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Autor: Voegelin, Eric Buch: The World of the Polis Titel: The World of the Polis Stichwort: Athen des 5. Jhdts; paradigmatische Existenz der Polis als Voraussetzung für Plato u. Aristoteles Kurzinhalt: The Great Awakening was the feat of the Athenian people in the fifth century B.C.-with consequences for the history of mankind that have not been exhausted to this day Textausschnitt: 315a The union between the polis and the spiritual adventure of the poets and philosophers was the civilizational form of Hellas. The potentialities of the adventure had been fully actualized, however, and perhaps were exhausted, with the generation of Heraclitus and Parmenides. The myth, the terminus a quo of the movement toward transcendence, had been disintegrated through the discovery of the soul and its authority; and a terminus ad quem a people that would live by the insights of the mystic-philosophers, had not been found. The authoritative "But I say unto you [...]" required a social response if it was not to peter out into repetitions, from time to time, by solitary individuals.1 The Heraclitean reflections on the "sleepwalkers" ominously illuminate the social impasse of the magnificent adventure. In order to become truly the form of a civilization, the tension had to be something more than an irritation of the polis by odd individuals. Something like a Great Awakening was required to create a society in wakeful response to the depth of the soul, to the new humanity in love of the sophon, discovered by the philosophers. (Fs) (notabene) |