Platonic reflections on the aesthetic dimensions of deliberative democracy

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 288-312

  Tarnopolsky, Christina ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Aesthetics; Deliberation; Deliberative democracy; Plato; Shame

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248547346     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707299951     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. It is important to note that these theorists use the term "aesthetic" in a much broader sense than it was first used by Alexander Baumgarten in "Reflections on Certain Matters Relating to Poetry" in 1735. Baumgarten used the term to denote the "science of perception" or the sphere of sensory cognition in contrast to the more general and abstract forms of intellectual cognition. Political theorists who now speak about the aesthetic aspects of politics focus on topics ranging from sensuous perception, taste, beauty, disinterestedness, the imagination, mimesis, performativity, representation, fictionality, etc. It is also important to note that these aesthetic critics of Habermas do not conflate the aestheticization of politics with the subjectivism characteristic of either Romantic or Nietzschean aestheticism. Both Zerilli and Panagia focus on intersubjective aesthetic practices that involve the publicly available aspects of representation within a democratic public sphere. For the argument that Arendt's aesthetics involves a rejection of the subjectivism of Nietzschean aestheticism see Dana Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action," Political Theory 20 (1992), 274-308;
2. Lawrence J. Biskowski, "Politics versus Aesthetics: Arendt's Critique of Nietzsche and Heidegger," The Review of Politics 57 (1995), 55-89.
3. Linda Zerilli, "We Feel our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt," Political Theory 33 (2005), 164.
4. Linda Zerilli, Political Theory, Ibid., 171.
5. Linda Zerilli, Political Theory Ibid., 171.
6. Davide Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," Political Theory 32 (2004), 830.
7. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," 832.
8. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," Ibid., 834.
9. Panagia focuses primarily on the essays of William Hazlitt, but also discusses Montaigne and Adorno's notions of the essay.
10. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," Ibid., 837-841.
11. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," Ibid., 838.
12. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," Ibid., 840.
13. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," Ibid., 840.
14. As Panagia points out many contemporary thinkers have focused on the interconnections between politics and aesthetics as a resource for thinking about political critique and judgment: Amanda Anderson, F. R. Ankersmit, Jane Bennett, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Bill Connolly, Frances Ferguson, Stanley Fish, Richard Flathman, Michael Fried, John Guillory, Bonnie Honig, Steven Knapp, Kirstie McClure, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, Jacques Rancière and Mort Schoolman. See Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), no. 7, 126. I would add Kennan Ferguson, Patchen Markell, and Dana Villa to this list.
15. Zerilli, "We Feel Our Freedom," 166.
16. This aspect of the political character of Arendt's reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment is also stressed by Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999), 7-8;
17. Biskowski, "Politics versus Aesthetics," 65;
18. Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil," 295.
19. Arendt admits to feeling ashamed of her humanity in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 234.
20. She also argues that one of the most problematic aspects of Germany in the aftermath of the Nazi regime was the heartlessness and absence of emotions like shame. See Hannah Arendt, "The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany," Commentary 10 (1950), 342.
21. Both of these citations are from Volker Heins, "Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotions in Politics," forthcoming in European Legacy 12 (2007).
22. Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 4.
23. The translation is by Paul Shorey, Plato: The Republic: Books VI-X (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). The reference is to the Stephanus pages.
24. This proverb is quoted by Aristotle in the Rhetoric at 1384a18.
25. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 531.
26. One of my central arguments in "Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame," Political Theory 32 (2004), 468-494 was that it is necessary to distinguish between the moment when a person feels shame before another (the occurrent experience of shame) and the moment when the person reacts to this feeling in any number of different ways and actually develops a sense of shame that disposes him to avoid what he first judged to be shameful about the initial experience.
27. I borrow this term from the title of Zerilli's article.
28. Christina Tamopolsky, "Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants," 479.
29. See E. R. Dodds, Gorgias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 30-34;
30. Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51-55.
31. See for example Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 138.
32. Hannah Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990), 73-103, 73.
33. I borrow this citation from Biskowski, "Politics versus Aesthetics," 68.
34. Christina Tarnopolsky, "Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Politics of Shame," Forthcoming from Princeton University Press, 2008.
35. Paul Nieuwenburg, "Learning to Deliberate: Aristotle on Truthfulness and Public Deliberation," Political Theory 32 (2004), 449-467;
36. Bernard Yack, "Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian Understanding of Political Deliberation," Political Theory 34 (2006), 417-438.
37. The Gorgias initially depicts dialectical exchanges between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, but when Callicles refuses to continue the conversation, Socrates proceeds to carry the argument forward with a bizarre conversation with himself (Gorgias 506c-509c) and then finally ends it all with a myth (Gorgias 523a-527e). Second, at different moments within each of the dialectical encounters Socrates gets his interlocutors to consider how the others who are actually present or an imaginary Athenian audience would view their remarks. Finally, there are important interruptions into the conversation made by those who had been silent witnesses deliberating with themselves as they watched the conversation go on between others (Gorgias 497b).
38. The fact that shame can make someone change his or her premises is what makes it such an important emotion for deliberative democratic theory.
39. I develop this point much more fully in "Plato on Shame and Frank Speech in Democratic Athens," in Politics and the Passions in the History of Political Thought, ed. Rebecca Kingston and Leonard Ferry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming 2007).
40. I borrow the terms "civic self image" and "normative imagery" from Sara Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements (Princeton University Press, 2000) 3-18; see especially no. 26, 12.
41. For a much fuller treatment of the democratic practice of parrhēsia see Sara Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements;
42. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001);
43. Arlene Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
44. All translations of the Gorgias are from James Nichols Jr., Plato: Gorgias (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). All references are to the Stephanus pages.
45. Both of these assertions are developed at much greater length in my forthcoming book.
46. Christina Tarnopolsky, "Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants," 485-486.
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
48. Charles Kahn, "Drama and Dialectic in Plato's Gorgias," in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy I (1983), 75-121;
49. Richard McKim, "Shame and Truth in Plato's Gorgias," in Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (New York: Routledge, 1988), 34-48.
50. Kahn, "Drama and Dialectic," 117.
51. McKim ("Shame and Truth," 40) first describes this as what differentiates Socrates' understanding of shame from Callicles: "Whereas Callicles says that men assert out of shame what they really believe to be false, Socrates thinks that they assert out of shame what they really believe to be true; . . .". He then goes on to apply this understanding of shame in his explanation of the Polus refutation.
52. Kahn, "Drama and Dialectic," 115.
53. Liddell and Scott, A Greek English Lexicon, 272.
54. E. R. Dodds, Gorgias, 249;
55. Gregory Vlastos, "Does Socrates Cheat?" in Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 144;
56. Gerasimos Santas, Socrates'Philosophy in Plato's Early Dialogues (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 239;
57. Kahn, "Drama and Dialectic," 91-92.
58. Vlastos tries to show this by consistently making an individual spectator the judge of whether something is painful or pleasant to behold. See Vlastos, "Does Socrates Cheat?" 142-143.
59. (This is an updated version of his earlier article, "Was Polus Refuted?" in Studies in Greek Philosophy, Ed. Daniel Graham, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995: 60-64.)
60. This demonstration is less successful than the ones by Dodds and Santas that rely on consistently making the community the judge of the usefulness or harmfulness of beautiful acts. See Dodds, Gorgias, 249;
61. Santas, Socrates' Philosophy, 239.
62. Socrates of course rejects this retaliatory form of punishment precisely because he believes it is unjust to harm anyone.
63. As Socrates tells Gorgias, "And of what men am I one? Those who are refuted with pleasure if I say something not true, and who refute with pleasure if someone should say something not true - and indeed not with less pleasure to be refuted that to refute. For I consider it a greater good, to the extent that it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil than to release another (Gorgias 458a)."
64. According to Gerasimos Santas, "Socrates believes that an adequate definition must answer the following four things: What is the kind (characteristic, property) which (a) is the same (common) in all F things, and (b) is that by reason of which all F things are F, and (c) is that by which F things do not differ and (d) is that which in all F things one calls 'the F'?" See Santas, Socrates' Philosophy, 104. Contra Santas, I believe that the Gorgias is a transitional dialogue and I place it between the early and middle dialogues of Plato. This is why the definitions of the beautiful and shameful do not conform to the same logical strictures as the early Socratic dialogues. This is also why I partially disagree with one of my anonymous reviewers. This reviewer argues that for Plato bad things are always shameful, whereas many people can be ashamed of good things like generosity and many people can consider immoral acts to be beautiful, so there is a danger to aestheticizing politics. This is certainly true, but I think that this is just what Plato wants to correct in the Socratic understanding of shame which overlooks the fact that quite often people fixate only on the painful aspects of shame and the pleasant aspects of beauty and then orient their lives around these partial interpretations of shame and beauty.
