Thursday, February 05, 2009

Tertium quid

[Soloviev established a connection between "true religion and sensible politics" more convincingly in his commentary on current affairs than in his formal philosophy... In an essay titled "Plato's Life-Drama" (1898),(18) which on the surface presented itself as concerned with the origins of Platonic philosophy, Soloviev provided a key to understanding how he resolved this tension in his biblically-based worldview between the antithetical demands of respect for authority(19) and the moral imperative to defend and promote human rights, including, most importantly, what he understood to be the divinely-bestowed, unqualified sanctity of human life. This essay cast Socrates--the first "philosopher" recorded as questioning the authority of those who would lead others--in the role of tertium quid, a mediating force attempting to save his beloved Athenian civilization, the foundations of which were being eroded on the one hand by the nihilistic forces of relativistic sophism, and on the other by arch-conservative forces bent on preserving at all costs their prerogatives of power in the name of "blind" religious tradition.(20)
Vladimir S. Soloviev and the politics of human rights
Journal of Church and State: 01-JAN-99 Author: Wozniuk, Vladimir]

[Object-Oriented Philosophy: What is it Good For?
from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects: I contend that, in one way or another, all of these solutions result from the Hegemonic Fallacy where it is held that culture overdetermines everything else, or rather that all entities (persons, objects in the world) are merely vehicles of cultural significations.
These are substantial ontological claims. As K-Punk recently
noted, it is not that disputes over ontology are disputes over politics, but rather that disputes over politics are disputes over differing ontologies.
"My instinct would be to reverse this, i.e. it’s not that ontology is always constructed through a political battle, but that politics is always constructed through an ontological battle. Politics certainly presuppose ontology - to take a glaring example, the key slogans of Thatcherite capitalist realism, for instance (”There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families” and “There is no alternative”) were explicitly ontological claims, claims about what sort of entities can be said to exist in the world. But that isn’t to say that all ontologies presuppose a politics."]

The present divide between our A city and B city ideologues is not devoid of politics emanating out of distinct ontological stands. Eramenical Congresses need to be convened to thrash out differing perceptions on The Life Divine and allied texts. [TNM]

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