The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence

By Tilo Schabert

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe—including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China—The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics.
           
Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones—and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us—to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226185156

Book preview

The Second Birth

The Second Birth

On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence

TILO SCHABERT

TRANSLATED BY JAVIER IBÁÑEZ-NOÉ

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Tilo Schabert is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Erlangen in Germany and has taught at several other institutions around the world. A former secretary general for the International Council for Philosophy and the Humanities at UNESCO, he is the author of many books in several different languages, including, in English, Boston Politics and How World Politics Is Made. Javier Ibáñez-Noé is associate professor of philosophy at Marquette University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

Original publication: Tilo Schabert, Die zweite Geburt des Menschen. Von den politischen Anfängen menschlicher Existenz © 2009 Verlag Karl Alber, part of Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03805-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18515-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226185156.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schabert, Tilo, author.

[Zweite Geburt des Menschen. English]

The second birth : on the political beginnings of human existence / Tilo Schabert ; translated by Javier Ibáñez-Noé.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-03805-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-18515-6 (ebook) 1. Political science—Anthropological aspects. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Political anthropology. 4. Civilization. I. Ibáñez-Noé, Javier, translator. II. Title.

JA71.S276813 2015

320.01—dc23

2015010509

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

My friend, why are the great gods in council?

ENKIDU, after a dream, addressing Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh 6.11)

Contents

Preface

Introduction

At the Start

In Number

In Body

In Action

In Consciousness

In Grace

In the Divine

In Thought

In Creation

In Eros

In Time

In Law

In Freedom

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Analytical Table of Contents

Introduction

Distinction between first and second birth

The Gestalten of human life are Gestalten of power

The reflection on the political

To exist means to govern creatively

At the Start

Distinction between start and beginning

What are beginnings?

The first—bodily—birth

Power is the Gestalt of humanity

In Number

Number is the mode of all creation

From the One to the Many

The world in an order of number

Human beings in the order of number

Number and language

The beginning in number

The One and the Many

In Body

The power of bodies

The political problem of a bodily-spatial presence

The primary question of power among human beings

Body-politics: the image of the train station

Bodies are prevented by bodies from reaching an understanding

Bodies necessitate politics: comparison of human beings and angels

The civilization humans need: a creation made of power

The science of the founding of politics: Ibn Khaldûn on the establishment of a civilization that fashions human beings into human beings

Human beings and their bodies: lonely and yet eloquent

The message of bodies

The doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings

The beginning from which human beings become sociable to each other

The anthropophanous event

Unsociability and sociability are never interchangeable conditions

Toward a political world of human beings: a politics for bodies

A world different from the world of bodies: visions of paradise

The specific mode of bodily existence under paradisiacal conditions

Ibn Khaldûn’s distinction between a hypothetically and an empirically proceeding political science

Beyond historical time: paradisiacal times

Images of human society under paradisiacal conditions: Hesiod, Empedocles, Plato, Huainanzi, Rousseau, Fichte, Sartre

The para-empirical product of natural man

Anthropogonic logic: its formulation in Chinese thought

The modes of creation: political processes

Through their beginnings human beings are actors in the politics of creation

In Action

Human beings exist in action and in no other way

Pascal and Plato on human existence in constant movement

The existence of human beings: an existence oriented toward power

The great question: to act toward what and for what?

Human beings as the beginning and the begetters of their actions

Human beings come to the power of their action out of the beginning

Lines of meaning in relation to the totality of existence

The freedom of human beings to exist creatively

In Consciousness

For human beings the soul is the faculty of their existence

In the clarity of consciousness

The eyes of cognition are in principle not opened

In the night of cognition

The power to create as a power to destroy

A Gestalt of power for the recognition of meaning

The work of the soul

In the soul what consciousness is becomes apparent

Human beings as capable of humanity

The polis human being

The soul’s work of government

The beginning of political society in the Gestalt of the power of consciousness

The culmination of human life occurs politically

In Grace

The figuration of creation in the process of creation

Humans on the path to their beginning

The human way and a more beautiful way: grace

Knowing in the Gestalt of grace

The commandment of grace: you shall know, but you shall not be like God

The modern revolt against the commandment

The promise that human beings will become gods: the final motif in European (Western) thought

The beginning that human beings earn through grace for their second birth

Augustine’s anthropogonic-political interpretation of the biblical creation story

Two political societies from the very beginning (in primo homine)

The anthropogonic freedom that is revealed to human beings in grace

The estrangement of the first human beings from God out of arrogance (superbia) and greed (avaritia)

Unselfish love (caritas) and self-love (amor sui)

In the Divine

Divinity and thought: the Gestalten for any initiation of human civilization

The care for freedom

The architecture of human existence in the architecture of the world

How do human beings learn to be human beings?

