The Origins of Liberty

An Essay in Platonic Ontology

Alexander Zistakis

• Publisher: Vernon Art and Science Inc.
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781622738250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Unlike the vast majority of existing literature on Plato, this book seeks to argue that liberty constitutes the central notion and preoccupation of Platonic thought and that his theory of ideas is indeed a theory of liberty. Moreover, this book contends that Plato’s thought can be understood to be both one of liberty and a theory of liberation. Bound up in its efforts to reveal both the ideal liberty and the conditions and possibility of its existence in the so-called ‘real world, ’ the thought of liberty tends to be all-encompassing. Consequently, this book seeks to expose how liberty can be understood to influence Plato’s ontological form of analysis in relation to politics, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as its influence on the structural unity of all three.
Understood from such a perspective, this book frames Platonic philosophy as primarily an investigation, an articulation and as a way of establishing the relationship between the individual and the collective. Importantly, this relationship is acknowledged to be the natural and original framework for any conception and exercise of human liberty, especially within democratic theory and politics. By treating Plato’s philosophy as a continuous effort to find modes and dimensions of liberation in and through different forms of this relationship, this book hopes to not only engage in the discussion about the meaning of Platonic ontological-political insights on different grounds, but also to provide a different perspective for the evaluation of its relevance to the main contemporary issues and problems regarding liberty, liberation, democracy and politics.
This book will be of interest to both undergraduate students, experienced scholars and researchers, as well as to the general public who have an interest in philosophy, classics, and political theory.

THE ORIGINS
OF LIBERTY

AN ESSAY IN PLATONIC ONTOLOGY

Alexander Zistakis

Series in Philosophy

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Series in Philosophy

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Listening to Plato for modern times

Preface: About this Book

Instead of an Introduction: How to Read Plato’s Dialogues?

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERTY

Chapter One: Freedom – General and Universal

1. The Will to Freedom

2. The Liberating Truth

3. The Individual and the Communal

Chapter Two: Dialectic of liberty

1. Institutions of Freedom

2. Liberty and Domination

Chapter Three: Participation and Appropriation

PART TWO: IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE AND PARTICIPATION

Chapter Four: Onto-Politics and Political Ontology

Chapter Five: Equality and Difference

1. Differential Equality

2. Philosophical Education and Political Consciousness

Chapter Six: The Good – Rationality, Totality, Dialectic

1. The Rationality of the Good

2. The Totality of the Good The Conception of methexis

a) The Concept of Methexis in the Parmenides

b) The Sophist – Symplokê and the Hierarchy of Ideas

3. The Dialectical Nature of the Good

Excursus: The Time of Liberty

PART THREE: PLATO AND DEMOCRACY

Chapter Seven: Justice, Politics and Philosophy

1. Justice

2. Politicizing Philosophy

3. Philosophizing Politics

Chapter Eight: Foundations of Responsibility

1. Psychology of the Political

2. Theoretical Responsibility and Practical Accountability

Chapter Nine: The Politics of Virtue

1. Theoria, Praxis and Techne

2. The Virtue of Citizenship

Chapter Ten: Dialectic of Liberty Revisited – Democracy and Politeia

1. Plato and Democracy, Ancient and Modern

a) Dêmos

b) Qualifying for Politics

c) Consensus

2. Platonic Anti-Platonism

Epilogue: Liberty in the Polis

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Other Works

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to extend my warmest thanks to the editor Dr. Carolina Sanchez and her team at Vernon Press for their kindness, patience and support during the preparation of this book for print. Of course, throughout the years of its writing, many people and events influenced and contributed to its present state and form. However, of all the people that helped improve this book, my greatest appreciation goes to three people who have most directly and most decisively influenced both the different stages of writing and the final form and structure of this book.

George Boger deserves special thanks for his support for this project and particularly for his constructive comments and remarks concerning some key notions and arguments of this book. I really cannot imagine what this book would be like without our long discussions regarding central issues of this book.

I am extremely grateful to Aleksandra Zdravkovic-Zistakis for her support and her sharp but always constructive and beneficial criticism and input in all the stages of the development of this book. Suffice it to say that she was the one who pointed out the indispensability of ethics from the very beginning of my work on this project.

Finally, Anthony F. Shaker has been the most attentive and benevolent reader and commentator. One rarely gets the honor of being read by such broad and open mind. I myself, as well as this book, benefited so much from the depth and bredth of his knowledge and understanding that I cannot thank him enough for all his help.

It goes without saying that all the flaws and mistakes in this book are mine, and mine only.

Foreword:
Listening to Plato for modern times

Whatever we might think about Nietzsche’s ‘philosophic autopsies,’ we must nevertheless acknowledge that he boldly plumbs philosophic discourses to strike incisively at all the ‘virtuous noise’ of those human beings — call them ‘philosophers’ — less inclined to admit their follies than to cloak their prejudices with intricate rationalizations. And just as poignantly, Nietzsche faces into the storm of contradictions that characterize philosophic attempts to provide explanations of the ‘human condition.’ He dissects their hermeneutical excursions as they variously claim to discover, perhaps sometimes claiming to recover, truths that, however lying just there before them in plain sight, they overlook because of their prejudices — prejudices both benign and almost excusable, and those less than exemplary of what is best in humankind. Even as we may disagree with Nietzsche, as we might perform our own autopsies on his works, we cannot help but appreciate his questioning philosophic landmarks and tilling the landscape of contemplation for, if nothing else, a fresh look at the sacred icons of our established tradition. And for this might we be forever thankful.

Nietzsche’s obvious quickness of mind and poetic imagination enabled his assays through philosophical accretions to reveal the ontologies interred there that underlie the ethics and epistemologies of innumerable ‘virtuous souls.’ Precisely this activity is a signature of what is best in philosophic analysis. Moreover, his expositions proceeded well beyond providing clear exegeses of texts. His essays provide broad, critical, even inflammatory, explications of the European Tradition that resulted in his numerous likely stories for our modern considerations. Nietzsche unapologetically engaged the discourse, for which, again, we can be forever thankful.

While perhaps less obvious than Nietzsche’s wit and wiles, our modern world is making hard-fought advances toward completing the project — albeit surely a protracted struggle beset by fits and starts, successes, setbacks, and uncertainties — begun in modern times with the European Renaissance to realize fully what it means to be human and to exalt in that meaning. The human community has yet to recognize itself as a species, to embrace its species-being, if you will. And humanity seems to resist doing so, although this resistance is less the deliberate efforts of the mass of humanity than the more determined attempts of entrenched ideologues to thwart progress toward that recognition. Hegel had deftly woven an Enlightenment confidence in reason into a Romantic predilection toward elevating the best in humankind to affirm the march of human progress. And, whether we believe with Hegel that philosophy will deliver humanity, or with Feuerbach that anthropology is the compassing, liberating human science, or with Marx on the role of political economy in this connection, these great thinkers proffered inspired convictions toward human liberation. Each thinker engaged the discourse on themes of emancipation, of the value of the human person, and of the promises of democracy. Interestingly, each philosopher enlisted the importance of dialectics — of dialectical examination, of dialectical logic — in respect of both epistemic matters toward uncovering truth and ontic matters toward understanding the dynamics underlying nature and society.

If we look back only as far as the 20^th century after the destruction wrought by a second encompassing world war, we easily recognize the new stirrings of liberation struggles against colonialism throughout the world that awakened new possibilities for freedom and engendered new opportunities to release the full force of human potential. The signature desire of all these movements — those domestic to the Euro-American peoples as also the movements of peoples situated in or indigenous to Africa, Latin American, Asia — is universally concern for freedom, for recognition of the worth and dignity of the individual person, and for human autonomy and democracy.

Furthermore, taking human developments in the latter half of the 20^th century as antecedent, we see as consequent that there is nowadays not a single aspect of human being-in-the-world exempt from critical re-evaluation. The world’s peoples are faced with having:

• to redefine gender, race, class, ethnicity, family, nation-state, community, individual, God, nature, human, intelligence, etc.; and
• to re-examine the relationships between human beings and the natural world, between the individual person and the community of which he/she is a part; and to ask whether progress and growth are to be preferred over sustainability; among other concerns.

There are no sacred cows, or, if there are, those embracing them are on the defensive even as they thrash viciously to hold on to the rapidly disappearing provincial past. We are entering a new period of human development, the outcome perhaps not as assured as Hegel had anticipated, one fraught, indeed, with profound disadvantages of the dispossessed and impoverished, but one just as surely containing new prospects for success. We are on the cusp of coming to reframe and understand the notion of the common good, that human beings are pro...

Table of contents

• Notes