Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik, Unterschied 1 (moderner Staat - Republik): Gebrauch d. Vernunft; Gesellschaftsvertrag: Ergebnis kalkulierender Vernunft

Kurzinhalt: The modern state, in contrast, as described by Hobbes and embodied in totalitarian forms of rule, denies the domain of truth. For it, reason is a tool.... The citizens or subjects are not agents of truth in any way; when they express their opinions ...

Textausschnitt: Contrasts between republics and the modern state

190a Let us speak further about the choice between a republic and Leviathan. I would like to bring out three ways in which these two forms of political life differ. To be more accurate, I should not call them two forms of political life, but the form of political life and the form of mass subjection and individualism. (Fs) (notabene)

190b First of all, in the republic, and in all good political constitutions, reason can be exercised. Men can think and express themselves. The republic is not possible without active human reason. Such reason is exercised in the founding of the city, in the deliberations that go on to determine courses of action, and in specifying the laws of the city and adjudicating the application of the laws. All those who are citizens are able to enter into such exercises of reason; that is what it means to be a citizen, to be able to enter into political reasoning. But besides these political or prudential exercises of reason, there is also in the republic the recognition of the power of theoretical reason, of understanding for its own sake. Besides the ethical and political life of reason, there is a life of simple understanding. Aristotle recognizes this in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he says that the highest human happiness is found in the theoretic life, but he also acknowledges it in a very dramatic way in book 7 of the Politics, chapters 2 and 3.1 He says that the life of thinking is higher than the political, and he implies that if one does not acknowledge the excellence of the life of thinking, one will try to satisfy one's thirst for the infinite by ruling over others, and one will therefore try to magnify this domination over as many people as possible, at home and abroad, even over one's neighbors and parents and children and friends.2 In other words, the life of ruling is not the simply highest life; we have to take our bearings from something higher. This also means that there is something in us that transcends political life, and only when political life acknowledges such transcendence can it find its proper place in human affairs. Only then will there be limited government. What this means is that a true republic, a city limited by laws, will have respect for the person as an agent of truth, both in the practical and in the theoretical order. The reason of the human person has its own directedness and its own appetite for truth; it is not just a tool in the service of subrational desires. (Fs) (notabene)

191a The modern state, in contrast, as described by Hobbes and embodied in totalitarian forms of rule, denies the domain of truth. For it, reason is a tool. The modern state is constituted as a new reality, as the sovereign, by an act of sheer will by men in the state of nature, and it exercises its own power simply for its survival and to prevent the state of nature from returning. The sovereign state is separate from the people and it lords over them. For Hobbes, the metaphysical reality of the state is made up of its own power and its own decisions. There is no truth of human nature by which it must be measured and to which it must be subordinated. The state determines even the kind of religion—the grasp of transcendence—that it will tolerate. The citizens or subjects are not agents of truth in any way; when they express their opinions, they are, according to Hobbes, engaged in vain posturing, not true deliberation: "For there is no reason why every man should not naturally mind his own private, than the public business, but that here he sees a means to declare his eloquence, whereby he may gain the reputation of being ingenious and wise, and returning home to his friends, to his parents, to his wife and children, rejoice and triumph in the applause of his dexterous behavior."3 For Hobbes, the sovereign's will alone should determine public affairs, and even the religious opinions of people have to be segregated into privacy. Such religious beliefs have no public standing as possible truths and cannot be presented as such.4 George Orwell was not wrong when in 1984 he has the totalitarian O'Brien controlling not only what you should do, but also how and what you should think, even what you should think in mathematics.5 There is nothing to transcend the sovereign; as Hobbes's predecessor and guide, Niccolò Machiavelli, put it, any ideal or best kingdoms, whether Christian or Greek, are figments of the imagination, imaginary kingdoms, that bring about ruin rather than preservation.6 (Fs)

192a In this political viewpoint, intelligence becomes merely calculation and pragmatic coping with the material needs of life. Even the social contract is just the work of calculating reason. Reason is not insight into truth, because there are no natures or forms of things to be understood. There is only the calculation of consequences. The epistemological skepticism of modernity is not unrelated to its metaphysics and political philosophy. Indeed, Hobbes's understanding of men as machines and thinking as mechanical motion, which is presented at the beginning of Leviathan,7is also not unrelated to his political philosophy: this is how human beings must understand themselves if they are to subject themselves to Leviathan. It is how the philosophical spokesman for Leviathan wants them to understand themselves. The mechanistic interpretation of human beings offered to us by reductive forms of cognitive science, in which mind is replaced by brain and human beings are not seen as agents of truth, is teleologically ordered toward the modern state in its pure form. (Fs) (notabene)

193a This then is the first contrast I wish to draw between classical and modern political philosophy: modern thought subtracts the issue of truth from the domain of politics, but a republic acknowledges both practical and theoretical truth and the human person's ability to attain it. We might ask ourselves which of these two options is characteristic of our own political culture. (Fs) (notabene)