Plato’s myth of the rule of Kronos, the god of care

The message of the myth: human beings are now alone, and this is their great predicament

Human beings must lead themselves and themselves take care of themselves

There is a word for the care of human beings for themselves: politics

Politics is mimesis of God

The fundamental and the pragmatic meanings of political thought

The question regarding political theory

The care of human beings for their existence

A political theory is present in every human society

Political theory in the modern age

A theory of politics is always a theory of a crisis of politics

The classical nature of political theory

Political theory and political practice

In Thought

The sociability of thought

Thought: start and beginning

The path toward the human community begins in thought

Plato’s poleogony: (a) The founding of human civilization in the gradual process of its political formation

Plato’s poleogeny: (b) A history both of falling apart and of creation

The paradigm (paradeigma) of human society

The power of actualization of the paradigm

A creative power to give form or a creative power to annihilate

In Creation

Creation is separation 72–

Creation falls apart as it emerges

Reports: Dao De Jing, Huainanzi, Upanishads, Hesiod’s Theogony, ancient Egyptian hymns, the Koran, the Bible

The falling apart of the One brought about by the One itself

The world is a society of the unsociable

A history lies in things

In Eros

Eros, the twofold beginning: both of the falling apart and of the unity of creation

Order is the structure of chaos

The dialogue on Eros in Plato’s Symposium

Eros according to Empedocles: sociable love and divisive strife

Who is Eros?

Plato’s images of Eros: (a) The androgynous kind (genos androgynos): human beings, once a whole, were cut up and their nature is now desiring

Plato’s images of Eros: (b) Souls of wax: in caring for their souls, human beings prepare their thought. They are the shapers, the form givers of their thought. Human beings become human beings in the structure of Eros

Plato’s images of Eros: (c) Humans as marionettes: Eros, the choreograph, shapes human beings according to the way in which they have become disposed toward Eros

The common and the heavenly Eros

Everything finds itself in a Gestalt among Gestalten

Caring for and healing Eros

The night of evil

The monstrous human being

The eros tyrannos

The caring, conciliatory, just Eros

The way we should live

The culture of the soul

The eros philosophos

The feast of thought

In Time

Human beings are occurrences of time

What are human beings in time?

Time is a deactualizing power

Human beings can change time in time

Time Gestalten

The time of Creation and the time of annihilation

In the Gestalt of time all civilization is a civilization of recurrence

Plato on the question: Since when have human states existed?

The extinction of states: the beginning is the creation of the end

Plato on the beginnings of states in the Laws

The highest form of civilization manifests itself in the time-Gestalt of the beginning

The beginning of legislation

Humans create, within time, their times

Progress toward the good as well as toward the bad

The temporal course of political civilization

In Law

Human beings alone can never guarantee the soundness of a society composed of human beings

The poachers of the good of the community

Human existence is shaped from the beginning for the law

The second, political predicament

The rule of law (an empire of laws, and not of men)

Is the law the Absolute?

Not one answer, but different answers

Empirical exposition (Anonymous Iamblichi, Chrysippos, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes)

The validity of human laws

Foreknowledge of the law in human beings

The power of the law is the power that frees human beings for their humanity

In Freedom

The special status of the Gestalt of freedom

Freedom as a guideline for making a choice

Questions to ask on the basis of the preceding investigation

Freedom and the power that comes into being from the soul

The work of the soul: a political project

The animae anarchia

The framing of the first constitution of human beings: the emergence of the community of the forces of the soul

The politics of the soul

The essential elements of political reality (constitution, power, government) are prefigured in the politics of the soul

The freely chosen constitutions of the soul of different human beings

The reality of freedom is power

Power is the paradigm of human politics

Every human being defines his or her constitution

Freedom opens up every form of politics. It is both a good power and a bad one

The construction of a society of human beings in and according to the Gestalt of freedom

The paradox of freedom

Human beings’ natural right to freedom

Every human being is the sovereign of his or her existence

The transformation of bodily relations between human beings into juridical ones

A constitution for freedom

From the paradox of freedom to the paradox of power

What is the paradox of power?

