Publikuojame tekstą viešos paskaitos, kurią Mykolo Romerio universiteto profesorius Andrius Bielskis, Aristotelio ir kritinės teorijos studijų centro direktorius, Lietuvos nacionalinės Martyno ...Mažvydo bibliotekos kvietimu perskaitė 2023 m. balandžio 20 d. Paskaita, skaityta autoriaus 50 metų jubiliejaus proga, – reikšmingas Profesoriaus intelektualinės autobiografijos fragmentas, brėžiantis dar vieną akademinio maršruto variantą.Autorius dėkoja visiems, kas dalyvavo, klausėsi, skaitė ir komentavo jo mintis, ypač šeimos nariams – Severijai ir Nickui, atvykusiems iš Londono, Jolantai ir Samueliui Andriui, broliui Putinui, taip pat ir Nacionalinei Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekai už jos svetingumą
Publikuojame tekstą viešos paskaitos, kurią Mykolo Romerio universiteto profesorius Andrius Bielskis, Aristotelio ir kritinės teorijos studijų centro direktorius, Lietuvos nacionalinės Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekos kvietimu perskaitė 2023 m. balandžio 20 d. Paskaita, skaityta autoriaus 50 metų jubiliejaus proga, – reikšmingas Profesoriaus intelektualinės autobiografijos fragmentas, brėžiantis dar vieną akademinio maršruto variantą.Autorius dėkoja visiems, kas dalyvavo, klausėsi, skaitė ir komentavo jo mintis, ypač šeimos nariams – Severijai ir Nickui, atvykusiems iš Londono, Jolantai ir Samueliui Andriui, broliui Putinui, taip pat ir Nacionalinei Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekai už jos svetingumą
Aristotle has traditionally been aligned with conservative social and political philosophy. The conservative reception has been challenged by Alasdair MacIntyre and the Marx-inspired reading of ...Aristotle. Following MacIntyre’s arguments, this paper sketches an alternative conception of the critical theory beyond the Frankfurt School’s critique of the contemporary culture and the modern society. Critical theory is understood as an attempt to provide both historical analysis and normative critique of the contemporary society and its culture. It argues that normativity should be understood not in Kantian, but in Aristotelian terms. The articulation of Aristotelian conceptions of human flourishing and aretē, rather than that of the bürgerlich conception of Kantian duty, should be at the centre of contemporary theorising. The author claims that Aristotle’s practical philosophy allows us to conceptualise ethics beyond the dominant conceptions of ethical normativity prevalent in the capitalist modernity, while Marx is important because his analysis provides us with theoretical tools for the historically informed critique of the social and economic structures of the modern society.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the issue of the best constitution given Aristotle’s account of human flourishing articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle claims that monarchy is ...the supreme form of constitution. A similar claim is repeated in Politics. The paper argues that these claims sit uneasily with Aristotle’s teleological accounts of the polis, the citizen, and his discussion of the virtues of the citizen and the good man in Politics. Given Aristotle’s philosophical definition of the state as “an association of equals for the sake of the best possible life” and his notion that “the best is happiness, and that consists in excellence and its perfect actualization and its employment”, and Aristotle’s argument on the relationship between the good man and the good citizen, this paper concludes that the best constitution is politeia. Yet, simply to argue so is not enough if we are to rescue Aristotle from his inconsistencies and his claims on “natural inequalities”. Finally, a more radical interpretation of Aristotle is outlined, which rejects Aristotle’s separation between the oikos and the polis and argues that the verticality of the former is philosophically arbitrary and contradicts the revolutionary implications of Aristotle’s normative teleology.
Šio straipsnio tikslas – aptarti geriausios santvarkos problemą Aristotelio politinėje teorijoje, atsižvelgiant į Nikomacho etikoje pateiktą žmogiško klestėjimo sampratą. Joje Aristotelis teigia, kad monarchija yra geriausia santvarka (1160a35–36). Šis teiginys pakartojamas ir Politikoje (1288a15–18). Straipsnyje aiškinama, kodėl šie Aristotelio teiginiai prieštarauja Politikoje aptartoms teleologinėms polio, piliečio ir gero piliečio vs. gero žmogaus dorybių sampratoms. Atsižvelgiant į Aristotelio filosofinį valstybės apibrėžimą, jog ji yra „lygių asmenų susivienijimas dėl geriausio įmanomo gyvenimo“, ir teiginį, kad „geriausia yra laimė, o tai susideda iš tobulumo, tobulo jos aktualizavimo ir panaudojimo“, be to, jo argumentus apie gero žmogaus ir gero piliečio santykį, straipsnyje teigiama, kad geriausia politinė santvarka yra politėja, o ne monarchija. Tačiau tokios interpretacijos nepakanka, jei norime išgelbėti Aristotelį nuo jo nenuoseklumo ir filosofiškai abejotinų teiginių apie „prigimtinę nelygybę“. Siūloma radikalesnė Aristotelio interpretacija, atmetanti šio filosofo ontologinę skirtį tarp oikos ir polio. Teigiama, kad Aristotelio socialinių santykių šeimoje-ūkyje (oikos) vertikalumas yra filosofiškai nepagrįstas ir prieštarauja revoliuciniams šio filosofo normatyvinės teleologijos aspektams ir jos radikalioms implikacijoms.
