Zoe, Mere Life, vs Bios, the Good Life

Discussion

Akseli Virtanen:

"In the Classical world the simple, natural life, the fact of living (zoê), which was common to all living beings (animals, human beings, gods), was plainly marginal from the perspective of the way of living proper to an individual or a group, that is, from a qualified life, the good life (bios).2As a living being, man’s place was in oikos (dwelling, home, household) and as a political subject it was in polis (city-state, body of citizens). The entire Aristotelian tradition is quite clear that this was a difference constituted already in human nature: in so far as man was to realize his nature as a political animal, as a ‘living being who has language’, this was to take place in the polis, the community. Politics was almost as if the difference between the fact of living and good life, the place were mute life, realizing itself in the oikos) transformed itself into good life, that is, into political life that took place in language: political order was constituted on the humanness of living man, on his having a language, not on the fact of living itself, on him having a voice.Both Agamben and Foucault agree that we can no longer distinguish between the simple fact of living (zoê) and the good life (bios); between our biological life as living beings and our political existence; between what is incommunicable and mute (or has only a voice), and what is communicable and sayable (or whose place is in language). We are animals in whose politics our very life as living beings is at stake: “for millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living man with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1990: 143). Life ‘as such’, set apart from its different forms – an idea impossible in the Greek and Roman tradition – now becomes the centre of political order. Foucault analyses this entrance of life into the sphere of polis with his concept of biopower. According to Foucault, the ‘entrance of life into history’ – that is, the entry of phenomena particular to the life of the human species into the sphere of political techniques (the order of knowledge and power) – is begun at the moment when economy (oikonomia, the management of family and household) and politics (the government of polis) integrate. Life becomes the centre of politics at the moment when economy – at the time understood as oikonomia, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the household (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper – is introduced to politics, the minute attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state. This is political economy in the original sense."

(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)