How the paradox of power is put on stage

The regency of freedom

The second birth: human beings’ own free work

Preface

This book inquires anew into the question: Whence originates the political Gestalt of human life and what does it entail? In pursuit of this question the book attempts to undertake a transcultural and transhistorical grounding of political theory. The material for it has accordingly been taken from classical works of different cultural spheres. Ancient Greek, Jewish and Christian, Chinese, Arabic, ancient Egyptian, and Indian texts have been examined with regard to their fundamental claims. Analysis of these texts showed that the visions of the political existence of human beings that they entertain can be surprisingly similar. The parallels between pre-Socratic thought and Taoism, for instance, are striking. To take another example, Philo of Alexandria’s hermeneutical method is in no way inferior to modern hermeneutics. In this way, a body of knowledge that had largely fallen into oblivion owing to the advent of modernity could be recovered and made available for contemporary political theory. It is precisely this knowledge that has the potential for providing the foundation for transcultural commonalities in our own times.

The methodology of the book is both transdisciplinary and empirical. I have had recourse not only to philosophical and political writings, but also to mythical, religious, and literary ones. The material itself has been allowed to set the course of the investigation; nothing has been introduced that is not present in that material or that cannot be illustrated through it.

In order to compare and present traditions of thought from different civilizations, generous quotations from original documents—in translation—were unavoidable. In order to do justice to these texts, the scholarly diction utilized in their presentation and analysis had to be adapted both to their individual peculiarities and to the need to mediate among them. This was the only way to make accessible premodern, other rhythms of thinking and the mythical imagination, as well as the evocative style of traditions of thought that often believed themselves to be in direct contact with reality.

Human dignity is closely connected with the dignity possessed by politics in human life. When politics is despised or abused, human beings despise or abuse themselves. But if they understand politics as their most important activity, and if they act accordingly, human beings make themselves in fact worthy of themselves. The present book proposes to validate this claim.

Introduction

We must begin with a distinction: the distinction between the first and the second birth. The first birth yields a finished human being, but finished only in his or her bodily constitution, and in no way in his or her human constitution. This is because human beings, through their bodies, and merely by the fact that they exist, are put in an inescapable predicament that encompasses the totality of their being. This predicament is associated with the need for food, clothing, space, assistance, protection, instruction, welfare, and, in consequence, the need for association with others. In a certain, apparently contradictory, manner, their bodily existence, for which they were born into life, takes away their very capacity to live. Human beings must first regain this capacity in, with, and through their bodies, i.e., through the event of their second birth.¹

This second birth is, as will be shown, a political birth, because it is carried out (by virtue of the primordial predicament that explains everything concerning human beings) in an act of political caring for human beings by human beings. They take themselves caringly into their own hands, and make themselves the beginning of the work that is required of them, for the sake of securing their life and survival. This work is the work of government. The reason is this: before human beings lay the foundation for a political community, certain Gestalten are pregiven to them for the conduct of their life that make them entirely political from the very start of their life. What is meant here by Gestalt? This term may be generally defined as follows. If one wants to be creative, whatever is intended in the creative process must be attained within certain boundaries: an intended configuration within certain forms that have been observed, a wished-for consummation within certain solutions that have been found, and a desired connection within certain structures that have been discovered. Or—to give a different example—human beings, by reason of their bodies, take up a certain amount of space, each one for himself or herself, and have thereby a position of power. This is the reason why the act of maneuvering through a crowd in a train station is itself already a form of acting politically between the poles of discreet diplomacy and a war of bodies.

The Gestalten pregiven to human beings for the conduct of their life are Gestalten of power. No one can evade them, unless he were to escape from life itself. The Gestalten of power, which inhere in their existence by reason of their existence, take hold of human beings from the very beginning, with their entrance into the world. This is the logic of creation.²

These connections explain the view of the origins and primary forms of the political offered here. While the tradition of political thought, from its beginning, has equated the start of human politics with the founding of human communities, the possibility is explored here that the disposition for politics may be found already in the disposition of human creation (i.e., in bodies) and, in general, in the form of this world as a creation. Let it be clearly understood that there is nothing arbitrary about this enterprise. Rather, the materials for the present reflection on the political are taken, without exception, from the vast repository of mythical, philosophical, religious, and political reflection that informs us of the intellectual traditions of different civilizations. This reflection on the political is empirically found in these traditions, and the only surprising fact is that there is not already a book that presents it. An attempt to provide such a presentation is offered here. The political in human life must be exhibited in the in-between in which it is empirically located, i.e., between the start of human existence (which while giving rise to this existence is not identical to it) and the beginning that is then made by human beings themselves through the founding of political communities. The interpretation of this beginning offered by Aristotle has had too normative an effect. It prevented a visualization of the political cosmology and the political anthropogony that must be grasped prior to the zōon politikon.³

