Rewriting Contemporary Political Philosophy with Plato and Aristotle by Schollmeier Paul;

Author:Schollmeier, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Part Three

The Cave Again: The Daunting Prospect of Political Tragedy

6

Poetical Animals

1. Politicians are liars all. Or so people say, especially during election season. But we ought not to be too harsh on our politicians, I submit. Their falsehoods are not always voluntary. The more popular arguments will suffice. During a campaign even candidates who otherwise display integrity often speak off the cuff and can misspeak. Before elected to office, they may also make sincere promises, but their promises may prove difficult to keep. They may find after taking office that the situation was not quite what it had seemed.

Political philosophers are liars, too. Our lies, I dare say, are nothing less than endemic to our enterprise. But we ought not to be too harsh on ourselves, either. Our untruths are hardly voluntary. The usual philosophical arguments are the more apposite. We are but mortals, and our faculties, even our rational faculties, are feeble. We can have recourse only to hypotheses, whether we reason or understand. But our hypotheses at best only approximate any absolute truth, and a political world, on which they can shed light, only approximates them.

I would go so far as to declare that natural as well as moral philosophers are less than truthful. All our theories, natural or moral, are hypothetical. To this thought we ought by now to have become accustomed. But are we accustomed to its consequences? Have we thought out its consequences? A theory, I submit, concerns intelligible objects, but these objects are our own ideas. With our ideas we can at best attempt to formulate a grander, unifying, hypothesis and employ it for a first principle.

Nor can our theory, because it concerns intelligible things, express any truth about sensible things. Sensible things are merely images of a theory, Plato would insist. Sensible things only approximate a theory, we would say. Any physicist or chemist would tell you that their theory has its limits. They cheerfully accept for a satisfactory confirmation of a hypothesis an experimental result deemed an adequate approximation to it.

I would venture to assert, then, that any theory is a myth. My assumption is that a myth concerns less than necessary ideas but more than contingent impressions. Perhaps Aristotle put the matter best. He in effect asserts that myth concerns a realm that lies between what is more intelligible and what is merely sensible. Explicitly he compares poetry to history. Poetry is more philosophical than history because it concerns more a universal and less a particular (Poetics 9. 1451b5–11).

Theory at its best, then, can be no more than logically cogent. We can rise from narrower hypotheses about intelligible entities to broader hypotheses, and we can descend from broader to lesser hypotheses and to their conclusions. But, again, we cannot presume to glean an absolute truth, nor can we presume to grasp an empirical truth. At its worst theory is emotionally congenial. With our reasonings and understandings we can, perhaps unawares, keep ourselves tethered to sensible entities. These entities might include our reputation, our employment, or our enjoyment.

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