In Search of the Political: an Essay of the Phenomenology of Power

Abstract

Historically, making sense of politics began in the form of philosophizing on topics deemed political by default. In Plato, such default judgment means an undifferentiated analysis of the ethical and political aspects of reality. This theoretical position results in classifying all known political phenomena as, essentially, either good or bad. One instance of it is splitting the phenomenon of power into ‘force’ and ‘reason’. Initiated by ancient philosophy, the reduction of ‘ethically good power’ to Reason lingered throughout the classical period of European political thought. Full-blown philosophy of power emerges as an outcome of discarding the traditional ethization of reason. It is not fortuitous that, as such, postclassical philosophy begins with Arthur Schopenhauer’s substitution of Kant’s Reason with the Will. The next necessary step in this direction was Nietzsche’s pluralization of the Will, the modern ‘political space’ being thus constituted. It is within the conceptual limits of that space that political philosophy continues its growth as a specifically modern mode of philosophizing.