Embodiments: From the Body to the Body Politic

Notes

157 Notes Introduction 1. In a January 7, 2006, article, the New York Times, citing a Pentagon study, wrote “as many as 42 percent of the Marine casualties who died from isolated torso injuries could have been prevented with improved protection in the areas surrounding the plated areas of the vest. . . . An additional 23 percent might have been saved with side plates that extend below the arms, while 15 percent more could have benefited from shoulder plates” (“Pentagon Study Links Fatalities to Body Armor,” available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/politics/ 07armor.html). 2. Homer, Iliad 5.291. 3. Plato, Republic 368b–369a. 4. Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince,” in Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), 73. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett , 1994), 78. 6. Ibid., 106. 7. Ibid., 78. 8. In Locke’s view, “Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.” Such a state is as different from that of war “as a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence and mutual destruction, are one from another” ( John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government,” in Political Writings, ed. David Wootton [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2003], 270). 9. Plato, Phaedo 65a, in Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. G. Grube (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1981). 10. Plato, Phaedo 66a. 11. René Descartes, “Meditation II,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. L. LaFleur (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 30. 12. Descartes, “Meditation VI,” 74. 13. Aristotle, Politics 1253a5, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 14. See Rousseau’s assertion: “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may 158 N O T E S T O P A G E S 6 – 2 1 still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau , “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald Cress [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987], 148). Beyond the defense of the “goods” of each person, there is the necessity of our associating together to create such goods. 15. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9. 16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 120. (Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as VI.) 17. Whether or not such senses exhaust the totality of meaning—whether or not, for example, the abstractions of mathematics and physics can be completely explained pragmatically—need not further concern us since, in fact, what is at issue is political life, and its senses, as indicated, are pragmatic. 18. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 262. 19. Hobbes, Leviathan (1994), 79. 20. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 324. Like Hobbes, Locke stresses our equality in this state. The reason why we have this uncertainty is that “every man [being] his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very insecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers” (“Second Treatise,” 324–25). 21. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 309. Such preservation is thus the object of the government’s laws. In Locke’s words, “The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative [body] is that there may be laws made and rules set as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society” (“Second Treatise,” 373). In fact, all the powers of the government, not just “the power of making laws,” but also “the power to punish” and “the power of war and peace” are “for the preservation of the property of all the members of that society as far as possible” (304–5). 22. This is Kant’s ideal. He writes: “A constitution of the greatest possible human freedom according to laws, by which the liberty of every individual can consist with the liberty of every other . . . is . . . a necessary idea, which must be placed at the foundation not only of...