The book is accordingly organized as a successive consideration of what we call here "Gestalten of power in the development of human life as well as in the establishment and preservation of a civilization for this life. This organizational sequence is indicated in the thematic table of contents and clarified step by step in the analytical table of contents. A second thematic sequence may be drawn by focusing on key points. The discussion here starts—as demanded by the book’s empirical methodology—with the fact of the body, and it determines the political in its primary physico-cosmological emergence; in the next logical step, it proceeds to grasp the political in those modes in which the subsequent creative efforts of human beings establish it, so that its power may be a civilizing power and may thus break and replace the power of bodies. (The actual history of Western civilization, which is based on the principle of freedom, starts, for example, with freedom rights vis-à-vis bodily force, namely, in the legal agreements concerning habeas corpus). A third and final organizational stage consists in the constant reiteration of the central claim of this book: Human beings are placed by their very birth (i.e., their first birth) in the mode of the political, and in this mode they are subjects of a government. They are such subjects throughout their whole existence, and that is exactly the problem: Why is human existence a matter of governing? Why are the concepts human being and government, considered existentially, identical? If and when human beings become conscious of this question—or, as happens more often, are made conscious of it—their existence opens itself to their true beginning. They then see the work of governing that lies before them. If they take it up and assume it, nothing changes, obviously, in their primarily political mode of existence, in which they are subjects of a government. And yet they become empowered in a unique way: They may now begin their existence—in the political mode of this existence—in a totally different manner. They themselves can consciously and purposefully appoint the government in their lives. Through this beginning, human beings create for themselves a freedom to be themselves. Through the political," they become creators of a political creation. They insert the work of the political world, which they have created, into a world that they have not created. On the one hand, everything stays for them the way it was, i.e., everything remains dominated by that first and unceasing question of human existence as such: Who governs? But, on the other hand, nothing stays quite the same, because now, in their capacity as authors of a work of government for the sake of their own existence, human beings are the agents who, in their creative freedom, work on the form that the political takes in their existence.

This book proposes to show that human beings own their existence only when they are creative for it. If they are not, they lose their existence, and they perish with their bodies, which did not receive the care that they required. In carrying out their existence—and they do not have the option not to carry it out, because nothing in their existence stands still—human beings are always, in one way or another, making themselves human beings, i.e., capable of government. Human beings exercise, of course, government over themselves. Such a government takes place against the background of a vast and confused multiplicity of forces that exist in them and that pull them or speak to them: passions, desires, resolutions, yearnings, fantasies, volitions, thoughts, reasonings, all of which are called, in a simplifying manner, soul, as though there were already certainly a unity here. Human beings must exercise this government over themselves, precisely because, when obeying those forces, it is not possible to achieve everything at the same time; indeed, in most cases it is possible to achieve only one thing. But who will steer human beings toward this one thing if not they themselves?

In dealing with their own existence, therefore, human beings must first of all deal with their soul, that field of multiple forces, in which and through which they must find their bearings, in order to be in this or that existential condition. But dealing with their soul in this manner is a creative form of governing, as is manifest in its paradigmatic mode. Here human beings, according to Plato’s description of this paradigmatic mode (which will be discussed in greater detail later in the book),⁴ go about the work of the soul (psyches ergon), i.e., they engage in an activity that is, if we are permitted the word, entirely soul-like, insofar as it creates the soul, i.e., the governing work called soul. For this activity aims at really bringing into being, for the first time, a soul out of the multiplicity of those forces in human beings that pull them and speak to them. This soul, which is supposed to be the aim of the activity in question, is to be understood as a faculty that, once it is acquired by being exercised, enables human beings to be themselves, so that they govern—kratein is Plato’s word⁵—the forces that exist in them, and not the other way around.

All that is meant by the word human being is creative politics. Its beginnings are a beginning toward humanity. To evoke this truth is the purpose of this book.

At the Start

We must distinguish between a beginning [Anfang] and a start [Beginn]. First, we must distinguish them according to cosmological knowledge, as expressed for instance in the Dao De Jing: All things arose from it [the great Tao/Way], but it is not their originator. . . . The Tao protects and nurtures all things but does not claim to be their master¹ And, second, we must distinguish them by emphasizing the atemporal meaning of the word start, since this word is intended to designate precisely that start which creates time—the sequence denoted by it—but