Perspectives on Political Science, 10457097, Fall2000, Vol. 29, Issue 4
Database: Academic Search Premier
ON THE PARADOXICAL PLACE OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE STRUCTURE OF REALITY
Contents
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II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
NOTES
Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself.
--Leo Strauss, The City and Man(n1)
I will argue that genuine subjectivity is to be attained through the redemptive return of doxological dispossession, thus ensuring that the subject is neither autonomously self-pres-ent, nor passively controlled from without (the pendulum of 'choice' available to the citizen of our immanentist city).
--Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: The
Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy(n2)
For these sophists desire that demonstrative arguments should be given for all things; for it is obvious that they wanted to take some starting point that would be for them a kind of rule whereby they could distinguish between those who are healthy and those who are ill, and between those who are awake and those who are asleep. . . . Still, they are not deceived in their own minds so that they believe the judgments of one who is asleep and the judgment of one who is awake to be equally true. And this is clear from their acts.
--Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's
Metaphysics, bk. IV, ch. 15, no. 709
I.
Philosophic discussions sometimes lend themselves to nonphilosophic beginnings. It seems proper to start with a tract from the last days of the twentieth century. The scene is the "Tenth Annual Tiny Tots' Concert." Present are Marcie, Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown's little sister Sally, and a diminutive girl with long hair, wearing a headband. Peppermint Patty tells us right off that she "hates" "Tiny Tot Concerts." Sally in turn complains, "Every time we come to one of these concerts, they play 'Peter and the Wolf.'" In the next frame she adds, "They must think we don't understand anything else." The little girl with the headband, sitting at Sally's left, asks, "Don't you like 'Peter and the Wolf'?" Sally replies, "I don't know . . . I've never understood it."(n3) We find this account amusing because we understand, without need of further explanation, what it means to say that we do not understand while at the same time claiming that we do understand.
That is to say, as the above-cited passage from Saint Thomas affirms, we possess the first principle of being and knowledge without needing to elaborate it formally: namely, that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. We cannot deny the principle without implicitly affirming it. Our acts often make our thoughts clear when we do not admit their clarity even to ourselves. Even when we would be skeptics, we reveal something that is not skeptical. Our very rational power is given to us. As Samuel Johnson put it in a letter to James Boswell, on 9 February 1776, "Providence gives the power, of which reason teaches the use."(n4) Without the implicit truth of the principle of contradiction, we could not know that we reason badly. Without it, we could not be taught reason's use.
In a conversation at the University of Leyden in Holland, on 20 May 1975, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was asked by Professor H. Phillipse, "Is philosophy a diversion for you, as it was for Pascal?" Levinas enigmatically responded, in a phrase to which I shall return later, "[I]f the undivertable can be a diversion, and if a diversion can be undivertable." Phillipse next inquired, "Is the philosophical attitude--which is in essence a skeptical attitude--not in contradiction with the attitude of faith?" Levinas distinguished the meaning of "skeptical," a point with which I am beginning these considerations on political philosophy. "'Skeptical' only means the fact of examining things," Levinas affirmed,
the fact of posing questions. I do not at all think that a question--or, at least, the original questioning--is only a deficiency of answers. Functional and even scientific questions-and many philosophic ones-await only answers. Questioning qua original attitude is a relation to that which no response can contain, to the "uncontainable"; it becomes responsibility. Every response contains a "beside the point" and appeals to an un-said [de-dit].(n5)
The fact is, there are questions to which there are answers, even when we realize that every answer arises out of a reality that is "uncontainable" by our own minds. That questioning is not skepticism but a manifestation of what Socrates called intellectual "eros," an awareness and pursuit of the revelatory nature of what is.
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