Between Founding and Ordering: Towards a Properly

Transcript of Session 1

Let me begin with a reading of our contemporary political existence. It seems to me that we modern men are possessed by an excessively arrogant compulsion to collapse and breakdown animating sources of tradition. This is evident not just in what appears to be the fad of modern men which is stirred by the rejection of anything passed on to us by authority but more so in our unquestioned and uncritical trust in the progressive hope of an unknown future whose contours are unavailable for scrutiny and public validation. Hannah Arendt writes: “This double perspective into infinity, which corresponds most closely to our newly found historical consciousness, not only somehow contradicts the biblical myth of creation, but also eliminates the much older and more general question as to whether historical time itself can have a beginning. In its very chronology, the modern age has established a kind of earthly immortality for mankind.” While I find some kind of hope in the former, which in fact, proves that we are still thinking beings with the ability to begin something new, I am quite terrified by the latter tendency, because it rids our thinking of any politics and reifies the notion that politics does not need thinking – everything is just a “thrownness” into the present/future.

In this lecture, I hope to retrieve the deep bond and close association between the two activities which are the subject matter of our present preoccupation: that of thinking and acting politically. I shall do this by highlighting the role of tradition in providing an analytical framework for thinking and as such and rather surprisingly animate a rich and radical resistance to the pervasive currency of the formless stylistic of thinking and acting that has gained preeminence in our modern context. In what follows, I first give an exegetical discussion of the role of tradition in political theory expounded by Hannah Arendt in the essay, “The Tradition of Political Thought”, then give a more detailed appreciation of the contours of this “tradition” through a summary of its elements elegantly constructed by Sheldon Wolin and simplified in Mark Warren’s article. Third, I analyze the relation between thinking and acting in James Tully’s “Political Philosophy as Practical Activity”

1. From Finding Tradition to a Tradition of Founding

A wrong way of interpreting tradition is to understand it in the imagery of ruling and being ruled, which is the pervasive imagery of human relations in our modern socio-political consciousness: where tradition is the ruler and we, its practitioners and consumers are the passive ruled. Hannah Arendt makes this unequivocal point in the passage:

The transformation of action into ruling and being ruled – that is, into those who command and those who execute commands – is the unavoidable result when the model for understanding action is taken form the private realm of household life and transposed to the public-political realm where action, properly speaking, as an activity that goes on only between persons, takes place (Kohn 2005, 52).

The problem with making tradition equivalent to the metaphor of ruling and being ruled is its relegation into the private sphere whose model is precisely the life of the household, simplistically put, the danger in this conceptualization is the radical privatization of tradition, dialectically, the colonization of tradition by the private. This privatization of tradition, however, is not something totally new or modern. Its origins according to Arendt, were in fact, found in the Greek, typically, Platonian and Aristotelian inversions of the hierarchy of human activities, namely, the radical polarization between the bios theoretikos and the bios politikus which became the foundational principle of Western political theory. The culmination of this tension between the political and theoretical life was discovered by the Greeks and acquired by the Romans in the figure of the lawgiver and his triumph over the war hero as the penultimate source of authority, memory and imagination. Hence, our modern understanding of tradition is derived from the private experience of ruling, which has, in the pre-polis, that is pre-Platonic philosophy of the Greeks, had no place in public and political life.

A greater danger, however, in the privatization of tradition lies in the positivist, behavioralist compulsion to prove. Once, tradition has been relegated into the realm of private judgment, it becomes a matter to be proven, hence to find out whether its aims are efficiently and productively matched with its means. Tradition becomes reduced to our modern preoccupation with means and ends. One, as it were, needs to find tradition.

It seems to me then, that for Arendt, the proper way to understand tradition is to situate it in the public realm of human affairs, beyond the calculus of ruling and being ruled, and embedded in the necessarily public nature of human thought: “it lies in the nature of a tradition to be accepted and absorbed as it were, by common sense, which fits the particular and idiosyncratic data of our other senses into a world we inhabit together and share in common” (41, emphases mine). By inscribing tradition into the realm of common sense, Arendt is hardly making a concession to private judgment here, instead, her idea of common sense is one that “obviously operates chiefly in the public realm of politics and morals, and it is that realm which must suffer when common sense and its matter-of-course judgments no longer function, no longer make sense” (42). This is something very different from how we understand common sense nowadays, where “sense” in a very individualized way is the emphasis rather than the common.

