Seeing in the Dark

Seeing in the Dark Anne Norton (bio) Seeing in the Dark Politics and Vision is a work of the Enlightenment that begins with an account of political theory as revelation. Political theory belongs to philosophy as an enterprise of opening. “Philosophy can be distinguished from other methods of eliciting truths, such as the mystic vision, the secret rite, truths of conscience or of private feelings.” There may be, Wolin suggests, truths that belong to the private. The truths of memory, of sentiment, of conscience and sensation remain private, contained within the boundaries of one mind, one body, one soul. There may be truths revealed by “the mystic vision, the secret rite” but these do not belong to philosophy. Theory and philosophy are engaged in opening. They work in the open, eliciting “truths publicly arrived at and publicly demonstrable” (4, 608 n.1). Political theory belongs too, to an open politics and to political opening. The private truths of memory and sentiment are neither philosophic nor political. Political theory concerns itself only with those truths that can be made public, that escape the confines of a single body and mind. “The dramatic symbol of the right alliance was the demand of the Roman plebs that the status of the Twelve Tables of the law be transformed from a priestly mystery cognizable only by the few to a public form of knowledge accessible to all” (Ibid.). Political theorists are committed to work in the open. They work toward openness and opening. Their way remains open before them. Wolin noted at the outset that political philosophy is “not an essence with an eternal nature,” nor an enterprise subject to definition (3). The manifold practices of political theorists do not exhaust this complex activity. The possibilities of philosophy remain open. Wolin would have politics open as well. The contentious character of this latter claim reminds us that the first is not altogether inarguable. A number of readers have read the expanded edition of Politics and Vision and seen an altered conclusion. The first Politics and Vision called for readers to commit themselves to theory and philosophy. The second calls us to politics. This difference ought not to surprise us. Political philosophy is a political enterprise: answering to the demands of a common public life. That life has changed. Politics was opening, when Politics and Vision first appeared, but political science sought to silence and sequester political philosophy. Political theory was “not political science”; certainly not “science” and one would be wise not to regard it as authoritative. Wolin restored that authority, arguing that political theory not only had authority in but over political science “defining the area of what is political”, making political facts and making them significant, and creating the concepts that enabled political analysts and writers on politics to do their work (6). Political theorists have a double vocation in Wolin’s account: a political vocation and a philosophic vocation. They are called moreover, not simply to politics and philosophy but to a politics and philosophy of openness and enlightenment. The idea of the calling contains affirmations and caveats. There is a distance between the caller and called. One is called in the present, but not to it. There is space, there is distance between the caller and the called; between where one is and what one is called to. That interval is, as Heidegger wrote, the space where thought arises. The interval, the empty space in which the call is heard, is also a space of loss. We hear the call in an absence. In a great absence, in the face of great loss, in an extended interval, the call may die unheard, or echo louder. Roxanne Euben has recently reminded us that the Greek theoria refers not only to sight but to travel. Theoros “has multiple meanings, including a spectator, a state delegate to a festival in another city, someone who travels to consult an oracle.”i Wolin’s account recalled the simultaneous inscription of politics and philosophy in the word and reminded us that the task of theory, like that of travel, was a confrontation with the absent and the alien, “to make the unfamiliar familiar, and the familiar

Aesthetics · Conscience · Epistemology · Mysticism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Revelation · Theology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought