The picture, once seen, is not quickly forgotten. — A barefoot young woman hurtling towards us. In the rush her dress has slipped off her shoulders; she is waiving a flag high over her head. Then we notice, with shock, the bayonet in her hand and we see the dead,…
In a diary note from 1950 entitled “What is politics?” Arendt roundly attacked the philosophical tradition for having failed to get at the deepest problems of politics. “The difference in quality between the political philosophy of the great thinkers and their other work is startling – even in Plato. Politics never reaches the same depth.” The problem was that “for all scientific thinking – in biology and psychology as well as in philosophy and theology – there is only Man” whereas politics, Arendt added, “rests on the fact of human plurality.”
I began this investigation by asking myself what it means to be political. This was, I realized, in essence a double question. I wanted to ask what it means to call an action, a decision, a speech, an institution, a system, an order, a principle, a conflict (etc.) political. But I also wanted to know what meaning those “political” things might have for our living and breathing existence. My question was, thus, in one sense conceptual and in another existential in nature. It concerned in one sense no more than the meaning of a word but in another our entire understanding of politics and its place in our lives.
We are standing today on the edge of a cliff and notice the ground before us falling away: we see an uncontrolled growth of world population, a quickly disintegrating environment, the accumulations of resources in the hands of the few, the cynical transfer of powers from the state to private interests, an unstable shifting of weights from one side of the globe to another, education swamped by ever more ruthless varieties of entertainment, the academy divesting itself of its erstwhile humanism, philosophy abandoned as a luxury we can do without. These and other such signs alert us to the precariousness of our condition – an uncertainty that manifests itself in all walks of life but not least in the political arena.
What does it mean to say that we are by nature political beings. Critical reflection on Aristotle’s dictum can help us to get a clearer vision of the place of politics in human life.
We need to move in political philosophy from the now dominant normative thinking to a diagnostic practice. Normative theory tends to look at human situations in an abstract and simplifying manner. It seeks to discern in them general patterns that can be regulated by universal norms. The diagnostic practice, on the other hand, considers those situations in their concrete density. It does not isolate moral dilemmas but understands specific individual circumstances as parts of a larger social, historical, and political pattern.
Plato’s dialogues Protagoras and Politikos (The Statesman) both relate a creation myth and both do so for political ends. In each version the gods are said to have made the cosmos but at some point to have abandoned it to its own devices. In each of them the origin of human politics is traced back to that moment. Both myths proclaim thus that politics belongs to a world in which the gods are absent and we are, in consequence, obliged to take care of ourselves. Each myth also makes clear that we are forced to become political at this point because we are incomplete beings, not well-equipped to survive when left to our own devices and not naturally prepared to live and labor together. Both accounts agree, thus, that politics is grounded in human deficiency.
If we had to choose right now a single, concise term to characterize our time, we might well call it an age of uncertainty – in contrast to the ages of faith, of reason, of revolution, etc. that have come before it. But given the current, ambiguous state of things that denomination will itself seem uncertain and its all-inclusiveness of limited value. Every historical period is, after all, steeped in uncertainty – it is there in the midst of faith, reason, and revolution – and if ours is more deeply uncertain or is so in a distinctive manner, that needs to be specified.
