Political sense and networks
16
Oct
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.