The paper examines Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ethical views – especially as exemplified in the dictum “each of us is guilty of everything against all, and I am more than all” – in light of their political ...implications. It focuses on two related issues. First, Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical interpretation of Dostoevsky’s “I am more than the others” is contrasted with its interpretation by Sigmund Freud, who famously argued that Dostoevsky’s fixation on guilt was the consequence of his neurotic intention to murder his father. Freud’s claim has been refuted by Dostoevsky’s bibliographers. To understand the meaning of “I am more than all,” its semantic-narrative context in The Brothers Karamazov is therefore discussed. Second, the paper then examines the political implications of Dostoevsky’s ethics of redemption. Given that there are at least three traditions of theorizing the political – classical-Aristotelian, Schmittian, and liberal – the paper examines how Dostoevsky’s ethics of redemption can be positioned vis-à-vis these conceptualizations and which of them it can enrich the most.
The paper analyzes Thomas Mann’s literary work from the perspective of critical theory. By briefly discussing an alternative conception of critical theory, it emphasizes the importance of Karl Marx, ...Aristotle, and normativity to social and political theory. The paper argues that we need to conceptualize normativity in Aristotelian rather than Kantian terms, that is, by reinterpreting the tradition of the Greek notion of aretē (excellence). Hence the importance of Aristotle’s ethical reflections on the flourishing of human life and of the political community. Marx is important because he provided a historically informed analysis and critique of the socioeconomic structures of modern society. Marx also gave birth to a new paradigm for social sciences and humanities, a paradigm alternative to positivism and phenomenology. Its main premise is that social and political theory must articulate the normative notion of social emancipation and criticize society and its social structures by drawing on this notion of emancipation. Thomas Mann is interesting and important from the point of view of critical theory; among other things, he provides a literary critique of the European bourgeois society and its way of life. As an illustration, Thomas Mann’s dialectic of eroticism and death in the life of the bourgeois iron cage is also analyzed (the dialectic that we find in Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain).
This paper examines similarities and differences between the genealogical approach to social critique and the Marxist critique of ideology. Given the key methodological aspects of Michel Foucault’s ...genealogy—the fusion of power and discourse and the Nietzschean notion of the aesthetization of life—the paper argues that Hollywood kitsch maybe interpreted as a new dispositif. A key task of the genealogy of kitsch is to analyze the effects of fake Hollywood narratives: how they form and normalize us, what kind of subjectivities they produce, and what type of social relations they create. La La Land, a 2016 American musical, is discussed as a way of illustration. Theorists of the Frankfurt School also advanced their critiques of the popular culture and its forms of kitsch; yet they followed Marx and his conception of ideology. The paper concludes that the differences between genealogy and the critique of ideology are philosophical. Foucault rejected the Marxist conception of history and the notion of ideology as false consciousness. Kitsch, for a genealogist, is formative rather than repressive; it makes people pursue banal dreams. For a Marxist critic, popular culture as a form of ideology dulls our critical capacities and, therefore, leaves the status quo of alienation intact.
Gregory Sandstrom. Human Extension: An Alternative to Evolutionism, Creationism and Intelligent Design. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. – 97 p. ISBN 978-113-746-488-0
This article discusses automation from the point of view of the intersection between Aristotle and Marx. First, it was Aristotle’s notion of automatous – self-moving tools – that gave rise to the ...contemporary concept of automation. Marx’s historical materialism is important as it puts the ongoing process of automation into a historical perspective. The development of self-moving machines should free us from the slavery of hard work, yet the legal and political superstructure of capitalism means that the growth of automation produces new forms of precarious wage-slavery. Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian notion of practice is discussed vis-à-vis the Marxian notion of alienated labour. Given the conceptual structure – alienated labour (which prevents us from flourishing) versus non-alienated labour (as essential for human flourishing) – the article poses the question of whether we can apply this in our attempt to assess the ongoing process of automation.
This paper aims to evaluate Marx's conception of alienated labour from the point of view of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of practice. I will argue that Marx's conception of alienation in The ...Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (and elsewhere) is too abstract, and therefore needs to be revised to reflect the reality of the 21st century. It presupposes that, in capitalism, all salaried and waged labour is alienated (a claim recently reiterated by Amy Wendling in her otherwise outstanding Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation). Clearly, this is not the case. The key characteristics of alienation as spelled out by Marx may not be present in a great variety of contemporary jobs dominated by services, especially if they are (or can be seen as) MacIntyrean practices (for example, practicing medicine in a public hospital or working as an engineer in a private company). Drawing on some of the most notable literature on the forms of alienation and reification, I will aim to theorise the conception of meaningful non-alienated labour. Given that practices, as meaningful non-alienated activities, are small islands of human excellence and resistance against the economic pressures of institutional profit maximisation and the self-valorisation of capital, I will conclude the paper by considering the political importance of this conception of labour for anti-capitalist struggles in the 21st century.
Following the definition of ‘practice’ conceptualised in After Virtue, the paper argues that literature as creative writing and reading is a MacIntyrean practice. Literature's key internal goods are ...spelled out: the common aesthetic enjoyment achieved by the writer's ability to create a truthful fictional narrative the reader is drawn into and the expansion of our narrative identities and self‐awareness. Against the conceptual background, the paper asks in which sense can we say that literature as a practice schools us in the virtues. Thomas Mann's work and life are discussed. It argues that Mann's work is both a rich source for us to understand 20th‐century German and European bourgeois societies and an ideological obfuscation of such understanding. Drawing on his early conservatism, the paper shows how the practice of writing and Mann's Nietzschean self‐assertion allowed him to become a politically engaged writer able to question himself and his culture.
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