Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Solon: doxa (Quelle der Unordnung - eunomia

Kurzinhalt: The Doxa is the source of disorder; renunciation of Doxa is the condition of right order, Eunomia; through openness toward transcendence, the passion of life is revealed as the Doxa ...

Textausschnitt: 265c Nevertheless, we are yet far from a Thucydidean causality of politics. The actions of man are still embedded in a cosmic order that is governed by the gods. Evil conduct will lead to evil results because offended Dike will have her revenge. This is the aspect of theodicy that Solon explores thoroughly in the great Prayer to the Muses (13). Grant me wealth (the Homeric olbos), he prays to the Muses, as well as good fame among men; and with wealth will come the power, for which he prays, to be "sweet to my friends, and a bitter taste to my foes." But the prayer for the excellences of a Homeric aristocrat is softened by concern for the Hesiodian Dike: "Wealth I desire to possess?but I would not have it unrighteously; for Dike always catches up." Zeus himself, through his Dike, watches over the actions of man; the works of hybris and force will arouse his wrath slowly but surely; the one will pay earlier, the other later; and if he escape himself, his guiltless children and their offspring will pay for his misdeeds. Then the poem broadens into a grandiose meditation on the delusions of man. Each of us, whether good or bad, lives engrossed in his own illusion [doxa] until he suffers. The sick hope to be healthy, and the poor to be rich; the cowards believe they are brave, and the ugly man believes himself good-looking. Each, furthermore, follows his business and hopes to gain by it?whether as a fisherman, a peasant, a craftsman, a physician, or a seer; and he will not be deterred by hard work, failure, and little profit. But the goods of comeliness and health, of success and riches, are not at the disposition of mortal action. Moira, Fate, brings good and ill to the mortals; and the gifts of the immortals must be accepted. Honest endeavor may fail, and the wicked ones may succeed. Nevertheless, this order of things is not senseless; it appears devoid of sense only if the illusionary wishes and pursuits of man are substituted for the sense of the gods. The source of senselessness is the illusion (doxa) of man. And, in particular, the striving for wealth, the highest aim of all effort, cannot be a principle of order. There is no clear end (terma) to such striving; for the richest among us are twice as eager to have more than the others,- and who could let them all have their fill? Possessions, to be sure, come from the gods; but there is a fatality attached to them, which passes along with them, from hand to hand. (Fs) (notabene)

266a In the meditative prayer of Solon, as in the elegy of Tyrtaeus, the polis asserts itself against the excellences of the old aristocracy. The citizen of a polis cannot lead the heroic life of a Homeric prince. If everybody wants to play Agamemnon or Achilles, the result will not be an aristocratic culture but a war of all against all and the destruction of the polis. In a polis heroic existence degenerates into exploitation and tyranny. The conflict becomes the occasion for a profound reconsideration of political ethics on the part of Solon. If the Athenian aristocrats use the advantages of their economic position to the full, the danger is imminent that Athens will perish and Homeric conditions will be restored, indeed. Thucydides, in his History, shrewdly discerned that the most backward regions of Hellas gave an idea of conditions in the age depicted by Homer. Solon recognized the truth of the Homeric excellences; but he also knew that the polis required a new temperance. The naive prosperity and magnificence of the hero could no longer be the Arete of man. "Many bad men are rich, many good men are poor; but we for our part shall not exchange Arete for riches; for Arete lasts forever, while possessions are in the hands now of one man, then of another" (15). The true Arete of man is distinguished as something less tangible than the possessions in which the hero finds confirmation of his worth. But wherein precisely does the newly discovered Arete consist? The religious genius of Solon reveals itself in the refusal of a positive answer. The excellence of man cannot find its fulfillment in the possession of finite goods. The goods at which man aims through his action are apparent only; they belong to the doxa of his wishes and pursuits. The true Arete consists in man's obedience to a universal order that in its fullness is known only to the gods. "It is very hard to know the unseen measure of right judgment; and yet it alone contains the right boundaries [peirata] of all things" (16). The true Arete is an act of faith in the unknown order of the gods who will see to it that the man who renounces his doxa will act in accordance with Dike. On the one hand, "The mind of the immortals is all unseen to men" (17); on the other hand, "At the behest of the gods have I done what I said" (34, 6). We are already very close to the Platonic Agathon about which nothing can be said positively, although it is the source of order in the Politeia. (Fs) (notabene)

267a The Doxa is the source of disorder; renunciation of Doxa is the condition of right order, Eunomia. When man overcomes the obsession of his Doxa and fits his action into the unseen measure of the gods, then life in community will become possible. This is the Solonic discovery. At the core of his Eunomia, as its animating experience, we find the religiousness of a life in tension between the passionate, human desire for the goods of exuberant existence and the measure imposed on such desire by the ultimately inscrutable will of the gods. Neither of the two components of life is invalidated by the other. Solon is neither a middle-class type who finds virtue in a medium situation because it fits his medium stature; nor is he a broken Titan, resigned to the frustration of his desires by Fate. He passionately loves the magnificence and exuberance of life; but he experiences it as a gift of the gods, not as an aim to be realized by crooked means against the divine order. Through openness toward transcendence, the passion of life is revealed as the Doxa that must be curbed for the sake of order. (Fs) (notabene)