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Observations on Community
John Schaar
May, 1970
I, of course, don't know where you people have been, what kind of
journeys you've had, but I thought at least I'd try to start - I know
your general theme has been community--by saying a few, very basic,
almost elementary words about some of the ways that notion, that
problem, that set of ideas and theories have been formulated in the
tradition of western political thought and institutions. Mayybe
they'll set a kind of context, a kind of boundary, provide us with a
few terms when we try to talk about where we are. This is going to be
very schematic, it's going to be stark--a kind of schematic
presentation of some of the basic ways of this oldest and in our day
again liveliest of the problems of political theory. I'm not going to
say anything new. I'm just going to try to formulate a few themes for
our talk.
I think the way the question has been mainly formulated (and it's a
formulation that's appearing among us again today) is one that starts
with a tension or strain between the demands of political order and
structure and uniformity on the other. Today, in place after place,
in writer after writer, this theme and this problem in effect is
being formulated in wavs that make it insoluable, that offer terms
for the discussion which can end up only in paradox. It's formulated
today increasingly as not merely a tension, but probably an
incompatibility, between things that we call individual freedom or
authenticity or self-fulfillment and self-realization on the one
side, and the structures and processes of power and of domination and
of alienation and mediation on the other.
Even that harsh formulation, and in the end not very useful
formulation, is not new. If you start, for example, with certain
of the themes in that magnificent Platonic allegory of the Cave,
we're already taught that at least for certain individuals who
would seek the highest possible fulfillment of their potential, it
is necessary to leave the market place --to leave the life of
common men and of common things, and to fix their gaze and their
energies on an order of truth and reality and being which is
higher, more enduring than the fleeting images of the world of
opinion. And Plato tells us that once a man has tasted of that, he
in effect will have to be compelled to descend again into the
cave, into the market place, to shoulder some of the common
burdens of ruling and of caring for the whole.
That flight, that Platonic flight from the market place--in his
argument, of course, in the interest of the highest possibilities
of the self, and only for the best men--is recommended today by
moderns for all men. The notion of higher and of lower has
virtually disappeared from the recommendation. So you can see the
symbolical structure of the argument is as old as Plato, but the
content and the tenor of the argument is, I think, among us today
very, very different. You cut of the notion of higher and
lower and the whole thing changes. The modern consciousness
contains very little of that Platonic notion that when the
prepared man leaves the market place he will find authentic
fulfillment not in an order created by him, but in an order
discovered by him--real and existing outside of himself. Whereas
for the modern, increasingly we are being told by the writers on
this subject that man's only authentic and true home is the self
itself. That is the only home he has, and that of course is a
decisive difference. That's one way the problem has been
formulated for us, that's one way of stating very starkly the
change of accent that has taken place in formulating the argument.
And then there is a contending formulation of the question which is
like the other one, equally old and equally new. This contending
formulation, of course, found its earliest philosophical treatment in
the Aristotelian vision of political life, a vision that tried to
reconcile the difference between the private and the public selves--
which argues that participation in the public things and cares was an
essential activity in the individual quest for fulfillment or
authenticity that the idiot, in effect, was not fully a man. Now that
formulation finds its modern echoes, of course, in such things as the
slogans of participatory democracy and in a good many books and
essays. But here again there are decisive differences between the
classical and modern formulations on this question which I'm going to
touch on in just a minute. So then we have this one way of formu-
lating the question--it's a formulation that asks, "can the
individual participate in the structures and processes of politics
and still achieve an authentic expression of the highest
potentialities of the self?" We have that one common way of
formulating the question and we already have those two great and
opposing answers to it.
There has been, I think, a second enduring way of formulating this
problem and question in political philosophy. The question is put,
"Are there any conditons which are prior to and necessary for the
existence of political order and community, as such? Are there then
indispensable prerequisites for political community?" Here again, I
want to look very, very quickly at some of the contending answers to
that question. One starts again with Plato, because he has offered us
an enduring answer to the question--one that still echoes in muted
form and sometimes in very loud voices among us today. Usually, I
suppose, if you were doing this very seriously from Plato, you would
look at The Republic. I want to just simply instead go through the
retelling of a little story in Tl~e Protagoras, where Plato offers us
one of his earliest myths. That is, of course, his telling of the
myth of Prometheus.
