Karatani is a Japanese Marxist philosopher. This book, however, deals entirely with classical Greek philosophy and the political arrangements of Greek city-states. Karatani seeks to compare early Ionian philosophy with Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, to show what was truly groundbreaking about Ionian natural philosophy and political science. He contends, “nearly all of what is believed to be distinctive about Greece began in Ionia.” On the political unit of the polis, he asserts, “the principle first appeared in the early colonial cities in Ionia, and expanded from there through further colonization from those cities. It was only later that the principle spread to the Greek mainland.”
What interests Karatani most is the type of political institutions that flourished in Ionia. “What existed in Ionia was not democracy but isonomia.” Hannah Arendt expands, “Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy…. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word democracy, expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is “no-rule” is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.” Aristotle adds, “In a democracy the poor have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and [the majority] is supreme.” Karatani continues, “Modern democracy is a composite of liberalism plus democracy, that is to say liberal democracy. It attempts to combine, therefore, two conflicting things, freedom and equality.” He goes on, “The fact that realization of democracy requires a concentration of power as its prerequisite reveals that democracy essentially takes the form of a -cracy or rule…. In fact, in this people-as-sovereign, absolute monarchy is concealed. In other words, democracy is a form of rule realized by passing through the concentration of power.”
Karatani contrasts democracy with Ionian governance. “The Ionian polis came into being with a covenant (social contract) among these people. Their fidelity was directed not to kinship but to the covenant…. The new communities formed by the settlers in Ionia were independent from the city-states or tribal groups of their origin.” Ionian colonies had enough frontier land to enable free migration and, for a time, had no threat of external aggression from neighboring nations. This allowed a radical egalitarianism to spread. They brought no baggage from the clan-based loyalties of the mainland. Ionian “natural philosophy, with its rejection of the gods of the polis, was viewed as a denial of the polis (community) itself…. In Athens, people are subordinate to the polis, and all ethics flows from that point. However, for Democritus, a human being is in essence independent of the polis, and each person is “a world unto themselves” (microcosmos)…. In [Ionian] eyes, the world and human beings were themselves equally physis or nature. They were among the first to propose this universal perspective.” This perspective flowed from their general natural philosophy. “The love of humanity in Ionia is inseparable from the attitude of approaching humans, not through nomos, but through physis…. Isonomia, or no-rule, does not simply place people on an equal footing in terms of political participation. It means more fundamentally the absence of the ruler and ruled hierarchy in the relations of production.” It resulted in the absence of the Asian despotic division of labor. “In the civilizations of Asia, the “first form of ideologists, priests,” held a monopoly on technical and scientific matters…. In a sense, the power of the priests and bureaucrats was rooted in a monopoly over writing systems that were difficult to acquire, or a monopoly of the knowledge that could be obtained through reading. By contrast, the Ionians adapted the Phoenician script into a phonetic alphabet that anyone could easily master. Further, they minted coinage and left trade, pricing, and other matters of economic policy handled by the bureaucracy in the states of Asia to the market…. When the Ionian natural philosophers eliminated the personified gods of Olympus, they also rejected professional priests and ritualists, which is to say they rejected the implicit division of material and mental labor.” The Ionian philosophers were both anti-dualist and anti-idealist in their worldly outlook. Although they differed on what the primal element was, from Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, to Parmenides, they were all strictly materialists.
Karatani suggests that the democracy of Athens was diametrically opposed to the isonomia of Ionia. “Athenian direct democracy was dependent upon the ruling and plundering of the other poleis. It is precisely this imperialistic expansion that was the condition of Athenian democracy…. The Athenian army was based on the mass tactics of the phalanx using a heavily armed citizen militia called hoplites. The success of these tactics provided the basis of the ascent of the democratic faction versus the aristocracy. During the Persian War in particular, the contribution of the lower class of citizens, who volunteered to row in the galleys of the warships, gained them a political position…. The motive for the promotion of democracy in Athens lay in this military exigency…. Athenian democracy is inseparable from this kind of nationalism…. In order to prosecute wars, and participate in political affairs, they had to rely on slaves for labor. A landowner with no slaves would be unable to carry out the obligations of a citizen. Slaves were, in this sense, a condition for citizenship…. Athenian democracy was a system that sought to equalize the people by redistribution of wealth. On the other hand, this democracy was rooted in the homogeneity of its members…. Whatever economic contribution a foreigner might make to the polis, there was no path to citizenship, nor legal protection under the law…. Direct democracy gave rise to demagogues, who inflamed the people.”
While Athens was rich in wealth and militarily dominant by the fifth century BC, it imported teachers of rhetoric and philosophers from the Ionian colonies. These were the so-called Sophists. “In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, rhetoric is portrayed as the art of persuading other people, and thereby ruling them, and the teachers of this art were the Sophists. However, the reduction of rhetoric to a set of techniques for domination was the view, not of the Sophists, but of the Athenians…. It is under democracy (majority rule) that rhetoric becomes a means of ruling over other people…. In Ionia [rhetoric] took the form of a means of collective inquiry (elenchos)…. Rhetoric was not a set of techniques for ruling over other people, but a method for understanding a nature that included humans.”
Karatani makes that case that Socrates, despite Plato’s portrayal, was, in fact, a direct descendant of the Ionian philosophers. “Socrates was the first person in Athens to attempt to lead his life as an individual. In that sense he was cosmopolitan, independent from the polis and the community of Athens…. Socrates rejected the generally recognized values of the Athenians, which held one’s deeds in public office and one’s political actions to be the foundation of virtue…. Socrates recognized no value in participation in the assembly and courts and the attainment of power. The art he taught was not for the purpose of action in the public sphere; rather, it was a means of severing one’s ties to it…. This further hints at a civil society where there is no split between one’s public and private lives…. Plato aimed at a condition where the soul ruled over the body. What Socrates aimed at, though, was the abolition of rule itself, that is to say, isonomia.”
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