Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy
* Article: The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy. Cornelis Castoriadis. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 9, Number 2, 'Fall 1983
Contextual Quote
"History is creation: the creation of total forms of human life. Sociohistorical forms are not "determined" by natural or historical "laws."
Society is self-creation. "That which" creates society and history is the instituting society, as opposed to the instituted society. The instituting society is the social imaginary in the radical sense.
The self-institution of society is the creation of a human world: of "things," "reality," language, norms, values, ways of life and death, objects for which we live and objects for which we die-and of course, first and foremost, the creation of the human individual in which the institution of society is massively embedded. Within this wholesale creation of society, each particular, historically given institution represents a particular creation. Creation, as I use the term, means the positing of a new eidos, a new essence, a new form in the full and strong sense: new determinations, new norms, new laws. The Chinese, the classical Hebrew, the ancient Greek or the modern capitalist institution of society each means the positing of different determinations and laws, not just "juridical" laws, but obligatory ways of perceiving and conceiving the social and "physical" world and acting within it."
- Cornelis Castoriadis [1]
Description
Cornelis Castoriadis:
"Modern discussions of Greece have been plagued by two opposite and symmetrical - thus, in a sense, equivalent - preconceptions. The first, and most frequently encountered over the last four or five centuries, is Greece as eternal model, prototype or paradigm. (One contemporary outlook merely inverts this preconception: Greece as anti-model, as negative model.) The second and more recent preconception involves the complete "sociologization" or "ethnologization" of the examination of Greece. Thus, the differences between the Greeks, the Nambikwara, and the Bamileke are only descriptive. No doubt, this second attitude is formally correct. Not only, needless to say, is there not nor could there be any difference in "human value," "worthiness" or "dignity" between different peoples and cultures, but neither could there be any objection to applying to the Greek world the methods-if there be any applied to the Arunta or to the Babylonians.
But the second approach misses a minute and decisive point. The reasoned investigation of other cultures and the reflection upon them does not begin within the Arunta or the Babylonian cultures. Indeed, one could show that it could not have begun with them. Before Greece and outside the Greco-Western tradition, societies are instituted on a principle ofstrict closure: our view ofthe world is the only meaningful one, the "others" are bizarre, inferior, perverse, evil, or unfaithful. As Hannah Arendt has said, impartiality enters this world with Homer.
This is not just "affective" impartiality. It is the impartiality of knowledge and understanding. The keen interest in the other starts with the Greeks."