Thursday, December 21, 2006

About Philosophia Rei Publicae

This blog was designed in part as a reaction to issues I had with other political blogs. I may have exaggerated these problems. I haven’t done an extensive survey of internet blogs, so perhaps my complaints are founded off of misconceptions. If that's true, this entry still serves its purpose, which is to lay down the objectives of this blog.

First of all, I wanted to strive towards independence. It seems like the vast majority of political blogs identify quite strongly with one political party or the other; one political faction or the other. Tendencies of some sort or another are inevitable, but for an intellectual community to be vibrant it has to be free, and capable of offering criticism from multiple different angles.

It’s especially dangerous for intellectuals to associate closely with political parties because in doing so they're bound to compromise their intellectual honesty. Political parties are broad, encompassing more ideas than anyone could ever actually agree with. They're Machiavellian sacrificing political ideology for political power. Intellectuals can’t in all honesty support everything a political party does, and, in pretending to do so, they are bound to sacrifice they're intellectual honest.

Secondly, I wanted to put less focus on transient issues than other blogs seem to. It’s important to describe the facts on the ground in Iraq, or to discuss the foibles of elected officials, but sometimes writers need to step back and analyze those things, to use Iraq or the recent scandals to talk more generally about war and corruption. The war will eventually end (hopefully), elected officials will eventually be unelected, and to have a substantial movement which will outlast the current political travails, it's necessary to root that movement in timeless philosophical principles. Sure, people are unhappy with the war in Iraq right now, but if we can't convince them that preemptive war is absolutely wrong, that taxes aren't theft, and that it's alright to be gay, then we haven't really accomplished all that much.

It‘s this need to look deeper that made me choose the title "Philosophia Rei Publicae." Philosophy to the Greeks meant looking past the particulars and trying to understand the "forms" -- the underlying concepts themselves. No one today actually believes in the notion of the "forms" as espoused by Plato -- that, for example, there is some perfect manifestation of beauty or righteousness that one can find and use to understand all other examples of beauty. But, in using the word philosophy, I’m trying to hearken back to the idea that we should look past the purely transient manifestations of a thing and try to analyze the deeper concept itself.

Some of my more astute readers will notice that the title of the blog is actually not in Greek, but in Latin. This is largely due to a shortcoming on my own part, namely that while I know Latin, I know not the slightest bit of Greek. Also though, I liked the phrase “res publica“ which is Latin. It’s the root for the word "republic," but literally just means “public thing.” I liked the broadness of the term, because I feel as if any adequate analysis of politics has to encompass not just affairs of the state, but cultural phenomena as well

So, the precise translation of the title is something like the “Philosophy of the State.” I know, it sounds better in Latin. That's precisely why I waited so long to translate it.

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