All sciences have a hidden ontology and all ontologies anticipate a knowledge.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty.(31)
What properties do society, and more particularly human livelihood, possess that might make it a possible object of knowledge? In developing an answer to this question we will concentrate on the ontological aspect before shifting to the epistemological question of how the properties of human livelihood make it an object of knowledge for us. This is not an arbitrary order of development. It reflects the strong proposition that it is the nature of objects that determines their cognitive possibilities for us. Our reason for examing ontology is that it tells us about the general structures of our world. We can contrast these most general structures with the structures produced by other worldviews. In this way we may arrive at a very deep insight into our worldview. For instance, we may achieve insight into the role of duality in our worldview as compared with other worldviews. Our ontological perspective obtains from the developments in this century in Continental philosophy that have had little impact on political economic theorizing, but which, nonetheless, has the wherewithal to transform the theorizing of the Cultural West and, for our purposes, to facilitate a transition from PENS to a PEBS. The notable lack of influence obtains, at least in part, from philosophical myopia of most scientific practice. In the extreme, this defect is an advantage. We should note that much of what leaches out of science is tacitly philosophical, albeit on a naïve basis. Philosophizing on the basis of an avowed ignorance of even the rudiments of Western philosophy is not uncommon. The insinuation of Analytic philosophy, Deconsructionism and other related post-modernist nihilistic schools of thought into philosophy is repugnant to and reinforces scientist's distrust of philosophy. However, without philosophy the meaning of theories and facts loiter in obscurity. It is fair to say that the crisis of Western science of which Husserl wrote has not subsided. Science has colonized the lifeworld and teeters on the abyss of meaninglessness. What we need to do is bring the best insights of recent philosophy to bear on economic practice and use that as a context for understanding human livelihood. Indeed, it is from insights into ontology that we hope to construct effective categories to explain and appreciate the dynamics of human livelihood.(33)
It should be evident that in the definition of a subject area of inquiry, what is considered legitimate and how it is best studied is never fortuitous. The boundaries and methodology of a subject are set by the not merely deeper, but often hidden assumptions that are constituent to and constitutive of the social and political context of the subject area. This is tantamount to saying that social scientists approach their subject through explicit or implicit assumptions about the nature of the social world, i.e., the reality of society, and the way in which it may be known to them. This suggests that ontology is a metatheoretical category about the fundamental nature of the world. It addresses the question of what we take to exist in the world, that is, what might be an object worthy of description and knowledge. As a species of first philosophy with its reflection on the essential meaning of life, ontology once posited an immutable order of Being. In the philosophy, that finds its roots in Parmenides, ontology may be the study of Being or existence as such. Consistent with Merleau-Ponty's citation above we may contend that problems of knowing are at the same time problems of Being...