"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Raymond Guess on philosophy and politics
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October 21, 2008
In Philosophy and Real Politics Raymond Geuss defends a philosophy that is in, and concerned with, the everyday political world as opposed to a philosophy as ideal theory. In the Introduction he sketches four interrelated theses that structure the former conception of philosophy.
First, political philosophy must be realist. That means, roughly speaking, that it must start from and be concerned in the first instance not with how people ought ideally (or ought “rationally”) to act, what they ought to desire, or value, the kind of people they ought to be, etc., but, rather, with the way the social, economic, political, etc., institutions actually operate in some society at some given time, and what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances.
Second, and following on from this, political philosophy must recognise that politics is in the first instance: about action and the contexts of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions. In many situations agents’ beliefs can be very important—for instance, knowing what another agent believes is often a relevant bit of information if one wants to anticipate how that agent can be expected to act—but sometimes agents do not immediately act on beliefs they hold. In either case the study of politics is primarily the study of actions and only secondarily of beliefs that might be in one way or another connected to action.
The third thesis I want to defend is that politics is:
historically located: it has to do with humans interacting in institutional contexts that change over time, and the study of politics must reflect this fact...If one thinks that understanding one’s world is a minimal precondition to having sensible human desires and projects, history is not going to be dispensable. The more important one thinks it is to act, the more this will be the case. For as long, at least, as human societies continue to change, we won’t escape history.
Finally, the fourth assumption that lies behind this essay is that politics is:
more like the exercise of a craft or art, than like traditional conceptions of what happens when a theory is applied. It requires the deployment of skills and forms of judgment that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot be reliably codified or routinised, and that do not come automatically with the mastery of certain theories.
This offers viable way of thinking about politics that is in opposition to the mainstream of contemporary analytic political philosophy.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:55 AM | Permalink |
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