Reason and Politics

The Nature of Political Phenomena

Mark Blitz

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780268109141
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

Reason and Politics explores the central phenomena of political life and, therefore, of human affairs in general.

Amidst the seemingly endless books on more and more narrowly specialized topics within politics, Mark Blitz offers something very different. Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena examines the central phenomena of political life in order to clarify their meaning, source, and range. Blitz gives particular attention to the notions of freedom, rights, justice, virtue, power, property, nationalism, and the common good. At the same time, Blitz shows how, in order to understand political matters correctly, we must also understand how they affect us directly. We do not merely theorize over political questions; we experience them. Blitz also considers matters such as the powers and motions of the soul, the nature of experience, and the varieties of pleasure and attachment.

Living at a time when technological change makes it difficult even to claim convincingly that there are defining human characteristics and natural limits that we simply cannot change, Reason and Politics proposes that there are in fact basic phenomena not only in politics, but that make up human affairs as such. In examining these central phenomena in a lucid and articulate manner, this book makes a unique contribution not only to the study of politics but also to the study of philosophy more broadly. It will interest undergraduate and graduate students, political scientists and philosophers, those interested in politics, and general readers.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Although my study concerns political phenomena and does not directly interpret texts, many of the remarkable recent studies of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others help us to understand political phenomena more immediately.

2. In thinking about how characteristics can be common, one should consider the varieties of commonality. Some common characteristics can be uniform among their members as, say, each instance of the number 2 is identical, but some can differ among them as, say, the degree of reason differs among us, or as I and my shadow are alike but differ. I discuss in later chapters the varieties of commonality.

3. I will use “politics” and “political life” equivalently.

4. Reason and speech differ. Speech can involve exclamations, assertions, deceptions, promises, incantations—rhetoric. Nonetheless, all speech is in the end oriented to speaking truly because the distinctions, connections, and goals that constitute its intelligibility rest on natural distinctions, connections, and goals. Although I will only occasionally make speech my theme, my discussions of history and nature, the particular and the general, freedom and what is common, and other subjects will in effect also consider the relation between speaking and reason, whose goal is to speak truly. We can translate the Greek logos as either speech or reason, which shows their basic connection, a connection more revealing than a strict distinction between, say, talking and reasoning or speaking as external and reasoning as internal would be.

5. Consider here the notion that in time “sedimentation” covers over the basic experiences from which concepts emerge. See, e.g., Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), first published in German in 1936; and Leo Strauss’s notion of the second cave or the cave beneath the cave, e.g., in Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 152–57; and Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Revelation, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), first published in German in 1935.

6. I mean “modern” in the sense of after Machiavelli and Descartes. For Descartes, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), first published in German in 1927; and Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), first published in German in 1961; and Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins, ed. Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), chs. 6–11.

7. In any event, this similarity or identity seems clear to us, in our way of life.

8. One can compare not only the elements of regimes but also political wholes themselves in terms of justice. In both cases this comparison allows concepts to be uncovered. The central political phenomena are speech or opinion laden and are thus open to becoming conceptually understood.

9. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil provides a good illustration of the variability among thinkers in what counts as a problem. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pt. 1, sec. 1; first published in German in 1886. See also Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966).

10. See Heidegger, Being and Time; Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968, 1991); G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. W. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), first published in German in 1821; and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), first published in 1651.

11. One way theoretical discussion shows its connection to ordinary affairs is through thinkers’ manner of presentation or writing, where they must consider the effect of their teachings on their community, their supporters and friends within their communities, their students within their communities, and their future students, friends, and foes. See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing.

12. In Heidegger’s discussion, understanding, meaning, and questionability arise from and ultimately return to the “world” in which we are immersed and from our human mode of being (the “existentials”). Each of our actions, and the concepts that emerge from them, belongs together in the (historically variable) worlds in which we are immersed. See Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), first published in German in 1979, from lectures delivered in 1925; Heidegger, Being and Time; Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. H. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 1970), first published in German in 1901–2; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil; and various writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, e.g., Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), first published in German 1883.

13. For Klein, consider Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), first published in German in 1934, 1936.

14. It is also to recognize how theoretically formed, how sedimented, our contemporary world is.

15. Others argue that we must begin from a necessary, if hidden, stage of historical development, or from our most powerful drives. I will discuss these views in due course.

16. See Heidegger, Being and Time; and Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), first published in German in 1987.

17. Consider how Plato begins many of his dialogues, Aristotle’s ethical and political works and their emphasis on pragmata (things), and Heidegger’s discussions of Aristotle.

18. One should be wary of Heidegger practically because of his support of the Nazis and theoretically because of what in his views allowed this to happen. We should be cautious about the classics because of their preceding modern science, their not recognizing equal natural rights, and the existence of slavery in ancient cities. Wariness and caution, however, are warnings, not arguments.

19. I will sometimes use the term “regime” to designate the broadest context of political activity, and sometimes way of life. I will use these terms interchangeably. “Way of life” is the more fundamental term because it includes things, actions, and qualities that today we tend to believe are not or should not be political. But the contemporary restrictions that allow independence or privacy in economic and religious life result from the political choice that established liberal democracy. Ways of life are essentially political because actions are always subject to authoritative constitutional or legal choice that fits them together into a whole. Indeed, the dominant opinion about justice in a way of life governs who pursues which activities and who can use and enjoy which goods. This opinion is announced or mandated in law and culture, or in divine writings and priestly control. A view of what goods it is proper to pursue and, indeed, what is good or choiceworthy about them, their goodness, is also fundamental, for it sets the purposes of communities and their citizens. So the term “way of life” captures this breadth of justice and goods, while the term “regime”—democracy, liberal democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, tyranny—captures what is politically authoritative. I intend my discussion of context and concepts to show their basis in ways of life that are politically ordered but also to indicate what is inevitably cosmopolitan in our actions.

I also will mention the country or the “city,” in the sense of the classical polis, as the unit formed by a regime, or following a way of life. The country—“America”—evokes our way of life rather than our mere territory or state but also evokes our way of life rather than a similar regime elsewhere. But I do not mean this indication to close discussion. The questions of patriotism, loyalty, identity, and the relation between general and particular will be among those I will address.

20. The place of theoretical issues is also important in some of the variants of liberal democracy (such as Hegel’s German Rechtsstatt) that follow. See John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), first published in 1689; and John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), first published in 1690. For Locke generally, consider, among others, Peter Myers, Our Only Star and Compass (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1987; and Michael Zuckert, Launching Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

CHAPTER ONE.The Nature of Practical Action

1. I will concentrate on “context” because, although to speak of contexts, let alone to analyze what a context is, is already post-philosophical—would one discuss “contexts” in a world dominated by myths and gods?—it is both a recognizable and largely neutral term for us.

2. Nonetheless, as I indicated, different coughs in different situations call forth different ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• One The Nature of Practical Action
• Two The Nature of Freedom and Rights
• Three The Nature of Power and Property
• Four The Nature of Virtue
• Five The Nature of What Is Common
• Six The Nature of Goods
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index