As such, for Arendt, tradition is linked to the human capacities to a) remember the greatness of human action; and b) forgive the contingency and frailty of human relations. Allow me to discuss each.

Human Action

Human action, for the Greeks was considered the human activity proper to the realm of living in a political community. Human deeds “were supposed to possess and make apparent a specific greatness of their own, so that no end, no ultimate telos, was needed or could even be used for their justification” (46) and were the only activities available to man that afforded him the possibility of immortalization. But the immortalization of human action necessitated some form of remembering, practices of praising – which can only be achieved through words and the replication of such great deeds. Arendt writes, “the hero, the ‘doer of great deeds and speaker of great words’ as Achilles was called, needed the poet – whose divine gift sees in the past what is worth telling in the present and the future” (45). Thus, the greatness of human action depended so much and exclusively on men talking about it and praising its glory, and therefore on the preservation of a public space where the very essence of action - archein and prattein (beginning and completing) – can be attained. I think this is a crucial point, because it disturbs our contemporary dichotomization between thinking and acting: the need to preserve the episodic and fleeting moments of human glory demands that these two spheres of human life not be seen as opposing each other. Acting, if it has to be meaningful then, must require thinking men. In the same, way, thinking if it has to have any substance at all must depend upon the capacity of men to act. This is what we mean by the tradition of political thought.

The Romans articulated this need to preserve human glory through the use of a much interesting metaphor: the foundation of a civitas. Arendt writes, “the whole of Roman history is based on this foundation as a beginning for eternity. Founded for eternity, Rome has remained even for us, the only Eternal City” (49). What is interesting in Roman political consciousness is the role of religion as a transmitter of the tradition of acting and thinking. Obviously, religious tradition here does not refer to some form of private encounter with God as we nowadays conceive it, but as a bearer of the political community’s esteemed stories of greatness, “handed down from the ancestors, the maiores or greater ones” (ibid). Thus, Arendt writes, “religion, authority and tradition, thus became inseparable from one another, expressing the sacred binding force of an authoritative beginning to which one remained bound through the strength of tradition” (50).

What opposed acting and thinking from each other was therefore some thing or some things other than these two. Arendt identifies two: 1) the Platonic/Aristotelian misunderstanding of the relationship between acting and thinking and its modern realization in the conception of human nature as homo rational (60) ; and 2) the modern equation of action to fabrication, making and labor or the theorization of man as homo faber (ibid). The first, Arendt says is Plato’s radical individualization of the human activity of thinking as thaumadzein – the philosophical marvel and wonder which makes philosophy, “wherever and whenever it reached true greatness, had to break even its own tradition” (55). The second, is more modern. By equating acting with making, modern theorists removed the human capacity to act from the realm of the public and transported it into the realm of the private. But the reverse could also be held true: that the realm of the private invaded the realm of the public thus making it unable for human action to be viewed other than the opposite of human thinking. The isolated nature of these two ascendant activities – laboring and philosophical wonder – it seems to me, is the greatest factor which contributed to the abandonment of the tradition of foundation and preservation which stands as the central principles of political life. Without the guidance of tradition, theory left man to his own devices – figuratively but also literally.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness, according to the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, is what makes politics possible. For Arendt, the ability to forgive releases human action from “the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done” (Arendt 1958, 237) and allows men to come together anew and begin, because “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (ibid). The human faculty to forgive then makes it possible for political actors not to be enslaved to the past and consequently makes sure that the task of politics is not abandoned.

The justification for the necessity of forgiveness rests on two Arendtian accounts of human life: 1) her characterization of political action as unpredictable; and 2) her understanding of history as irreversible. Central to Arendt’s political theory is the capacity of man for action which she likens to a miraculous disruption of natural processes. For Arendt, it is action and its disruptive nature that engenders the political space. Action transcends the futile “natural rhythm of coming to be and passing away” of human biological processes by disclosing not just the what-ness but more importantly the who-ness that distinguishes man from animals acting merely out of instinct. The novelty in Arendt’s conception of action is that for her, it is a beginning that has no end in sight – existing outside the established categories of means/ends and exhausted by the unique and multiple forms of its sheer performance. Arendt’s theory of action can therefore be frustrating and vulnerable to moral haphazardness (Weiner 2005, 154). She writes:

Men have known that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes guilty of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act.