65. Vlastos, "Was Polus Refuted," 74.
66. Zerilli ("We Feel our Freedom," 164-5) nicely brings this to light in her interpretation of Arendt and Kant: Political engagement and intersubjective judgments simultaneously reveals "who one is" while they reveal the "world", and both of these creations do not exist prior to the communicative interaction.
67. John M. Cooper, "Reason, Virtue, Moral Value," in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 263.
68. Cooper, "Reason, Virtue, Moral Value," 273.
69. Zerilli ("We Feel our Freedom," 176) argues that the unique perspective or position from which political judgments take place is one of outsideness; "It is this third perspective that Arendt has in mind when she said that imaginative visiting involves not the mutual understanding of 'one another as individual persons', but the understanding that involves coming to 'see the same world from one another's standpoint,' to 'see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects'."
70. I stressed these various possible reactions to the occurrent experience of shame in "Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants," 478, 487.
71. This is why I disagree with the accounts of shame offered by Martha Nussbaum and Jon Elster that stress the reaction of hiding as the primary action consequence of shame. See Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004);
72. Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 153.
73. Thus although I agree with Nieuwenburg's argument ("Learning to Deliberate," 463) that shame can have a role to play in making us more sincere deliberators who develop a genuine concern for the common good that was originally not part of our pre-deliberative preferences, I disagree with him that shame always has this "direction of fit" towards the common good. This is because we can develop a sense of shame that focuses on the painful rather than the beneficial aspects of the occurrent experience of shame and that then compels us towards the reactions of hiding from or flattering the common good.
74. See also Kahn, "Drama and Dialectic," 95. This spectator view of human action was evident not only in Polus' estimation of his own actions but also in his judgment of the actions of others. His speech about Archelaus was grounded, not in any personal experience of tyranny, but rather in a projection of the conventional views of justice and injustice onto the external actions of a person. In this speech the just and unjust were totally conventional: Archelaus was a slave by birth and therefore to remain just, according to Polus, he should have remained a slave (Gorgias 471a5). It was Socrates and not Polus who said that he would have to talk with Archelaus in order to determine whether or not he was just and happy (Gorgias 470d1).
75. As Paul Nieuwenburg ("Learning to Deliberate," 460-461) has argued with respect to Aristotle, the person who has a sense of shame that attunes him to endoxa (i.e.. reputable or honorable propositions held by all, the many or the wise) and who desires esteem is morally superior to a person who has no shame and who admires things like money because the former is at least potentially able to acquire a sincere desire for the common good.
76. Note too that in this sense Socrates hopes to become a patient of the very people he incessantly questions, because he hopes that this questioning will help to release him from his own false opinions. The activity of Socratic elenchus requires the willingness of both parties to reciprocally take up the position of agent and patient, speaker and listener.
77. Polus is oriented to maintaining the "alien beauty" that arises from continually remaking oneself over in accordance with the spectator's perspective, whereas the tyrant is oriented to eradicating this perspective altogether by remaking the world in his own image.
78. Zerilli, "We Feel our Freedom," 180.
79. Zerilli, "We Feel our Freedom," Ibid., 167.
80. Zerilli, "We Feel our Freedom," Ibid., 169.
81. Zerilli is here quoting Stephen Mulhall's interpretation of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Kant's Third Critique.
82. Kant, Third Critique, Ibid., 183.
83. Jonathan Lear, "Allegory and Myth in Plato's Republic," in The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic, ed. Gerasimos Santas (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 25-43, 25.
84. As Andrea Densham notes, the first public awareness of the AIDS pandemic came in 1981 in the form of an "obscure public health bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta [that] first reported that five young men - 'all active homosexuals' - had contracted a very rare pneumonia, the cause of which was entirely unknown." See Andreas Densham, "Introduction - Politics as a Cause and Consequence of the AIDS Pandemic," Perspectives on Politics 4 (2006), 641-646, 641.
85. Biskowski ("Politics versus Aesthetics," 61) argues that this tension is precisely what an Arendtian account of the public sphere is concerned to emphasize.
86. Panagia, "The Force of Political Argument," 841.