Philosophical Categories of Antiquity in Debates on the Rehabilitation of Politics: The Anthropological Meaning of Civic Friendship

The most important problem of modern political philosophy is the loss of politics' independence from other spheres of human activity. Since the beginning of the last century, philosophers have sought to justify the uniqueness of political being and to update the modern political-philosophical vocabulary by redefining the categories of antiquity (e.g. τὸ ᾰ̓γᾰθόν, φῐλία, παρρρησία, etc.). The article is devoted to the approach to the rehabilitation of the political sphere based on the political-philosophical experience of the ancient Greeks. The theoretical basis of the study is H. Arendt's solution of the issue of depoliticization in the context of her reminiscences of the ancient heritage. The author turns to the notion of civic friendship, which largely determines Arendt's contribution to the discussions on the rehabilitation of politics and acts as a practice endowing the community with political potential. On the basis of Arendt's interpretation of the political philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the author justifies the appeal to this notion and shows the connection of civic friendship with other categories of ancient thought (truth, opinion, Maieutics). The analysis reveals that the requirement borrowed from Socrates to eliminate truth from the sphere of human affairs puts Arendt's philosophy in opposition to the tradition of political thought, and the use of political-philosophical categories to describe the human lifeworld allows us to consider it as a version of the hermeneutics of the subject. The author concludes that the justification of politics by means of ancient thought has an original anthropological dimension. It consists in the recognition of the significance of political action for the orientation of man in the world and the assertion of his identity in the community.

politics, the political, Arendt, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, civil friendship, maieutics