I won't try to expound the dialogue or anything of that sort, just
retell the story very quickly. You remember it n~ something like--
after the creatures were created by the gods they gave to Epimetheus
and to Prometheus the work of equipping each of the creatures with
the materials and ability necessary to their survival. Again, as I'm
sure you know, it was Epimetheus who took on the job and he loused it
up. By the time he got around to man, the highest creature, he had
exhausted all the materials and resources available to him. His
brother Prometheus coped with the problem by that famous theft--he
stole the mechanical arts and fire. He could not, however--we are
told in this Platonic telling of the myth, steal political wisdom
because that was held by Zeus.
Now fascinatingly, at this very early time, we're told that man is
already equipped for survival. He is able to live dispersed with the
arts that have been made available to him by this theft. He is able
to live without the city in small and scattered and isolated groups.
In this condition, then, men have the means of light, but they are
too weak to defend themselves against some of the animals more
furiously equipped. For, we are told by Plato, they lack the art of
government, of which the art of war is a part. Therefore, they
gathered into cities for their self-preservation, but lacking that
art of government, they fell into conflict. Zeus, fearing the
extermination of the whole race, sent his messenger to them, and here
I quote: "bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles
of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation." Then three
other things are brought along at the same time. There is the in-
struction that reverence and justice must be distributed so that each
man shares in them. They must not be distributed in the way the arts
are, where only some can have an art and not all, for we're told that
cities can exist only if all men share in the virtues and in a
reverence for justice. The next thing that is brought is a
God-decreed law declaring that he who has no part in reverence and
justice shall be put to death as a plague of the state. The final
counsel is that the state must vigorously and constantly, through
every means available to it, teach men laws and teach men the meaning
of justice. It must compel all men to live after the pattern
furnished by the laws and justice and not to live after their own
fancies and tastes.
The point is, I think, in his way of formulating the question,
political community is possible only under a couple of prior
conditions--where, first of all, men are bound together by a common
reverence for the same conception of justice and of virtue. Secondly,
these tablets of justice and of virtue must be based in divine
origin, must be hallowed by tradition, and must be enforced by the
laws and the institutions. Now that is such a beautiful and still
timely way of making that formulation. It is as though in anti-
cipation, Plato had looked forward to that time which is ours, when,
in effect, God is dead, when tradition is either hollow, (or for
those who still have it, it is seen mainly as a burden); where the
law is seen increasingly as little more than temporary treaties in
the struggle of competing groups for competitive advantage and
finally, where sets of beliefs held in common are said to be
something called ideologies, all of which might be equally valid. Or
at least, we are very confused about the status of our loyalities and
our obligations to any such sets of seemingly arbitrary and relative
beliefs. In short, then, we live in a world obviously without
tradition and transcendence, and I'm simply trying to remind you that
theorists heretofore, very powerful ones among them, have known of no
way of keeping order in such a time save through force.
Now that myth and most political thought stemming from that time
always formulated the question in terms of what did man owe the city
and each other. What is so fascinating and troublesome in our time is
that today, the very priorities ordinarily in most of the discussions
of this subject and in most of the books on this subject have shifted
so that the primary concern is not so much with what men owe the
city as it is with what each man owes himself. That is where I think
typically, discussions even of this theme and topic tend to begin
today. It comes as no surprise. In many ways this was the American
concern, the American promise, the American commitment from the very
foundling. Our central value was liberty, it was not common reverence
for justice and for virtue. Liberty was defined as private liberty,
namely as the liberty to enhance one's private estate and
possibilities to the limits of his power. Interests and desires
become the main if not the sole guides to conduct. In that profound
sense, the American foundling was genuinely democratic. By calling it
genuinely democratic, I mean there were to be imposed no common
standards. I mean, secondly, that the test of conduct was held to be
self-interest or self-expression or self-fulfillment. The context
would vary. The logic would be remarkably uniform. Thirdly, I mean
that all desires were to be regarded as equally valid. Desire is to
be gratified in effect because it is there. I'm trying to say that it
is that tendency which has now reached its perfection among us.
