The leader's speech to the 1989 Conservative Party conference sent the flag-waving faithful into raptures. On 13 October – her 64th birthday – Margaret Thatcher looked gratified, and perhaps a little relieved, as the applause modulated into a football chant of “Ten more years!”. In May, she had become Britain's first prime minister since Lord Liverpool (1812–27) to serve for an uninterrupted decade; by October 1989 she had led her party for longer than her idol, Sir Winston Churchill. In her conference speech she had recalled October 1975 when, at the same Blackpool venue, she addressed the party's annual gathering for the first time as opposition leader:

In an interesting embellishment of Enoch Powell's near-truism that all political careers end in failure, the ignominious denouement of John Major's premiership is largely explained by the circumstances in which it began, and the nature of his misleading successes.

Margaret Thatcher tendered her resignation to the Queen at 12.15 pm on 22 November 1990, after a final cabinet meeting which was fraught with mixed emotions. Just before 5 pm she was on her feet in the House of Commons, replying to a motion of no confidence in the government she was leaving. Alan Clark was a somewhat inconsistent soothsayer, but before the 1990 leadership contest his crystal ball was less clouded than usual: “If she went bloodily”, he told Hugo Young, “the media would be saying in ten days, Come back Maggie” (Young 2008: 308). Clark's only miscalculation was to anticipate an interlude of days rather than hours before seller's remorse set in. After Thatcher's parliamentary performances on the day of her downfall, Norman Fowler recorded ruefully, “Of course now the mood will change. MT will become a national hero and will remain so until the end of her life” (Fowler 2008: 74). Like Obi-Wan Kenobe in Star Wars, she might even become more powerful for being struck down.

In the Preface to this book, I described its aim in two ways: to make explicitness explicit; or, less ambitiously, to make explicitness more explicit. I am confident that I have not fully succeeded in realizing the first ambition. Whether, or to what extent, I have delivered on the second the reader who has gone this far can now judge.

I began with a direct attempt to capture explicitness, teasing out its many aspects and dimensions. While I hope this was helpful, I fear that it may not have been very illuminating, even less inspiring. Unpacking “explicitness” into its semantic neighbours may have served only to demonstrate how slippery it is and how it forces anyone attempting to dive into its depths to float towards the surface. This may be a question of like forces repelling one another: explicitness resisting making itself explicit. Or, less fancifully, of the impossibility of using words to take us to a place beyond words – and indeed beyond perceptual awareness – whence we can adopt an outside view on explicitness. Hence the indirect approach adopted in the chapters that followed, where I have examined how contemporary approaches to philosophical problems have so often overlooked or sidelined explicitness and have for this reason been seriously point-missing.

Chapter 1 unpacked the seemingly mundane revelation of an individual looking at himself in a mirror. The physical reflections prompted philosophical reflections on what he sees: the unholy trinity of the thing or the Blob, of the organism or the Beast, and of the person or the Bloke who makes the other two, and himself, explicit.

GOVERNANCE FORMS

Charter

Royal charter granted for “Rupert's Land” (1670) covering all rivers and lakes draining into Hudson's Bay (unmapped), totalling 3.9 million square kilometers, ranging from Labrador in the northeast to the prairies in the southwest. HBC granted the right to make laws, monopolize trade, enforce penalties, set up colonies. 18 original investors listed, some of whom had financed the pre-Charter voyage of the Nonsuch (1668).

Until 1931, the London head office (“London Committee”) was the centre of Company activity. The Governor and Committee finalized all decisions on North American matters through appointed overseas governors and commissioners.

Irhaa picked up the Pritt stick and applied some glue to the back of the paper cut-out. Turning it over and pressing it firmly against the rolled-out collage paper, she looked back from the sheet. Affixed to the timeline of her life was now an image of a glass milk bottle and cup filled with black milk. “He was just one of those people, if he said, ‘the milk's black’ and you’d be like ‘are you daft? It's white’, he would start an argument.” Irhaa was talking about Auraq, her husband and father to their four boys. His emotional manipulation and distortion of reality – gaslighting – had lasted 13 years. We first met Irhaa in May 2022 at a baby bank that also provides holistic care for families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in Greater Manchester.1 We sat together in an office there, a small room with bright blue walls and a frosted window. On the sill sat a tissue box adorned with the affirmative mantra “Thrive”.

Standing up from our swivel chairs, Irhaa traced her biography on the “journey map” we were creating. This was a visual representation of her journey through and beyond the times of abuse perpetrated by both Auraq and his mother.2 The collage paper held down with a potted cactus on one edge and a stapler on the other, Irhaa wrote on each of the glued-down houses – each representing a house she had lived in – what it was like, the dates she lived there and the financial circumstances she faced in each.

