sabato 3 febbraio 2018

Crise of liberalism ancient philosophers

I have read the recension of  book of Patrick Deneen on the cirse of liberalism. Deneen says that this crise is due to the fact that liberalism replaced the old ide of the phylosophers of self-mastery with the universal pursuit of personal desires. Apart that the term is improper (he says liberalism but he means modernity), apart that this is the cnformistic, boring criticism of the right and apart from the fact that the true proble is the conentration of wealth in a ridiculously restricted number of hands, the book has a point. People of the modernity are unhappy. Freud and Durkheim thought that this was the inevitable drawback of civilisation (the unease of civilisation), but I think that it has to do exactly with the abandonemenet of the idea of self-mastery pointed out by Deneem Where the book fails, however, is in confusing self-mastery with coerction, an idea that was totally foreign to the ancient philosophers and that arose only with the rise to power of Christianism (it was equally foreign to the first Christian communities). Socrates could sleep with the handsome Alcibiades and avoid to have sex with him because he was master of his desires, not because law or necessity prevented him from doing that (as conservatives would like).