Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis

7. The Body Politic: Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Concept

101 7. The Body Politic Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Concept The humane person regards Heaven and Earth and all things as one body. —Ch’eng Hao, Ech-Ch’eng i-shu The body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. —Samyutta Nikaya (Buddhist scripture) Looking at contemporary humanity, one can hardly avoid the impression of a huge body or organism ravaged by multiple diseases and even catastrophes.1 Even without detailed diagnosis, it is not hard to trace these ailments to a set of underlying factors or causes: political oppression or domination; radical inequality between rich and poor; xenophobia sometimes resulting in genocide; terrorist violence; and the abuse of religions and ideologies. If such ailments occurred on a small scale or in a limited group of people, efforts would quickly be made to find remedies to combat the existing ills. However, if they happen on a large scale—in nations or in the global community—fatalism often takes over, backed up by the argument that ills of this magnitude must be the work of inscrutable “nature” or else divinely ordained. What is correct about this argument is that the cited ailments are not merely “mental” phenomena or matters of opinion, but sufferings inflicted on multitudes of people seen as concretely “embodied” human beings. Here might be the beginning of a “natural” philosophy of politics, a philosophy taking seriously the notion of politics occurring in a “body politic.”2 In ancient times, human societies were typically seen as tightly 102 Being in the World knit, homogeneous entities or organisms dominated by a supreme king or ruler representing divine power. From this angle, kings or rulers were seen as embodiments of a godlike agency, while the people at large were a passive body under the sway of destiny. During the Christian Middle Ages, Western societies were governed by a combination of worldly and spiritual rule; Ernst Kantorowicz speaks appropriately of “the king’s two bodies” as the emblem of royal absolutism .3 During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the people at large slowly awakened from the “slumber of tutelage” (to use Kant’s phrase) and began to discover their own role as agents and not merely passive victims of political events. The result was a series of dramatic social-political changes and revolutionary upheavals. This sequence of changes is often interpreted as a process of “secularization ” involving the growth of agnostic disbelief; however, this reading is lopsided and misleading. What happened in modernity or the modernizing process was rather that political agency was predominantly (mis)construed as instrumental fabrication, as the construction of the “body politic” as an artificial body through contractual design. Here we have the signature conception of modern Western political thought, which views the political community or “state” as an artifact created through a social contract—a conception that has taken several shapes. In the following I shall, in a first step, discuss this modern conception of the “body politic” as it was developed by a string of leading thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to Rousseau. In a second step I show how, during the nineteenth century—and chiefly under the influence of positivism and natural “scientism”—politics and political agency were increasingly construed as an empirical process subject to quasi-scientific natural or biological laws. By way of conclusion, I turn to more recent developments in the twentieth century, when—partly under the impact of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and neo-Aristotelianism—efforts were made to overcome the conceptions of the “body politic” as either a willful construct or a purely physical organism. What emerges or what is rediscovered at this point is the notion of the political community as an interactive body, that is, as a shared “embodied praxis” or an affective “interbody.” The Body Politic 103 The Body Politic as Artifact One of the crucial presuppositions of ancient and classical thought was that human beings are social or political creatures and that hence political communities are at least to some extent “natural” bodies or organisms. During the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas translated the Aristotelian notion of “political animal” (zoon politikon) into “social animal”—but without a significant change of meaning. It was the rise of antiessentialism and voluntarism during the late Middle Ages that began to undermine this traditional conception. The decisive step in this respect was taken by Thomas Hobbes, who took direct aim at the Aristotelian legacy. His book De Cive (The Citizen...