of the usefulness of what was done, became a good act.  We have already concluded this to be true.  But there is more.  When the usefulness of what is done becomes in fact antithetical to the person who does this useful thing, that thing that is done is no longer good to the person.  Is there anything to suggest that it is possible simply to do The Good?  The assumption here among people who "do" The Good is that there will also be good that is done that may be translated into something useful.   That is to say, they assume that "good" can be "done" that is also something useful.  Here is where the whole human mentality that produced technology and technical progress--the whole entity of industrial civilization--started from a "moral premise" or idea of "doing" Good.  In fact, this civilization was the consequence of humans who were doing something useful but which something was connected to anything good only through their individual selves.  Creative people first of all act out of self-interest (this is all, disappointingly, that we may be saying!).  Is The Good at all something that can be "done"?  We have already said that the fundamental essence of The Good is its role in re-connecting (in the sense of religion or religare) the useful and the limited or personal good that, under conditions of mass society, are estranged and disconnected from the individual.  What we would be saying is that in "doing" Good we would be restoring the individual connection between the useful and his own good.   We have already said that The Good appears after, first, an individual has produced a thing that is useful to himself and is thus called good.  The Good has a general existence.  But its role is to mediate in situations of estrangement.  It is not simply something to be "done."  In "doing" good that is supposed to be a good derivative of The Good, we have degraded The Good and demoted it from its majestic transcendent position as uniting persons.  Now, because doing is always individual doing, the same disputes arise between individuals that resulted, in the first place, the estrangement of use from the good of use.