A conference in Athens

The European society for the history of political thought just held its second international conference in Athens. This was a signal event. With the world coming crashing down around us, not a sound was to be heard in the lecture hall. Or, to put it in another way, the sounds were transmuted into the ringing silence of intense thought concerning that dissolving reality. And this signifies a hope that something can be after all be salvaged from the ruins.

It has to be noted that all the Greek participants exhibited a high level of sophisticated reflection on a par with the best of their foreign colleagues. And this is meant not as a silly "national" boast, but as a token of the great tragedy that is the trashing of this country by its ruling elites.

The topic of the conference was citizenship and rulership in the light of ancient Athenian insights and practices. And in the course of the discussion it became so strikingly evident that the European historical and intellectual experience revolves around the matrix of concepts erected by classical thought. What struck me in a particular way was the invocation even by the Polish Schlachta (that self-destructive feudal elite) of Aristotle's definition of the citizen from the Politics in order to justify its trampling upon the rights and well-being of the mass of society. If to be a citizen means to participate in the exercise of authority, then they and they alone -having usurped and monopolized that participation through arbitrary means- were allegedly entitled to that honorific and profitable title. So, they even entitled their oppressive rule a "res publica", a "politeia". This is of course to use Aristotle's concepts against Aristotle's purposes, in order to legitimize a concrete historical situation.

So history from this angle could be viewed not as the realization, but rather as the deformation and even nullification of abstract discourse, about justice, equality etc. This was also exemplified during the radical phase of the French Revolution, when the Parisian mob surrounds the Convention and demands the expulsion (amounting to a sentence of death) of the Girondin deputies, all the while appealing to the ideal of "democracy". Thus, an assembly elected by democratic means (as democratic as you could get in those times) is strangled and eventually drowned in its own blood by a section of "the people" claiming that only it is entitled to represent the general will. The idea of democracy here is violated in the opposite direction as compared to the Polish situation, but the principle of action is exactly the same: whoever wields raw power effectively elevates himself to the status of "true" humanity, condemning the rest of humans not fitting into his self-idealization to abject and pitiless death.

In this context, we must concede that Plato was exactly right when he claimed in the Laws that the root of all evil is the blind and unquestioning love of self that darkens people's minds turning them into inhuman monsters. This after all was the great issue of tragic poetry. Whether you can cure this situation by eradicating all self-feeling in the human breast (as Plato and later Rousseau would propose under the spell of Lacaedemon)is another question. Aristotle opposed this type of psychological surgery, and he was again exactly right. But, certainly, the problem with his approach is how to set up the criteria of differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate modes of self-feeling (between amour de soi and amour-propre as Rousseau termed them).

And so it seems that whatever course you adopt in actual life (whether you take the theological as it were route of chastising and mortifying the flesh through ascetic discipline or whether you adopt the way of pragmatic ἐπιείκεια giving leeway to the self-seeking urges) you end up paying a huge in all cases price. The decision cannot be made a priori, and no theory offers the guidelines for such a thing. It can only be taken by appraising the material and moral conditions of each case, albeit guided all the while by an idea of justice, namely a concern for the the flourishing of the community and the individual within it. An idea of justice, though, that you cannot be certain won't be defeated by the truculence of the real and its refusal to be guided by the ideal. This is the tragedy of social life (Tragedie im Sittlichen) that Hegel was able to discern -even though he too fell victim (like so many great minds) to the delusion that he could "overcome" it.