Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 14:53:07 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: me politeuesthai


Advice from Epicurus:  "Don't politicize!"  (or "don't engage in 
politics," but for a philosopher, that means don't politicize thought 
by trying to think the political.)   I know, Aristotle to the 
contrary; but he
was talking about an idealized polis, built on the possibilities 
inherent in human association, the
desire for the intimacy of community, wherein (philosophical) love 
and friendship may thrive.

Beyond the temporal bounds of the polis and the philosophical 
fantasies it spawns, there is no way
to think the political without disengaging thought from the chaos of 
the particular and its
accompanying contingencies.  Enter the Germans (I know I'm rushing, 
but there's a snowstorm brewing here), with nothing to ground their 
idealistic (literally) fantasies, but the impossibility
of a greater Germany in the making.  Any particular body which cannot 
incorporate itself into
the greater German ideal/body must either transform itself or somehow 
disappear from the horizon
of possibility.  And the Jews, as Kant put it, were "immutably tied 
to their god, Jehovah (sic)."
They not only represented the particular other, but their religion 
itself was embedded in obsessions ( and compulsions) which  dug them 
into the darkness of particularity, contingency and other subversive 
sunderings of sublation.  Idealism requires a strong military because 
its seemingly robust thinking is
really quite delicate and vulnerable.  So the Jew represents both a 
substantial and a spiritual threat.
Some unrepentent German idealist/romantics (the early Scheler) 
welcome World War I (though not called
that at the time, of course) as the only thing that could save the 
becoming impossibility of the  German ideal/body  from descent into 
Jewish heteronomous nitpicking.

Scheler exhausted his life trying to put it all together.  But 
Heidegger still lived in that self-same Germany and so had to 
continue to think the impossible.  But his thinking ( before 1930) 
returned
  to the truly  political in Aristotle:  the problems and 
possibilities of Dasein's basic condition of
being-with.  Here, in the negotiation between self and other, the 
personal truly is political and can
be thought. But "society" is an illusion of das Man, serving 
especially well the corporate aims of this holiday season.

Happy, happy,

Allen


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