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February 17, 2006
Adam Thurschwell over at Before the Law makes mention of this paper that builds on the friendship element of Aristotle's political philosophy. In Aristotle the role of friendship is the mediating link between the good for the individual (ethics) and the good for the community (politics). Maybe friendship stands for the solidarity that has been hollowed in the ALP?
The paper's abstract states that:
"... the essay concludes with a sketch of an ethical-political philosophy based on Derrida's work and the work of one of his main influences, Emmanuel Levinas, that incorporates the most important elements of the Aristotelian critique of modernity, without, however, falling back into the elitism and communitarian dangers [of the] traditionalist reconstruction of Aristotle... and without losing the benefit of modernity's real political achievements."
Sounds promising, doesn't it. I cannot download the article to understand how Adams interprets the 'Aristotelian critique of modernity' but I would suggest that it is along the lines of the loss of meaning (due to the process of nihilism) and the loss of purpose and value because of the hegemony of instrumental reason. The benefit of modernity would be subjective political freedom and liberal democracy. It could be argued that a secular liberalism, in its drive to eliminate all discrimination and make more and more of society conform to a single, universalist idea, of freedom and abstract right, progressively thins out the culture until nothing is left. Neo-Aristotleans would argue that liberal individualism can be supplemented by the Aristotlean tradition, which can be restated in a way that restores rationality and intelligibility to our own moral and social attitudes and commitments.
In the above post Adam says that:
The notion that I was trying to articulate [in that paper] was something like .... [a]Derridean/Levinasian political solidarity as an aufhebung of the (very "strong") solidarity of the classical polis and the extremely abstract, denatured and "weak" solidarity of the modern, Kantian political subject with its fellow rational beings.
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