Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword to the English Edition
- Foreword to the First Edition
- Translator's Acknowledgments
- Translator's Note
- Translator's Introduction
- Introduction
- Part I Abstract Thinking versus Concrete Sensation: The Opposition between Culture and Nature in Modernity
- Part II “Concrete Thought” as the Precondition of a Culture of Ethics, Politics, and Economics in Plato and Aristotle
- Chapter 3 The Interpretation of “Antiquity” from the Perspective of Modern Rationality
- Chapter 4 The Epistemological Foundations of a Philosophy of Discrimination
- Chapter 5 Abstract Consciousness versus Concrete Thought: Overcoming the Opposition between Feeling and Reason in a Philosophy of Discrimination
- Chapter 6 The Soul in a Philosophy of Consciousness and in a Philosophy of Discrimination
- Chapter 7 The Different Forms of Volition and Their Dependence upon Cognition
- Chapter 8 The Aesthetic, Ethical, and Political Significance of a Culture of Feelings in Plato and Aristotle
- Chapter 9 Theory and Practice: Plato's and Aristotle's Grounding of Political Theory in a Theory of Man
- Chapter 10 Evolutionary and Biological Conditions for Self-Preservation and Rational Conditions for Man's Self-Realization: An Appeal for a New Evaluation of Rationality
- Conclusion: A Comparison of Two Fundamental Forms of European Rationality
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 9 - Theory and Practice: Plato's and Aristotle's Grounding of Political Theory in a Theory of Man
from Part II - “Concrete Thought” as the Precondition of a Culture of Ethics, Politics, and Economics in Plato and Aristotle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword to the English Edition
- Foreword to the First Edition
- Translator's Acknowledgments
- Translator's Note
- Translator's Introduction
- Introduction
- Part I Abstract Thinking versus Concrete Sensation: The Opposition between Culture and Nature in Modernity
- Part II “Concrete Thought” as the Precondition of a Culture of Ethics, Politics, and Economics in Plato and Aristotle
- Chapter 3 The Interpretation of “Antiquity” from the Perspective of Modern Rationality
- Chapter 4 The Epistemological Foundations of a Philosophy of Discrimination
- Chapter 5 Abstract Consciousness versus Concrete Thought: Overcoming the Opposition between Feeling and Reason in a Philosophy of Discrimination
- Chapter 6 The Soul in a Philosophy of Consciousness and in a Philosophy of Discrimination
- Chapter 7 The Different Forms of Volition and Their Dependence upon Cognition
- Chapter 8 The Aesthetic, Ethical, and Political Significance of a Culture of Feelings in Plato and Aristotle
- Chapter 9 Theory and Practice: Plato's and Aristotle's Grounding of Political Theory in a Theory of Man
- Chapter 10 Evolutionary and Biological Conditions for Self-Preservation and Rational Conditions for Man's Self-Realization: An Appeal for a New Evaluation of Rationality
- Conclusion: A Comparison of Two Fundamental Forms of European Rationality
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The step toward political and economic theory is already presaged in the distinction between the different and varyingly free forms of striving for something that the individual judges to be good for himself. A wholly different justification of the need to organize human activity in forms of political community arises from this as compared to those advanced in the great modern political theories and, above all, in those beginning with Hobbes. Our attention will initially be focused on this distinct starting point.
The State as the Condition of Possibility for Realizing Freedom and Individuality
In spite of all their differences in individual details, most early modern and modern conceptions of the state share an assumption whose source must be sought not in Plato but in the reception of Hellenistic-Roman conceptions of the state. This is the assumption that the sovereign freedom of every individual is the basic principle of the state and that the state is the specific organizational form that is necessary to ensure that the many individual sovereigns do not reciprocally interfere or indeed destroy each other, and instead are able to live together in a state of optimal practical fulfillment of their freedom.
These basic assumptions cannot be found in Plato or, at most, in highly qualified form. According to Plato, man is born free and is potentially meant to be free, but is neither free and sovereign in himself nor has he always been so. Freedom of the individual is not a given that the state must take into consideration and which it must preserve as far as possible through appropriate measures.
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- Information
- Modernity and PlatoTwo Paradigms of Rationality, pp. 372 - 451Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012