Intuition and unanimity

from the platonic bias to the phenomenology of the political

Fabio Ciaramelli

pp. 15-28

in: Véronique Fóti, Pavlos Kontos (eds), Phenomenology and the primacy of the political, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

My homage to Jacques Taminiaux aims to show the fecundity of his investigations on the theoretical privilege of intuition, by pointing out the political implications of the "seduction of unanimity". The latter implies a deep depreciating of multiplicity of opinions, and consequently a virtual destruction of political space. The internal link between immediacy and unanimity implies the short-circuit between inter-locution and inter-action in favor of the purported objectivity and universality of theoria, retained capable of seizing, in its solitary gaze, the truth of Being. I would like to suggest that the drift to unanimous solutions in social field and political questions finds its unconcealed reason in the ontological paradigm of an ideal truth directly delivered to the solitude of a philosophical gaze. I will defend such a view by developing a critical reading of a classical text in political philosophy: the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie.

Cited authors

Taminiaux Jacques