Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The mistrust of politics (and politicians) is as old as the tradition of political philosophy, writes Hannah Arendt and it is through this question that one can understand the meaning of politics.

Right afterwards in the introduction to fragment 3b he writes: “Politics, as we have learned, is something like an imperative necessity for human life and, in fact, both for the life of the individual and of society”, and adds little by little to: “The task and objective of the policy is to guarantee life in the broadest sense”.

Then it will clarify an old misconception, present in all Western culture, we already said in another post from the zoon politikon, says the author that it is not: were politicians or that politics, that is, a polis, there were everywhere where men lived ”, he believed“ it is only a characteristic of man that he can live in a polis and that this organization of the polis represented the highest form of human coexistence ”, but he knew that it was far from being a society of angels and it was restricted to a group of people.

The author explains that what distinguishes the coexistence of men in politics from other forms of human coexistence was freedom, for a class of people.

The meaning of politics for the Greeks clarifies Arendt in paragraph 3c: “And the goal was not purely and simply freedom as it was realized in the polis, but pre-political liberation for freedom in the polis. The meaning of the political thing here, but not its objective, is for men to have relations with each other in freedom, beyond strength, coercion and dominance. Equals with equals that only in case of need, that is, in times of war, gave orders and obeyed each other; but, except for that, they regulated all matters by means of mutual conversation and mutual conviction. ”

Just as it emerged in the Greek polis, what is “… decisive in this context is not so much the conflict between the polis and the philosophers – in which later we will have to go into details* – but that the simple indifference of a scope in in relation to the other, in which the conflict seemed to be resolved for a moment, since the space of the minority and its freedom – although it was also a public and non-private sphere – impossible to perform both functions, just as politics included all those who were fit for freedom ”.

The note* (number 17 in text) according to the compiler of the fragments is that it may be an unwritten chapter on “The Socratic position”, what the author is dealing with here is the difference between what was deepened by many authors later between the public space and the private space, which should be able to freedom.

What happens in the contemporary world with social media, it is never too much to differentiate media from the networks themselves, which are the set of social relationships that Hannah Arendt recovers, it is of paramount importance because it will have properties different from those that are among the “privileged” politicians, as the Greeks established them and as the author says, which we often reject because we are not professional politicians.

The set of human coexistence was not possible to be thought of before global communication and social media, the Greek polis was a social experience of small city-states where a part of the population that was free could establish democracy in it, however the society as a whole was not free.

The new emerging realities create a greater space for human coexistence and denote civilizing weaknesses, and put democracy itself in check, there are still citizens who are only free to vote and politics is dominated by minorities who take power to establish their privileges.

The idea that there is a judgment of taste, about which Kant also sentenced, that one cannot “argue”, but rather fight and reach an agreement, we know him well in everyday life, and Hannah Arendt already pointed this out in the 50s , in a situation still unknown, we believe that this or that would have judged the situation correctly or wrongly, so it is not a topic of today, but since relativism, the absence of values ​​and parameters was installed in society as a whole.

If the function of prejudice is to defend the man who judges both the freedom to do so and not to openly expose himself to each reality encountered and hence to have to confront it thinking, so the worldviews and ideologies seem to fulfill this task, a since they protect them from all experience, since supposedly all the real would be predicted in them in some way, but this was what defended scientific neutrality and that it is possible to find “scientific” solutions in each case.

This lack of parameter in the modern world, the impossibility of judging what happened and happens every day according to fixed and accepted criteria by everyone, of subjecting them to a known general scheme, is because there is a difficulty closely linked to this, of indicating principles of action for what will happen, is uncertain.

What’s brilliant about Hannah Arendt, and also found in many other contemporary humanists like Edgar Morin and Hans Georg Gadamer, is that she understands the world (human-social) not the natural world (of life, animals, for example) , nor of the universe (the physical world), what she is trying to define is a new “social” (intertwined, we would say in current terms in network), and for her this human, in this sense, is a social being.

The space between men that is the world would not make sense without men themselves, just as the universe or nature without men would be a contradiction in itself, without this meaning that the world and the catastrophes that occur in it would be reduced to one happening purely human, let alone that it was something that reduced to something that happened to “man” or to the nature of man.

One could easily object to being the world that is spoken of with only one world of men, this is the result of human doing and acting, as they wish, these capacities belong to the nature of man, and when they fail, nature should not be changed before man can think about changing the world?

It is from this view that Hannah Arendt will think the meaning of politics, this question is very old, much more than one thinks, Plato reproached Pericles when saying that the Athenians would not be better after they died, and this will be the subject of Hannah Arendt in fragment 3b.