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Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political pp 15–28Cite as

Intuition and Unanimity. From the Platonic Bias to the Phenomenology of the Political

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Part of the book series: Contributions To Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 89))

Abstract

My homage to Jacques Taminiaux aims to show the fecundity of his investigations on the theoretical privilege of intuition, by pointing out the political implications of the “seduction of unanimity”. The latter implies a deep depreciating of multiplicity of opinions, and consequently a virtual destruction of political space. The internal link between immediacy and unanimity implies the short-circuit between inter-locution and inter-action in favor of the purported objectivity and universality of theoria, retained capable of seizing, in its solitary gaze, the truth of Being. I would like to suggest that the drift to unanimous solutions in social field and political questions finds its unconcealed reason in the ontological paradigm of an ideal truth directly delivered to the solitude of a philosophical gaze. I will defend such a view by developing a critical reading of a classical text in political philosophy: the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This passage from his speech for the solemn presentation of the Francqui Prize deserves to be quoted in extenso in its original French: «Concernant mes travaux, je dirai d’abord que j’appartiens à une génération qui a pris la finitude au sérieux. Au lendemain de la guerre, à l’époque où l’interrogation philosophique a commencé de prendre corps à mes yeux et de me requérir, deux œuvres phénoménologiques ont imposé les coordonnées de mon itinéraire et l’ont pour ainsi dire placé sous le signe de la finitude: celle de Martin Heidegger et celle de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ils étaient philosophes, et des plus grands, l’un et l’autre. Je n’ai pas eu la présomption de le vouloir être, mais tout au plus de pratiquer l’étude de l’histoire de la philosophie moderne et contemporaine d’une manière qui fût elle-même philosophique. A cet égard, qu’on me permette de dire que je me suis reconnu dans un mot de Jean Hyppolite dont j’ai eu le privilège de suivre l’enseignement à Paris, et qui disait: ‘Ne parvenant pas à être poète, je décidai d’être philosophe, et n’y parvenant pas davantage, je me contentai d’être historien de la philosophie.’ Prendre au sérieux la finitude dans l’étude de l’histoire de la philosophie, ce fut là le principe qui m’amena à me concentrer sur certains moments et certains rapports privilegiés de cette histoire et à les aborder d’une manière spécifique » (Taminiaux 1977a).

  2. 2.

    It is not by chance that “Gestell et Ereignis” is one of the most important essays collected in Taminiaux (1982), 118–141. For a large selection of Taminiaux’s essays written in this period in English, cf. Taminiaux (1985a).

  3. 3.

    Cf. Taminiaux (1977b, 1993a).

  4. 4.

    Cf. Tilliette (2005).

  5. 5.

    Cf. Arendt (1978a), 15: “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth. The latest and in some respect most striking instance of this occurs in Heidegger’s Being and Time, which stars out by raising ‘anew the question of meaning of Being’. Heidegger himself in a later interpretation of his own initial question, says explicitly: ‘Meaning of Being and Truth of Being are the same’” (emphasis in the original).

  6. 6.

    Cf. Taminiaux (1985b). This is probably the first nucleus of Taminiaux (1997) (original French edition: Taminiaux 1992).

  7. 7.

    Taminiaux (2007), 13. Cf. Taminiaux (1991) (original French edition: Taminiaux 1989).

  8. 8.

    Taminiaux (2007), 17. In The Fragility of Goodness – cited by Taminiaux at least in Le théâtre des philosophes (1995) – Martha Nussbaum makes some similar considerations concerning the Platonic image of Socrates, who –she says– “is put before us as an example of a man in the process of making himself self-sufficient” (Nussbaum (1986), 184). Plato’s privileging the self-sufficiency of the sage, according to Nussbaum, is “intimately connected with his imperviousness to happenings in the world”; for this reason his “soul, self-absorbed, pursues its self-sufficient contemplation” (ibid., 183).

  9. 9.

    Taminiaux (1993b), vii.

  10. 10.

    The gradual abandoning of the Heideggerian reading of Hegel is evident in the evolution of Taminiaux’s confrontation with him, starting from La nostalgie de la Grèce (1967), passing through his introduction to G.W.F. Hegel Système de la vie éthique (1976), and climaxing with Naissance de la philosophie hégélienne de l’État (1984). The culmination of this axis of his research is Taminiaux (2005).

  11. 11.

    de La Boétie (2008), 40. Cf. de La Boétie (2002), 26.

  12. 12.

    Rothbard (2008), 16.

  13. 13.

    de La Boétie (2008), 43.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 47.

  15. 15.

    de La Boétie (2008), 50. Cf. de La Boétie (2002), 31–32.

  16. 16.

    In this sense, and in a strong reference to La Boétie, Miguel Abensour speaks of political community of “all ones”: cf. Abensour (2014).

  17. 17.

    I have analysed and discussed La Boétie’s Discourse, without developing this critical point, in Ciaramelli (2001).

  18. 18.

    “In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (Arendt 1958, 176).

  19. 19.

    “Le civiltà tradizionali si fondano sulla intuizione intellettuale della verità trascendente e sacra: tutte le civiltà viventi e scomparse sono tradizionali, e tale è stato l’occidente fino al medioevo. Ma dal 300 in poi, in occidente ha avuto inizio la nascita dell’unica civiltà antitradizionale esistente, la civiltà occidentale moderna” (de Martino (1977), 496). For a general presentation of de Martino’s contribution to a philosophical anthropology, see now Ferrari (2014).

  20. 20.

    Lefort (1988), 19.

  21. 21.

    Cf. Benedict XVI, pope (2006).

  22. 22.

    Ibid. (emphasis added).

  23. 23.

    Talmon (1960), 52.

  24. 24.

    Arendt (1978b), 115.

  25. 25.

    Arendt (1978b), 124.

  26. 26.

    de La Boétie (2008), 55 (emphasis added).

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 71f.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 73.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 79.

  30. 30.

    «La question du désir érode le fondement de l’humanisme classique auquel il se croyait arrimé» (Lefort 1978, 263).

  31. 31.

    «Cette représentation [du peuple ou de tous] s’engendre dans le désir de la servitude» (Lefort 1978, 273).

  32. 32.

    I would like to express my thanks to Véronique Fóti, Pavlos Kontos, Ferdinando Menga and Ashraf Noor for their comments on a first version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy of Law, Università “Federico II”, Naples, Italy

    Fabio Ciaramelli

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  1. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Véronique M. Fóti

  2. University of Patras, Patras, Greece

    Pavlos Kontos

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Ciaramelli, F. (2017). Intuition and Unanimity. From the Platonic Bias to the Phenomenology of the Political. In: Fóti, V., Kontos, P. (eds) Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 89. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56160-8_2

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