It has been said that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed. The saying is strongly reminiscent of Carl von Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means." Both exemplify Realpolitik. What does Realpolitik exclude? It excludes any politics based on otherworldly principles such as Christian principles. Does it not?
The exclusion is implied in the following passage from Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin, 1968, p. 245):
The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]
"Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters." Nietzsche says something similar somewhere in his Nachlass. I paraphrase from memory. (And it may be that the thought is expressed in one of the works he himself published.)
The philosopher is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life for safe navigation. Bobbing like a cork, he capsizes easily. The solid bourgeois, weighted and freighted with the cargo of Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof, ploughs deep the waves and weathers the storms of Neptune's realm and reaches safe harbor.
The philosophers who shouldn't be given any say in matters mundane and political are of course the otherworldly philosophers, those I would dub, tendentiously, the 'true philosophers.' There are also the 'worldly philosophers' discussed by Robert L. Heilbroner in his eponymous book, such thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
The 'true philosophers,' which include Plato and his opposite number Nietzsche, have something like contempt for those who would occupy themselves with the human-all-too-human alone.
I am of the tribe of Plato, more a spectator of all time and existence than a participant in the flux and shove of the order of impermanence. It is this perch above the fray that enables the true philosopher to see the nature of the political that is hidden to those in the grip of the vita activa.
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