Thus, from the elaborated concept of the local, a group of characteristics emerges that makes abstract progressives blush. What comes into view under the pressure of muddled universalism, clarified through counterpressure – twentieth-century thinkers furthered these clarifications – is the extended component of successfully lived life, which does not become what it can without being immune, self-preferential, exclusive, selective, asymmetrical, protectionist, uncompressible and irreversible. This catalogue may sound like the summary of a far right party manifesto; in reality, however, it lists the characteristics that inhere in the infrastructure of becoming in real human spheres. They belong to the attributes of finite, concrete, embedded and transmittable existence. To draw one more time on the phraseology of ontology, being extended in one's own place is the good habit of being.
As long as the left intends to remain or become an earthly left, it will, for all its love of symmetry, have to take up contact with these definitions, unless it would prefer to have an affair with the infinite – which one could certainly understand, as earthly social democracy is philosophically boring and aesthetically unrewarding.
A few of the values in the alternative list – more precisely, the demands for a meta-life whose relation to the world is neglectful of immunity, preferential towards the foreign, inclusive, unselective, symmetrical, duty-free, as well as compressible and reversible at will – can be realized in practice from time to time, but only those that are supported by the first list. If the second list did not exist, we could never breathe the ‘air from other planets’ without which the cultural carriers of the West would view existence as constant suffocation. Indeed, perhaps the hallmark of high culture is that it abets the implantation of the impossible in the real. It projects the dowry of the prenatal world into the public sphere. From an immanence-philosophical perspective, this means that higher and more improbable states emanate from the current one: active nature drives its own luxurious tendencies to ever higher levels. The opening up of the first list towards the second in certain aspects indicates the élan of civilization, which preserves itself by expanding, heightening and further differentiating itself – only by attentively tying the second back to the first, however, can a reign of ghosts be avoided.
The fact that the age of globalizations brought effective increases of improbability proves that souls take part in the growth of the horizons. Under the duress of growth, they learned to express themselves in general ontological terms two and a half thousand years ago. Thinking in universal values provides inner support while the horizon drifts. Thus abstract universalism is not only the devious nonsense that pragmatists, Nietzscheans and all possible forms of realists wish to see in it (to quote Carl Schmitt: ‘Whoever says “humanity” seeks to deceive’); it is also the semantic reflection of the world growing large in the time of the burgeoning world system. Universalism: a stage of maturity. Falling for reflections is the occupational hazard of enlighteners; they too are entitled to support. Even they, whose teaching profession acts as a learning disability, will concede the necessity of further training sooner or later.
That souls grow with the world forms, however, in the steppes, the cities and the empires, is one of the facts from which philosophy began; it could still point it in the right direction during the metamorphosis necessitated by the global situation. At the time of the polis, Aristotle held the view that only someone to whom ‘greatness of soul’ (megalopsychía) had become second nature could be a citizen. Why should this no longer apply to the contemporaries of the global and nation-state era, simply because they now speak of ‘creativity’ rather than ‘greatness of soul’? The creative people, one hears now and again, are those who prevent the whole from being bogged down by harmful routines. Perhaps the time has come to take the catchphrase at its word.