Suchergebnisse

As opposed to philosophy, theology and natural sciences, for which only the singular Man exists, for political theory the decisive fact is the plurality of men. Politics is preoccupied with common and mutual being of different men. It is created among men and established as their connectedness. Freedom exists only in the authentic interspace of politics. We are saved from that freedom in the "necessity of history", which is a revolting absurdity. When one wishes in our time to speak about politics, one must start with the prejudice towards it. The prejudice accurately reflect the truly existing contemporary situation precisely in its political aspects, and suggest that we have ended up in a situation in which we do not quite or do not yet know how to move politically. The prejudice towards politics are manifest in the notion that national politics is made up of lies and deception by corrupt interests and corrupt ideology, while foreign politics hovers between hollow propaganda and brute force. This causes a flight into powerlessness, a desperate desire for men in general to be deprived of the freedom to act. Politics is, always and everywhere, preoccupied with illuminating and dissolving prejudice. If one wishes to dissolve prejudice, one must first discover the past judgment contained therein, i.e. actually show their contents of truth. This is the task of the faculty of judgment, but not as mere capability to subject the individual regularly and adequately to the general that corresponds to it and regarding which there is agreement, but as judgment directly and with no standard. The loss of standard, which truly determines the modern world in its facticity and cannot be annulled by any return to the good, old tradition or any arbitrary setting up of new values and standards, is therefore a catastrophe of the moral world only if one presupposes that men would in fact be completely unable to judge things in and of themselves, and that their faculty of judgment is insufficient for original judgment. Politics is always centered on care for the world organized in this or some different way, without which those who care and who are political, think that life is not worth living. Where men come together, the world always breaks through between them, and all human actions take place in this interspace. Adapted from the source document.

It is with good reason that decisionism stresses the crucial importance of decisions in the political process. But it is necessary to evaluate critically its dramatic pretension (from Schmitt to Agamben), according to which the normality of life is juxtaposed with the pathos of the state of exception & crisis. This erases not only every distinction between normality & the state of exception, but even between democracy & dictatorship. The proper framework from which an explanation of decisionism & its dramatizing forms can be derived is the modern age as a whole. The birth of decisionism from the crisis of tradition & commonality can be observed already in the beginning of modernity: with Machiavelli & Hobbes. We find the peak of dramatisation in Schmitt's decisionism, in the use of political theology for the dramatization of politics as drama of the subject which obtains his self-willed freedom through a secularist disempowerment of God. The other strand of political philosophy advocates the political priority of discussion & discourse, as opposed to the priority of decision. The author is interested in forms of discourse which revolve in a Habermasian or Rawlsian way around the concept of deliberative democracy. The theories of deliberative democracy are mostly characterized by the following postulates: demand for equality & inclusion, for non-coercion & communicativeness, oriented towards mutual understanding. The author points out that these demands reflect too great expectations, which cannot be fulfilled by discourse & discussion (expectations of consensus & rationality, underestimating of pre-discursive assumptions). In the final section, the author concludes that both decisionism & theory of discourse resulted from the modern-age loss of tradition & commonality. Decision & discussion could be perceived as feuding brothers, although they are doing their best to negate their kinship. A mediation of opposition is possible insofar as the feuding brothers recognize the fact that they are related. Unification at least protects them from the danger of irrationalism & excessive expectation of rationalism. Adapted from the source document.

Philosophy of politics is currently going through an extremely grave crisis. The crisis of the political is apparent everywhere. Political interpretation in the conditions of the contemporary age is seriously shaken. This in turn brings into question the segment of society which is an essential part of the cultural identity of the West. One might say that, throughout the 20th century, no one inquired into the position of politics as thoroughly as Hannah Arendt. Her major contribution had to do with understanding the relation between philosophy and the application of its principles in politics, and her basic estimation was that the application of principles of philosophical thought on politics had devastating consequences. Although philosophy as metaphysics, since Plato and Hegel, contributed greatly to consideration of the political, Hannah Arendt was nonetheless of the opinion that the original sense of the political was lost in such philosophy and that the application of principles of philosophical thought on politics caused the political to be forgotten. The text provides a brief outline of Plato's perception of the relation between philosophy and politics, postulating the philosophical ideal that the veritable political community (polis) must be measured according to philosophical thought, and on the basis of principles of constitution of thought itself. On the other hand, Aristotle calls upon the ethos of the existing polis, but he always analyses the political under the primacy of philosophical principles. Arendt thus deems that Aristotle also considers the relevant knowledge of the political to be philosophical. She points out that political philosophy always discriminated against opinion and variety, and consequently also against the political as such. Aristotle and Kant are partly excluded from this judgment. Since the political categories created in the philosophy of politics determine our understanding of politics to this day, Arendt subjects them to criticism. Her different understanding of the political is manifest in her analyses of the fundamental political categories (government, power, force, authority, freedom), which can be adequately grasped only on the basis of relations between people, and not of some substantial and unquestionable domain. Adapted from the source document.