It's that tendency that sets, I think, the problem for our
discussion. A hundred texts and movements today, even those that
think they are talking about political community, stress
self-liberation and self-fulfillment. They reject, in one of the
common vocabularies of the day, "role-playing". Or they reject
singleness of occupation and purpose. We're, I think, striving for
some vulgarized version of the Marxian vision of the multiple man set
forth in Tbe German Ideology.
Many writers today are stressing, in effect that any institution
which is not immediately responsive to personal desire and demands is
without justification. That's where most of the writers are. The test
of the validity of any institution is that it must directly and
almost immediately contribute to the fulfillment of personal demand
and desire. Of course, there's an interesting body of writers-- I
think they've got their own problems but they're interesting--Abraham
Maslow's perhaps the most powerful of them, who try to go beyond this
and provide a task. Institutions must fill basic human needs, not
merely all interests and desires. The problem, however, is that the
list of those basic human needs varies among the writers.
Nobody can say at all where this modern discovery and celebration of
the self is going to lead us. I want to make a couple of points about
it. First of all, nobody known to me has found that kind of
integrative principle of the self upon which we can build towards all
those shining and dazzling promises that are held before us today,
such as authenticity, the experimental and open orientation, and so
forth. I'm trying to say that it is so importanI to understand that
after 300 years of looking for it, the self remains elusive,
ironically perhaps, the most elusive thing of all, though seemingly
it is the most intimate thing, the thing closest to us. Now,
secondly, if that is the case, and if these impulses towards self
realization are basic, then the only justification for political or-
der and community is that they must aid in achieving selffulfillment.
That formulation I've just proposed to you probably renders the whole
problem of political community odious. It probably makes it
impossible to discuss the problem meaningfully. It rests, as I've
said, on a very vague basis--the elusive self. Then it goes on to
rest all its supreme values on the self. By doing so, l think it vir-
tually forecloses most of the really serious questions that have to
be encountered in a discussion of the problem of community .
I'll close on just one point: just to suggest some of the problems
which are to be encountered in a serious discussion of community, I
want to suggest to you a few offered by Aristotle. You remember he
had a magnificent arguemnt with Plato on exactly this question. It
remains, I think, the very best discussion of the matter in the whole
of Western political thought. He took up the contest with Plato at
exactly that point where Plato had concluded after a pwerful and
beautiful argument that since unity was a good in the state the best
state was the one with the most unity and the state was a perfect
unity. It was exactly at that point that Aristotle enters the conver-
sation with the proposition that the state cannot attain, and
therefore should not aspire to attain unity. He thought this was so
because the state consists neither of one man nor of a body of
identicals. Rather it consists of a body of different kinds of men.
Therefore, he tells us, community requires different kinds of
capacity, interest and character among its members. It does so
because through the interplay of the diversities, men, are able to
serve as compliments of one another and to attain a higher and better
life by the mutual exchange of different services. That's the first
area of discussion for the problem of community.
That something more that I'm trying to deal with, I think, has two
parts. It first of all has a part going by a number of names--
fellowship, sympathy and good will tying the members of the body
together, giving them a sense of common trust and responsibility.
Aristotle tries to argue that this feeling must characterize the
social bond just as the spirit of utility and fairness must
characterize the economic bond. The fourth and final element in this
presentation of the problem of community is simply justice. It is the
capstone. It is found perfectly in the formulation that men form
communities not just to live, but to live a life of felicity and
goodness. Aristotle tries to tell us that this is what must
characterize the political bond, namely the pursuit of justice and
goodness, and that without this capstone all the rest is defective--
sociability and fellowship become mere herding together
undistinguished by any nobler purpose of gain, and the community
itself becomes litde more than a commercial enterprise.
In short, I'm trying to suggest that, if we really want to think
seriously about the theory and the problem of community, we think of
four sectors of the problem as mutual protection and material
convenience. Secondly, the area of reciprocity; thirdly, fellowship
and sociability; and fourthly, the agreement on felicity and justice.
As nearly as I have been able to read, most of the modern
formulations which start from the self will help us to talk usefully
about no one of those four.
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