By the early 20th Century, the directive concept (or as I call it the parameter) of ousia was, like everything else, in a condition both objectively unstable and subjectively uncertain. For millennia, ousiodic structure had been both a philosophical obsession, reacquired and reinterpreted by every creative philosophical mind, and a practical guide, providing an intelligible justification for institutions and practices across the human world. Families, economies, fiefdoms, states, religions and even individual moral agents were structured as so many bounded domains, within each of which a single unitary part organized the rest and maintained internal order, while managing interactions with the outside world. Philosophy’s contribution had been to justify this structure as, in Aristotle’s words, basic to “all of nature:”
In all things which are composed out of several other things, and which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or discrete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue of the whole of nature…
Politics I.4 1254a28-32)
The “rationalists” had extended ousia’s domination to the supersensible realm; but it entered modernity with a difference. In premodern times, the various levels of ousiodic structure mentioned above were comfortably internested: individuals within households, fathers within cities, cities within kingdoms, kingdoms eventually within Christendom, all of it bounded and disposed by a benevolent Creator.
The downfall of something so fundamental, multifarious, and far-reaching could not happen all at once. Different realizations of ousiodic structure were discovered, in different ways and at different times, to be inadequate. The result was not a sudden toppling or a gradual replacement, but a whole gamut of destabilizations of what had been an unquestioned principle; in the words of one important participant in those destabilizations, Karl Marx “all that is solid melts into air.”
An early case of this was the “eviction” of ousia from nature in the 16th Century, when Medieval substantial forms were replaced by Galilean mechanical bodies. Matter had traditionally been seen in terms of its capacity to bear form, and so exhibited qualitative distinctions (so that, for example, human matter, being appropriate to the human form, differed from animal matter and plant matter). Now it became homogenous: governed by the laws of mechanics, all matter for people like Galileo (and later Newton) is basically alike.
This intellectual development had practical consequences, because matter provided limits to form. For Aristotle, a given form required a certain type of matter, and could control only a certain amount of it; it could not expand its dominion indefinitely. Once matter had become homogenous, there were no such material limits to growth: a sovereign, convinced of his worth, could aspire to control the planet (it may have worked the other way too: the ambitions of sovereigns led to changes in metaphysics).
The result was an aggressive expansion of empires across the globe, and their inevitable competition with one another. The same thing happened on an individual level: once wealth was defined in terms of money, a homogeneous medium, an individual could aspire to possess all of it, which brought endless competition in what would come to be enshrined as the “free market.”
These two levels, each a giant theater of competition, also competed with each other: states could not tolerate unlimited personal acquisition, which might result in competing centers of power; while rich men resented government regulations. Each side found its theorists: the state in people like Hobbes and Spinoza, the individual in people like Locke and Smith.
In religion, what had at least since Aquinas been a benevolent diversity of local cults, each singing to God (#17), gave way, under pressures of papal corruption, to fundamentally different Christian traditions. The internested ousiodic structure of Catholicism, inherited from Roman forebears, was replaced with a plurality of contending mini-ousias, each following a local or regional leader (Calvin in Geneva, Henry VIII in England), and each with its own set of ultimate doctrines. Each religion aspired to solitary dominance in the world.
These new political and social formations, unbound by any larger cosmic order and each claiming ultimate validity within its genre, rose and fell chaotically, and often by accident. Instead of a human cosmos of stable ousiai, we find a ferment of ousiodic structures which come together and disperse, melting into air almost as quickly as they arise.
But there was another set of problems, even greater: ousia is inherently oppressive. Ousiodic metaphysics, the whole barn, in fact amounts to a general theory of exclusion, providing a rationale for denying whole groups of people access to resources, particularly to power—all of which was assigned to form. All you had to do was associate the members of some group to matter, which ipso facto made them deficiently rational and so less than human. This has been done to women from ancient days, and also to foreigners, who could not speak (your language) and so were not wholly rational—and so subject to enslavement. It was applied, with exuberant cruelty, to people of color. Philosophers, alas, shared in the exuberance, for the cruelty had long been underwritten by their ancient discipline (Africans can speak, said Hume; but so can parrots).
But by the 18th Century, the intellectual achievements of women and people of color became undeniable (except to people like Hume); members of both groups were producing important philosophical work, which strongly suggested that they were as rational as anyone else. So, some philosophers came to suspect, were people from the “lower classes” of society. Revolutionaries even proposed that all men (at least) are created equal.
By 1920, European political structures had invalidated themselves in the Great War of 1914-18. Free markets had self-immolated in recurrent depressions, and much religious dogma had been discredited by modern science (particularly Darwin). The oppressive nature of ousia came to be felt, if not clearly seen, by many. The time was ripe for a frontal attack on it.
Enter, for better or worse, Martin Heidegger. His attack would come from the future.