During the 1980s an absolutely decisive text was published by McIntyre who rightly or wrongly is considered to be one of the main inspirers of the so-called communitarian current, in this very text titled After Virtue, the thesis exposed by McIntyre with sophisticated arguments also that
according to which we live in an era in which public virtue ethics in the Aristotelian sense
has eclipsed and remains exclusively dominant over the entire horizon of the absolute individual, from here before even if McIntyre in the pages of his text proposes as a fundamental theological orientation of thought and action a return to Aristotle or, if you prefer, a restart with Aristotle, in contrast to Nietzsche, whom the author considers the true anti-Aristotelian.
The text by McIntyre after more than twenty years or rather more than thirty years we could well say presents itself all effects as essential to reason on the theme that we propose to address here, and would say rather developing in a coherent manner the speech of McIntyre that in the end on the philosophical level, two essentially, reducing to the bone, are the anthropological profiles frontally opposed from which we must start to contrast and to reason in our present, the first that of Aristotle’s mankind as an intrinsically sociable community animal the other that and not of nice, but of Thomas Hobbes the great founder of individualistic subjectivity, modern anthropological pessimistic, the founder as well as of man as calculating animal, thought as calculus, repeats Hobbes continuously in his writings here, I believe that from this contrast as such, we can start again with a quiet reflection on the theme of the community and of the individual first of all from a philosophical and historical point of view Hobbes makes no secret of his clear aversion with respect to the great themes of Aristotelianism, in the Leviathan, Hobbes writes textually that his system of thought takes place in claiming total antithesis to every point of the Aristotelian doctrine, in answer Hobbes rejects the metaphysics judged as a real nonsense from which it is necessary to take leave in the name of physical science, instead of the only legitimate knowledge. Of Aristotle then rejects the ethics based on the value of the right measure,moderation, completely senseless in the framework of Hobbesian anthropology and of Aristotle finally rejects the social vision of mankind as a ζωον πολιτικον “Zoon Politikon” nor to which in the Leviathan but then also in the De Cive who opposes a vision that today we could rightly qualify as individualistic, Hobbes says that Aristotle is very wrong to think of the individual as a ζωον πολιτικον “Zoon Politikon”, but as a political animal part of a sociable community, the individual is instead by its nature selfish, turned only to himself and to the pursuit of his own personal interest, there isn’t an intrinsic community in being in the world of mankind, the community takes shape only in the second instance, explains Thomas Hobbes, from the research that each individual in the state of nature carries out with a view to maximizing his own interest but then above all with a view to guaranteeing his own safety which the state of nature continually puts at risk, well here in fact from an anthropological point of view, we find on the one hand the genetic constitution of the modern subject which still today mutatis mutandis persists in the sad Neo-Liberist rhetoric evoked above, but then we also find the complete reversal which proceeds in tandem with the imposition of modern individualism from the Aristotelian perspective. Here the Aristotelian perspective becomes completely reversed, Hobbes rejects point by point every aspect, the individual, for Hobbes, is a calculating individual in the real sense of the expression. The Greek wisdom to be answered for in some moment, in some measure the culminating point on the plane of consciousness, never Ancient Greeks would have dreamt of calling: individual the mankind or with the Greek lexicon,άτομο, from which in fact derives from our expression, individual. άτομο means the smallest part in which it can be broken down the material quantity, for the Greeks mankind is never a sole individual. For Ancient Greek philosophy, mankind is more and more that individual, mankind is the “ψυχή” psyche, a soul subject to Socratic maieutic dialogue, while instead in modernity mankind becomes an interchangeable quantity on the basis of individualism.
Modernity replaces the Greek concept of soul, “ψυχή” psyche, with that of the individual as an interchangeable quantity of matter, an object not of Socratic dialogue, but of Galilean scientific calculation precisely modern society is constituting itself starting from the admission of that which Hegel will later call the sworn enemy of this paradigm, and himself proposer in his own way of a restart from Aristotle’s, the individualisms of solitudes, individualistic society made of isolated individuals. Aristotle in his book, Politics, takes his instance from the community, “κοινωνία” (koinonia) where it clearly resonates in the timbre of the expression, the term of the “κοινόν” (koinon), what is in common what is shared, what precisely concerns the “communitas” the Latins will say. Aristotle started from the community, first comes the community and then on the ground of the community where the family is the basilar nucleus, then constitutes the individual as a secondary moment with respect to the community, essential with respect to it.
Hobbes reverses the paradigm, first of all, there’s the individual. In the state of nature, we find isolated individuals who then each pursue their own interest to become to the stipulation of a pact through which they secure their existence, it is not given to know in Hobbes’ works in which language this pact is assured how they do enter into a relationship with each other given their natural antagonism. In any case, society takes shape secondly as a union of isolated and antagonising individuals.
Hegel will say to radically refute this perspective as a completely barbaric vision because it places the individual, in-primis, forgetting that the priority instead is of the community and in second place because, Hegel thinks of the State as the superior entity, the ethical idea of societal harmony, the perfect community, according to that Hegel thinks it as in analogous terms and as the Hobbesian private contract is thought to arise from the stipulation point of a private agreement. Well, in Hobbes, we find exactly the genesis of modern individualism the individual as calculating and thinking, thinking and calculating, everything is reduced to the dimension of calculation, society itself takes place as a contract between private individuals and well we could say that mutatis mutandis the neoliberal rhetoric, even if they know it or not whether they place themselves or not in the wake of the Hobbesian tradition do nothing, but bring to completion this adventure this very troubled adventure of the modern subject to such an extent that one could say, as has been said, that the great paradigm, the great myth of the modern individual here depicted by Hobbes in philosophical terms, portrays Robinson Crusoe the great myth of modern subjectivity the individual alone in search of his own individual interest, the individual who goes to sea to constitute ex-novo the same type of mercantile society even up in a desert island, the individual who does not entertain relationships with the other except with a view to maximizing his own profit at the expense of the poor Friday of the moment, as happens on the island of Robinson, this is the dominant paradigm in the modern era. Globalization itself, the same word that continually returns in the common lexicon, a word that is the task of philosophy to problematize if as was rightly said before philosophy must question the obvious, well this word is so used and so abused I would say that globalization could perhaps be better re-declined as the globalisation of egoisms, as exportation on a planetary scale of the anthropological profile of the acquisitive and rapacious individualism of Hobbesian thought, as the imposition of a paradigm of the anti-communitarian, selfish individual. For these features the discourse of the capitalist and the one that aims to neutralize every residual form of society and community, from the family to the State, imposing an anthropological profile that is essentially albeit with
substantial modifications, the paradigm of the acquisitive man’s individualistic, pessimistic on the anthropological level based precisely on the geometry of cold passions, we could say anti-community, anti-social.
Everything structurally differs instead in the discussion with Aristotle from which perhaps, more than ever, it is necessary to start again, if it is necessary to define oneself or to find oneself as Kantian, for Kant, mankind is defined by its capacity for rationality and moral autonomy. Unlike other beings, humans possess the ability to act according to principles or laws that they give to themselves, rather than being driven solely by natural instincts or desires, in fact, Kant viewed society as a necessary condition for the realization of human potential, particularly moral development. He believed that individuals achieve their moral and rational capacities within a social context. I define myself firmly as Aristotelian from this point of view, I recognize the importance precisely even before Hegel, of Aristotle for the theme of the community, Aristotle was the first to codify in a clear unequivocal way the theme of mankind as a community animal, ζωον πολιτικον, and in Politics τα πολιτικά, we find the well-known definition of mankind as ζωον πολιτικον, usually translated and misinterpreted with the expression mankind as a political animal; in Aristotle we have a triple determination In this expression ζωον πολιτικον does mean at the same time, communitarian, sociable, political animal, that necessarily relates to other subjects with other rational beings, because the intersubjective relationship evolves within its very nature, mankind cannot realize itself if not in the community dimension. It would be necessary to be a beast or a god, Aristotle says to be in perennial solitude and isolation, but then a political animal necessarily lives in the polis, in the political structuring of the polis and then sociable for nature in search of that friendly friendship that perhaps we could rightly consider the molecule, The first fundamental element from where community originates.
Too often it is forgotten that in “τα πολιτικά” Aristotle keeps intertwining the two definitions of mankind with “ζωον πολιτικον” (zōon politkon), and with “ζῷον λόγον ἔχον” (zōon logon echon), in this case often the latter expression is misinterpreted by making it univocally with, an animal with rational reason or sometimes as an animal with language, also, in This case, the expression (zōon logon echon) incorporates three expressions together that must be made jointly concepts, one which means of mankind as an animal with rationality, able with calculation and equipped with language whereby calculation here we mean the calculation of the right measure, to be implemented in the space of the polis.
We know that Aristotelian politics is fully built according to the cardinal point for which it is always necessary to identify with the calculation of thought the right measure of its own, as ethics always identifies in the Moderation, (μέτρον), and if the Moderation,(μέτρον), is the fundamental cornerstone on which to structure his speech, the just Polis says Aristotle, it’s the one who has neither too many inhabitants nor too few and who has neither too many rich nor too many poor, one that is neither too large nor too small and that is one which structurally takes on the right measure, Moderation, as a structuring element. The polis itself is the one that remains at the right distance from excesses.
Aristotle knew very well the anecdote linked to one of Thales, Seven Wise Men, who once interrogated on
What was the best polis replied dryly by saying: “one in which There aren’t citizens too rich or too poor the right size that avoids the unbridledness, of one excessive democracy”, that perhaps in our lexicon it would be more appropriate to translate with anarchy, and that instead which proceeds in the opposite direction of the oligarchy which is the very denial of the rights-based democracy.
On the right means in the Aristotelian expression that says the “κοινωνία” (koinonia) community resonates as already said the word “κοινόν” (koinon) with the municipality that concerns not only the abstract individual but a dimension that something transcends it, to something that is in common that is not in mine but that it is ours, that concerns us as belonging to a community social dimension the Latin term,” Communitas”, in this case, manages to say perhaps more than the Greek, in addition to resuming how much already expressed in the Greek term “κοινόν” (koinon), common, also adds another dimension that has been evoked several times previously, that it is that of the gift, of the generosity, communitas says together, the common and the duty of service, “munus”, generosity becomes essential solidarity that structures the relationships within the community,where within the community not everything is commensurate according to the criterion of the exchange value or money we could say, there are other values, solidarity and relationships. Aristotle clearly says in politics, the polis is not only made up of merchant exchanges or the physical mercantile space in which individual subjects with mercantilist rationale, calculation and language coexist, this is certainly fundamental because there is a polis but it is not enough. Next to these dimensions, there must also be the sense of social relationships, Solidarity, and The sense of kinship and fellowship to something bigger, compared to individual subjects, precisely the community implies a common dimension that makes it larger compared to the sum of the individual parts belonging to the Polis. This theme simply in an impressionistic way will return with emphasis to the pages of Tommaso d’Aquino that somehow continued in the Christian age the Aristotelian discourse when in the “Summa”, Tommaso d’Aquino spends important words worthy of consideration also today, on the common good, the good a municipality, of the Communitas, justifying Even the possibility of tyrannicide, when the Governments instead of protecting, “Bonum comune”, protect only themselves. Indeed we have here a full recognition of the “ius resistantiae” of the opposition which is not sedition to the disturbance called it by Tommaso D’Aquino.
In reality, it does not respond to an anarchist criterion for the reversal of the order, if anything, means restoration of the right divine order against the disorder imposed by the individual anomie of the
tyrant because it is the right divine order the one in which the totality stays ante-partes, for
Tommaso D’Acquino the totality stays before the parties this means on the theological level
that God is first compared to the creatures and that on the political level the Communitas
is first, compared to individuals and cannot be transcended compared to It, individuals must coexist within the Communitas as parts of it in search of the common good.
This makes clear the net dichotomy between Aristotle and Hobbes to relate how also sociology is most attentive to these issues, defined as The era of the Broken Social-Contract, the era of ego-narcissistic, the era of the autistic ego that enjoys unlimitedly and is incapable of pursuing social passions, the era of the amorphous flock of the last mankind, nothing big in which to hope for, nothing great in what to believe in; simply the degradation of inauthentic life, in the name of the commodification form of the individual who pursues his acephalous decaying, well in this scenario seems to be no space for the community dimension, Thomas Hobbes at an exponential power.
Indeed the Mercantilistic society, the Consummerism society, is anti-communitarian by its very nature. After all, the function of consumption is the more individualistic one that you can imagine. Only in the presence of the consumers goods and only in the face of the sparkling successive sequences of the products of consumer society and the one that unites dialectically without a stroke of concrete impotence, it is the one that celebrates the individual ingesting it very practical free and lightened as from any identity, from any relationship with God, from every community and which together produces The concrete impotence reducing the individual to what gives but the isolated contemporary Robinson Crusoe, in the shade of power totally subjugated to the mechanisms of the global finance market, totally projected into an individualistic dimension, this then reverberates in many phenomena magnificently described by sociology, for example the phenomenon called the solitary crowd, that is a question of the scene of ordinary post-modernity solitary crowd, that is, find anyoneself solitude among and in the middle of millions of people on their own, and after all, once again the sentence of Robinson Crusoe character, in the reflections written by Defoe after Robinson Crusoe’s novel, it’s said that Robinson returning to London after the adventure on the island expressly declares to feel more lonely in London, in the metropolis among millions of individuals, than when he was with Friday on the desert island, this is the scene of ordinary post -modernity that afflicts us all in today’s cosmopolis of the global village. Any contact needs to be avoided by the gaze of the other, we live isolated through technical devices whose only function seems to be that of preventing the beginning of a dialogue, so to ending every possible communication. The one who Gunther Anders in “The Obsolescence of Mankind” had qualified with happy intuition the era of the hermits among the masses, the masses’ hermits that populate our insulated cities, autistics, isolated unable to establish social contact and basically this is the paradox of our era of absent community. Societies have two polarities that are actually the two sides of the same medal, Two figures who are fully complementary and unable to integrate with each other, on the one hand, the already enhanced figure of Nietzsche’s last man, where there’s nothing in which to hope for, no future that is not that in the crazy myth of infinite growth, the cult and daily propaganda of capitalism and capitalist accumulation, or it’s that of the new products that the consumerism market religion continuously produces with many types of the same iPhone models and all consumable products.
And on the other side, we have the figure of shuttered individuals in a complementary way
Shattered Society, we could say individuals who warn the oppressive degrading weight of today’s society that feel conscientiously the burden of misery and exploitation and that together they cannot transform this anger, pregnant with good reasons, in shared political passion that know how to constitute a social chain capable of making operative this anger. Before when still there were the Communist party
and the Catholic Church fully operational, while the first one disappeared in 1989 In Berlin, so to speak, while the other was muted when the balcony in San Pietro in 2013 remained empty, but when there were these two great powers, there was somehow the possibility, on what Peter Sloterdijk in his work called the banks of social anger, political institutes able to give expressive and social-political form to these great passions.
Today, however, in the absence of these institutions, passions remain as projected in the cave of consciousness of the individual, the abandoned ego, precisely, society is distressed and made of
individuals at the mercy of an entanglement of sadness and unable to give social development to these passions and the scene of ordinary madness of our time. And the scene for which even before, when injustices were said that In not very remote times, would have been enough to spark 10 Russian revolutions, 20 French revolutions, nowadays injustices are prisoners of the individual consciousness of the shattered ego unable to act socially, here we could say that in this paradigm, Power, to use a
formula with a vague Facault flavour, but that in reality, it says something a lot
concrete, Oppressive Power has a continuous interest in that the social bond does not reconstitute. Oppressive power has continuously the interest in maintaining the individual suspended in this ambiguity with the presence of abstract omnipotence and concrete impotence, hence until the social bond remains interrupted there is no possibility that in some way an oppositional front is reconstituted compared to everything.
This is why power or if you prefer the new world order with which power is structured on a global scale, must continuously delegitimize each community, must delegitimize families, must delegitimize the States, must delegitimize any form of community solidarity, always of course with Orwellian grammar pretending to promote rights and emancipation, must disintegrate families so that the original community, that in the name of which different authors such as Aristotle and Hegel, showed the individual being secondary compared to the family, the individual doesn’t springs to life alone in the forest according to Hobbes barbarianism, instead the individual has birth and arise in a community the family, and destroying the family means denying these originary communitarian familiar bonds from the individual and means destroying the duty of service, relationships and solidarity linked to the community, the gift-giving aspect, means to remove what unequivocally characterizes a solidarity relationship within the family, then of a mother will never turn to a son or a father will never turn to a mother, according to a grammar sympathetic to the axioms of profit and the agile geometry of the “Do ut Des” for there will always be a Solidarity relationship of other excellent type compared to that dimension, for this capitalism does not want to see the family, capitalism wants to see only individual consumers that relate to each other According to “Do ut Des”, Capitalism wants to fully see an individualistic conflictual society, Isolated monads only self-projected.
Again the news world order does not accept the National States, but must continually promote the global market and reduce its frontier so that the smooth plan of the world reduced to the market is imposed, the same ones who praise the end of the borders triumphantly the demolition of the borders, are the same as they are today raising an ever higher wall between the last in society and the first, between the base, working and middle classes, and the top 1%, complicit this same logic of the creation of the global market with annexed relocation of the volatilization of capital. The law of Capitalism only knows how to find someone willing to produce the same products for lower wages, for this reason, it is necessary to break down the borders, and for this reason, we must favour the flows of migration. All These tools must be used to promise emancipation rights the mirage of integration, and then actually use them As instruments in the class struggle, that today becomes incidentally a social-classes mayhem, the dominants top 1% are triumphantly by sanctioning their primacy for them throughout the horizon, without meeting any resistance any return of red flame, simply a victory that is not even anymore conflict, the last ones suffer in Silence, this is the scene from 1989 Berlin Wall to today the social-conflicts that become mayhem.
In this certainly not reassuring scenario certainly not comfortable, but to philosophy, Hegel said it must never be edifying, we need to move towards the reconstitution of a communitarian party, that is, a new political scenario that overcoming categories today as left and right, Atheists and believers, natives and foreigners, knows how to constitute a unified opposition front against capitalism, in view of a democratic community made of free, equals and solidary individuals who know how to keep as a polar star of one’s own acting words such as that Democracy, Used today with Orwellian texture to justify the primacy of finance over human beings relationships, and words such as Community, that have been continuously devalued presented as an archaic and reactionary form, in essence bringing forward a discourse permeated on the centrality of mankind relationships contrapposed to the commodification of society, that is necessary to work on a new form of communities or communitarism that know how to go further and beyond the form of communitarism of xenophobic extreme right, or the societal levelling of past Communism, and then also to defy the isolationistic individualism barbariasnism of NeoLiberal societies that contrappose the individual-rights to the more wide accepted Social-Rights of all individuals.
This is the task here it only hints at the new movement for the new communitarian party to elaborate a universalism of the differences that is to be able to combine the poles of the particular communities with that of the universal belonging to the genre of one and same human species, being humanity by its very nature a unitary subject that exists however, In the plurality of the cultures of the language of the customs of the ways of being plural.
Globalization pretends to Promote universalism and instead, spreads the ideology of Conformity, All the Same, Globalization wants to see everywhere the same and neutralizes every right to diversity the difference in plurality wants to see the only model of the individual without community without identity without culture, unable to speak of understanding other language that is not that of mercantilistic English.
In the flow of the challenges of globalization, against this globalization, It is necessary to keep the moment of the universal together with that of the cultural differences, in following precisely a reasoned opposition. Probably a koinè, where there’s a shared endeavour and language of the resistance, the opposition where the dissensions exist and where they still survive are always dispersed and fragmented in micro struggles, similar to that of the Two Minutes of Rage in 1984 by Orwell, the two minutes in which the anger is manifested and then returns to production, in line with the regime working precisely at full capacity thanks also to these two minutes of rage.
It is necessary to constitute a koiné who knows how to start from the community and the
universal vocation of this community by keeping these two moments together without
recovering in the pathologies of the past, opposing first of all also on the plane
anthropological to the profile of selfish man identified in the autistic enjoyment, while you all will have noticed and it is not a mystery that the great battles for the themes of egalitarian societies and Social rights, Workers’ Rights, and Welfare State, that are not even mentioned in the European treaties have disappeared under the sky, remains of it indeed thrives the battles for everything related to the individual rights.
The magical word of our time, in the total absence of social rights, while everything is always individualistic rights to create and enforce discrimination between isolated ordinary persons part of fragmented and shattered societies.
Here too we can imagine the paradox of a society of Orwellian flavour, where abstractly ordinary people can get married to whoever, but concretely ordinary men and women will not be able to make a family, because absolutely precarious situations are created, these will bring the impossibility of producing that emotional professional ethical stabilization, harmony between individual freedom and communal norms, that Hegel called “Sittlichkeit” which is exactly what the economic order denies, the economic order in force today, in philosophical terms, it’s Marx’s and Hegel sworn enemy, because the Consumeritstic Economic Order must neutralize the dream of a thing there Utopian passion revolt of noble ulteriority with respect to the rosiers stinger in the market system, and of Hegel because, the economic order, must neutralize the bourgeois ethical “Sittlichkeit” to the dimension of the community of the sentimental and professional stability, for this Capitalism needs of neutralize these together. First of all, we need to demystify the narratives that are the dominant ones and are dictated by power, those uniquely managed by power from the single totalitarian thought.
Here it’s perhaps the real strategy of contrast, it’s that of the programmatic dispute of unique thought and the symbolic captivity that it continuously proceeds to produce on us by placing themselves in a condition similar to the inhabitants of Orwell’s Big Brother while forced to see, black where it’s white and forced to think that two + two = 5, so let’s decolonize thought and imagination.