6.1 INTRODUCING THE SELF

Kant's extraordinary claim that “The fact that a human being can have the ‘I’ among his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth”highlights something very special about the awareness that lies at the heart of the “I”, the ego, the person, the conscious subject, or the self. What is special is highly relevant to our exploration, or recovery, of explicitness. “That I am”, the amming of a body to create an embodied subject, is connected with all other modes of explicitness. The conscious “I” transforms the “it” into presences that, thus transformed, potentially have meaning. The explicitness switched on by the self faces two ways: to itself and to that which is other than itself; to the that-I-am – the “who” surrounded by the world, facing it, and engaging with it; and to the that-it-is – to the “what” that adds up to a surrounding world with which the self is inescapably engaged.

Notwithstanding its centrality to our endeavour to make explicitness explicit, the present investigation of the self will not do justice to the richness of the topic. Indeed, it will be consciously incomplete, not the least so that I shall avoid covering too much territory that I have covered elsewhere.

The most hotly contested, and unavoidable, issue in the philosophy of the self is the extent to which it has substance and what that substance amounts to. We might expect that explicitness itself has no substance: that-it-is is not an additional mode of what-is.

In 2019, I attended a conference at Cambridge University. We were well looked after at the college we were staying at. Academics, policy-makers, company representatives made for an eclectic mix. The main theme everyone present was pondering was the shape of geopolitics after disruptive events from Brexit in the UK to Trump in the US, and rising tensions with powers labelled authoritarian and autocratic. Of these, Russia and China took pride of place.

One of the key attendees was someone who, at that time, was a government minister. They appeared halfway through the event, their entourage hovering around them as they entered the seminar room. After making brief remarks about how they saw the world, someone took them to task for the government's stance on leaving the EU. As a businessperson, they said, they saw nothing good about what was trying to be achieved in getting out of the single market and imposing barriers to trade with our greatest partners, in terms of volume at least. The politician listened politely, but was clearly not there to change their mind – nor did they give much impression they were going to change anyone else’s. “We are where we are”, they said in response.

It was only after this that I felt emboldened to raise my hand and ask a vaguely related follow-up question. “In view of the fact that our relationship with Europe is already complicated, and likely to get even more so, one assumes that creating closer links with emerging economies like China's makes sense. What do you think the government and Britain want from China?” The politician gazed at me a little bemused, looked down at the sheet of papers in front of them, and in a somewhat dismissive, tired voice simple stated, “Well, nothing really. We don't want anything from them!”

In 2022, the US Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization undid the provisions of the 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade, which grounded the constitutional right to abortion in the United States in the right to privacy. In addition to enabling states such as Texas, where I currently live, to effectively ban all abortions, Dobbs exposed the fundamental limitations of Roe. Having relied on privacy rights to make its pro-choice case, the Roe decision obscured “the social conditions within which women actually make choices, conditions related to sex, race, and class. To use the terms with which this book is concerned, Roe made abortion into an “I” issue, when in fact it's a matter of “we.”

But it wasn't just Roe that individualized abortion and, in the process, laid the groundwork for Dobbs. This chapter pursues a major, more general contradiction at the heart of the contemporary fight to win and maintain abortion rights in the United States. That is: While abortion is an incredibly common, routine procedure and choice made by “one in four” women, the reproductive rights movement has tended to rely on exceptional women to tell their “one” abortion story in order to make this case.

Under the direction of the Virginia Company armed with its royal charter, a couple hundred settlers made up of investors and indentured servants landed in Powhatan territory at Chesapeake Bay in 1607, sailed up the river, planted a cross, and built a fort to ward off the locals, naming it Jamestown in honor of their English king. Eight years later, in 1615, the Virginia Company's flagship Sea Venture was destined for Jamestown but ran aground, inspiring the shipwreck in the opening scene of Shakespeare's The Tempest, from which we get the chapter's title “A plague upon this howling” (Act 1, Scene 1). Disaster paved the way for 60 years of corporate political and economic control of Bermuda, importing unfree labor to collect its pearls and cultivate its tobacco. The Somers Isles Company, as it was then called, connected the archipelago to the Virginia mainland, and, through their shared joint-stock investors, they too were linked to several other contemporaneous company colonies in Newfoundland, New England, and Providence Island. Disaster might also be an apt term for describing the experience of settler migrants, stockholders, and Indigenous peoples dealing from the fallout and follies of early Jamestown, with disease, starvation, penury, and land encroachment all characterizing the opening years of the colony.

Down the eastern American seaboard from the north Atlantic to the Caribbean, English colonial territory in the New World was acquired not only through brazen military conquest, but also, initially, through the more surreptitious granting of royal charters to joint-stock companies for trade, settlement, and law-making. New World colonial companies propelled feudal-mercantilism across the sea, settling territory at a time of incoherence in the not-yet-sovereign European state system and during England's especially turbulent seventeenth century.

1.1 INTRODUCING THE UNHOLY TRINITY

Philosophy has many things going for it. Not the least is that it doesn't require expensive equipment. Even the armchair – that iconic piece of furniture invoked by those who denigrate the discipline – is dispensable. Philosophers worth their salt can philosophize while standing up or walking the dog. This said, the rewards for mobilizing even a modest amount of equipment are disproportionate to the outlay. Consider what can be revealed of our nature when we look into a humble mirror and reflect on what is reflected back to us. And for this purpose, the outlay on equipment can be even more sparing: the mirror can be imaginary.

Indeed, to focus on our thoughts, we need to switch our attention from an actual mirror to the idea of one – not the least so we shall not be distracted by a spot on our nose or a crumb in a beard. The occupant of the mirror who also occupies this page is not a particular individual at a particular moment in space and time; not a bald-headed, grey-bearded individual; rather the idea of an individual looking at himself, realized in the self-directed gaze in a mirror. Up close and (im)personal.

So, there we are: staring at ourselves in an imaginary mirror, endeavouring to make ourselves present to ourselves, to bathe in one of the most literal dimensions of explicitness, being given to ourselves in a paradigm of revelation.

The political rivalry between Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) and William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) was prolonged and acrimonious. Their attitudes to politics were sharply different. Disraeli was a pragmatic showman, while Gladstone was adored for his painful sense of moral purpose: Disraeli was a dandy, and Gladstone was dour. As Queen Victoria found, it was difficult to like one of them without disparaging the other. For many of her subjects entitled to vote, the personal element reinforced and simplified the electoral choice, between Disraeli's Conservatives and Gladstone's Liberals. Things got more complicated after 1997, when British politics was dominated by two politicians who, though less gifted than Disraeli and Gladstone, displayed equally contrasting character-traits – and, having once been close friends, became bitter rivals for the leadership of the same political party.

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair had both entered the Commons at the 1983 general election, sheltered in safe seats from the post-Falklands Conservative landslide. They had shared an office at Westminster and “a fierce passion to see the party reform and recover” from its shift to the left and the resultant creation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981 (Brown 2017: 66). Brown, older than Blair by more than two years and with much deeper roots in the party, initially hoped that their personal and political affinity would endure, unlike similar postwar Labour relationships (such as that between Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland) which had been soured by conflicting ambitions (Radice 2002).

2.1 GETTING FROM THE THING TO THE PERSON

When I contemplate what I see when I stand in front of a mirror, I can pay separate attention to the material object or The Thing, to the living Organism, and to the Person. It seems as if they are and yet are not the same entity.

Of course, they are the same entity. To point to one, is to point to all three. None can move without the others moving. They occupy the same space and interact with the same material objects: if the Blob trips over a stone, so do the Beast and the Bloke. The jacket I drape on the Thing encloses the organism and is worn by the Person. It is the same jacket maintaining the temperature of the Blob and delivering warmth to, and protecting the life of, the Organism; and is worn with a (very) modest degree of dash by the Person. When the Thing is destroyed, the Beast and the Person also disappear.

And yet this trinity, this three-in-one, is not entirely one. Its members can part company. A non-fatal but devastating head injury resulting in life-long coma removes the Person, while leaving the Organism intact: living, yes, but no longer me. An even more serious injury may result in a material body that is no longer a (living) Organism: a corpse that may, for a while, occupy roughly the same space and have many of the basic physical properties as the Organism. In short, the Organism can outlive the Person and the material body outlast the Organism.

9.1 THOUGHT AND POSSIBILITY

Thoughts express possibilities that may or may not correspond to anything actual. Articulated possibilities are pure explicitness: that-it-is is detached from what-is, though in the case of a true thought, its intentional object will be an aspect of what-is. The detachment of thoughts from, the independence of, what-is is most obvious in the case of the thought that such-and-such only “might be” the case or the thought that it is not the case. Possibilities, that is to say, carry the second-order possibility that they might not correspond to any past or present actuality or that they envisage a future which, after all, may not come about. This may be concealed in confident expectation until that expectation is confounded. Possibilities that are explicitly entertained as possibilities – “It is possible that …” – are haunted by uncertainty as to whether anything did, does, or will, correspond to them: they are asserted or denied against the background that they only might be the case.

Possibilities may be packaged as thoughts in many different ways.1 These include: as singular factual assertions (“Paris is the capital of France”); as general facts (“Dogs are meat-eaters”); as speculations (“There may be life on Mars”); in the form of questions (“Is Paris the capital of France?”, “Do dogs eat meat?”, “Is there life on Mars?”); or as things to be denied (“Paris is not the capital of France”, “Dogs do not eat meat”, “There is no life on Mars”).