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

URL = https://blogs.newschool.edu/graduate-faculty-philosophy-journal/files/2020/10/Castoriadis_The-Greek-Polis-and-the-Creation-of-Democracy.pdf

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."