It is only by forgiving, if we follow Arendt’s thought, that man can be redeemed from the moral and tragic consequences of human political action.

2. Thinking About Politics or the Politics of Thinking

The public nature of political thought and its derivation from tradition links Arendt and Sheldon Wolin’s work closely together. According to Wolin, the inquiry of political philosophy is a tradition concerned with “the continuity of preoccupations not the unanimity of response” (1960, 3). Drawing from this definition, we already get an idea that political philosophy is concerned with matters that are of common preoccupations, by that, public, and because of its public nature, it is also concerned with power. In what follows, I will highlight how Wolin’s characterizations of the form, substance, matter, vision and task of political philosophy can be described as one that seeks to make public the relations of power that underpin human relations and thinking about human relations.
a. Political philosophy as a form of inquiry. Wolin argues that “ever since Plato first perceived that the inquiry into the nature of the good life of the individual was necessarily associated with a converging inquiry into the nature of the good community, a close and continuing association has persisted between political philosophy and philosophy in general.”
b. Form and substance. The task of political theory and philosophy for Wolin is to identify where the political begins and the non-political leaves off. But in answering this question, he argues that the articulation of what constitutes the political has always been a matter of conflict and tension. Unlike the natural sciences, the substance of the political is never self-evident, it is rather, defined. This makes games of power central to the analysis of political philosophy. The political theorist gives meaning, he does not prescribe political actions.
c. Political thought and institutions. Wolin’s discussions of political institutions is very instructive. For him, institutions are not process-oriented mechanical systems but “they serve to define, so to speak, political space or the locus wherein the tensional forces of society are related.”
d. Political philosophy and the political. When Wolin says that “no political theorist has ever advocated a disordered society, and no political theorist has ever proposed a permanent revolution as a way of life” he is not asking us to accept that the order of society is a natural order, but rather inviting us to reflect that what we identify as political is a result of an ordering. The task of political philosophy is to unmask this process of ordering, that is to take “politics as one reflection of this phenomenon has come to be an activity expressive of society’s need for constant readjustment.” Simply put, political philosophy’s task is to characterize how one historical age has defined the space of politics and therefore to allow us the opportunity to challenge and contest what we mean by the political, to open new possibilities for the political.
e. The vocabulary of political philosophy. Political theory uses specific languages to describe human realities. It can come in the form of a dark prediction or an opening up of spaces for political imagination. In the process of revealing the specific and systematized linguistic significations underlying political theorizing, Wolin seems to me to be insinuating that political theory advances a specific understanding of the world through the use of language. This is what we mean by the line, “theory does not exist in a vacuum”: theory is laden with a political objective. There is no value-free theory.
f. Vision and political imagination. Political philosophy allows us to understand that a vision of politics is always relative to where the theorist stands. The end result of this envisioning can come in two ways, according to Wolin: on the one hand, descriptive, on the other hand, normative. The aim of political imagining or envisioning is not to cast a finite depiction of an ideal situation. The political theorist must avoid understanding utopia in the wrong manner: that utopia must be realized. On the contrary, a properly political understanding utopic visions is that “precisely because political theory pictured society in an exaggerated, unreal, (unrealizable utopia), it opens an entire sphere of political possibilities.
g. A Tradition of Discourse. The discursive tradition of political theorizing means that theory and thinking is never done alone. It is always shared, it links the past and the present, and therefore historical. As such, it requires a public space in order for it to exist.

All of these aims of political theory are not suspended in some abstract field of thought. Rather, they provide us with a proper understanding of what “practical” means. Certainly, the definition of practical that we are adopting here does not refer to pragmatic, nor realistic. In fact, the very basis of the practicality of political theory and philosophy is the impracticality of its depictions of the world in the commonsensical understanding of the term practical.