Peter Sucaet

This paper argues that Åsa Burman’s concept of telic power in nonideal social ontology can be deepened by integrating Michel Foucault’s account of power in both his mid-period work on governmentality and his later work on ethics. Telic power is the ability of individuals to act in relation to shared ideals. It emerges from two distinct but interrelated sources: (1) the internalization of ethical ideals through subject-formation and (2) governmentality as a structuring of conduct through rational norms and practices. To capture how ideals circulate across both registers, I introduce the notion of ethical discourse – the socially embedded circulation of exemplary ideals and role models. Ethical discourse functions both as a medium of normalization and as a resource for self-formation. Drawing on feminist critiques of gendered ideals, such as postwar femininity, and a critique of neoliberalism, I argue that Foucault’s dual account of subjectivation and governmentality clarifies and expands Burman’s schema of telic and structural power, offering a richer framework for nonideal social ontology.

Dreyfus claims that Searle's views on intentionality and the social world are similar to Husserl's, but criticizes Searle's ideas in light of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This paper's thesis is that both the analytic and continental traditions have unjustly neglected this critique. The article compares Husserl's notion of the lifeworld with Searle's philosophy of mind, specifically his concept of Background, which is analogous to the lifeworld in Husserl. Next, the paper examines Dreyfus' criticism, which moves from a Heideggerian to a Merleau-Pontyian perspective. The paper concludes that Dreyfus's viewpoint is closer to Husserl's in The Crisis than is commonly assumed, and that the concept of Background is best understood as arising from the actions of embodied social beings, as Merleau-Ponty proposes.