[Geist takes a bit of a stroll down memory lane. Before insulting Heideggerians]
Back in my college days, I developed what I now recognize to
be an “approach” to reading political theory. I treated each political
philosopher’s image of his[1]
political subject as a work of art. Political philosophy was a matter of
aesthetic appreciation. What I wanted to imagine and experience was human beauty.
Though I eventually achieved a somewhat respectable facility
with the technical aspects of theorizing, I primarily read these texts to
imagine what the experience of being a particular subject was ‘like’. What did
being Aristotle’s citizen feel like?
What was the texture of his everyday experiences? How did he perceive the
world? And was his mode of life beautiful?
Many of us read novels for the same reason. This approach
assumes that philosophers are not merely describing human beings, but creating them (though creation under the
guise of description).[2]
The ultimate question for me when assessing the value of a political theory was
never ‘do I think this is right?’, but rather ‘do I want to make myself into
this?’ Is this what I want to be?
That beauty, and not truth, could be the foundation of a
political order has never been a particularly well-received notion. Plato
famously casts the poets out of the Republic. Liberal political theory has long
relegated aesthetic appreciation to the private realm. And fascism always
stands as the guiding example of the dangers inherent in mixing art and politics,
art and truth.
But we should recall that Plato only banishes the poets from
the Republic after their job was done, that job being the moral education of its
children. Songs and poems cultivate particular affective desires in the
citizenry. The Republic itself orients our mode of experience in particular
ways, ways that its citizens find to be beautiful.
Similarly, liberalism’s autonomous individual who freely
makes choices is too an image of a particular mode of life, a particular way of
being in the world. It’s a particular way of relating to other people and the
world of “things”. When we say we agree with “liberalism” what we’re saying is
that we want to experience the world in a particular way. We find that mode of
engagement to be aesthetically desirable. I think conservatives, those who
privilege the community over the individual and tradition over change, too are
conservative for this same reason. As are democratic socialists. Communists. Anarchists. And so on.
We desire to become
a particular imagining.
Which, of course, presents us with something of a problem.
What we see in a pluralistic society is not, as we tend to think today,
competing and differing political logics, but rather competing and differing aesthetic visions. And this is where I
think liberal pluralism misunderstands the question. It proposes a meta-logic
that all political logics can reasonably assent to. But these political logics
are really the scaffolding upon an aesthetic foundation. They don’t provide the
foundation in and of themselves.[3]
What political liberalism needs instead is an over-arching meta-aesthetic that
holds society together. That is, of course, if we find that vision of society
to be aesthetically desirable.
In my reading, political philosophizing engages in what it
was meant to deny: politics as art. But, if as I suggest, our judgment of the
political subject is ultimately an aesthetic evaluation, then perhaps it’s time
to accept this fact and work out what it means for our politics and our
philosophizing. I think most of us can at least agree that this is an issue
best not left to the Heideggerians.
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