Tilo Schabert

Storytelling is the form of the collective life we call politics. Politics is about performing actions and subsequently sharing stories about those actions. To answer the question posed as the title of this volume, history emerges when human beings perform actions together, and then reflect together upon those actions, frequently as Homer says they feast “at rows of tables throughout the banquet hall.” History emerges from the “eranos” or “love feast” people share. This essay examines the experiential core of this transition from action to thought, and back to action again, by considering Homer’s presentation of Odysseus’ visit to the land of the Phaeacians and his conversation with King Alcinous. The essay then considers a 20th-century instantiation of storytelling as history in the form of the statesman, Winston Churchill.

In 1517 a new “history” began to emerge on the eastern coast of Mesoamerica. The first Spanish military expedition made landfall in the Yucatan peninsula and encountered the social and religious periphery of the Aztec empire. In the next five years Spanish assaults on native Mexican city states resulted in the formation of a new racial, religious and political order known as Nueva España. The civilizational clash between the world of the Aztecs and the Spaniards led to new conceptions of human history, human racial types, and how religious faith and rituals should be lived and performed. We trace here the interactions of Spanish conquistadors, priests, and historians with Aztec women, scribes, and nobles to show how a new world of racial types, religious symbols, and historical understanding emerged.

Zoroastrianism offers a remarkable presentation of the origin of humankind, its present condition, and its final destiny. Human history is considered to be the result of a cosmological strategy enacted by god himself, Ohrmazd, in order to compel his direct and primordial antagonist, the evil Ahreman, to engage battle in our world. Eventually, the forces of darkness will be completely destroyed at the conclusion of a chiliadic temporal cycle. The most important battle in order to defeat Ahreman is fought by humankind. The importance of history in this teleology accounts for the emphasis put by it on the political dimension. We evoke the Sasanian period, in which the Persian kings assumed the status of a kosmokrátor, i.e. of a universal king, charged with achieving victory over evil. We offer in this article an overview of the intellectual contribution of the Pre-Islamic Iranian world to the idea of history.

My argument is: Plato and Aristotle have a pacifist vein. Nevertheless, their best cities are both war-like communities and both defend slavery and wars against barbarians in order to acquire slaves. These apparent contradictions are examined. Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on war and peace are considered to be similar. The human soul and its appetites drive history and cause war. Accordingly, a well-ordered soul and city are the premise of curbing man’s political urge to conquer and to go to war. This insight plays a crucial role in Plato’s and Aristotle’s psychology and their constitutional thought.

When we ask why, when, and wherefrom history emerged according to Buddhism we must start with discussing the two basic principles of Buddhism: (1) The world of phenomena exists only by conditions, and (2) all conditioned things are impermanent. Buddhism therefore reflects the absolute infinite openness within which “history” moves. And it aims, in the form of a philosophy of absolute nothingness, at a superhistorical history beyond the common chronological history. On the level of human experiences Buddhism tends towards an emptiness felt by a formless Self.

Powers of chaos accompany any order of the human world, being the force against which this order is set. Human experience of history is two-fold. There is history ruled by chaos and history ruled by order. "History" occurs in a continuous flow of both histories. The dialectics of life unto nothingness/creation, struggles for order/order achieved is unceasingly actual. In exploring it, within a wide interdisciplinary and transcultural range, this book reaches beyond a conventional "philosophy of history". It deals with the chaotic as well as the cosmic part of the human historical experience. It stages this drama through the tales that religious, mythical, literary, philosophical, folkloristic, and historiographical sources tell and which are retold and interpreted here. From early on humans wished to know where, why, and wherefore all started and took place. Couldn’t the dialectics between chaos and order be meaningful? Couldn’t they assume a productive role as to the world’s precarious event? Power, strife, guilt, divine grace and revelation, literary symbolization, as well as storytelling are discussed in this book. Philosophy, political theory, theology, religious studies, and literary studies will greatly benefit from its width and density.

Thinking is a festival and thus human beings experience, through cogitation, the sociable structure of their thinking. As they think, speak and listen they listen and speak and they are in the company of others. It was Plato, the sociable one, who thus spoke and was listened to: “And thinking, is it the same thing to you as to me?” This is the question that Plato puts in Socrates's mouth, when faced with Theaetetus in a dialogue named after him. Theaetetus in turn asks a question: “How do you describe it?” And Socrates replies: “As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. …, but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.”

A fictional panel of experts is set up for receiving responses to the question posed by this book. They expressed their views at different times and different places. And, yet, they appear to be much in agreement with each other. In the human soul reason wages war against passions, one passion with another passion, and from these conflicts of human beings with themselves history emerges. Humans have a cosmogonic vocation. Empirically, history resembles a “hell of ills,” as Kant observed. However, with and against this hell humans create their world, this world that takes place through the history of its creation. And to whom a politics of judiciousness is the most adequate response.

Two words describe a "modern" world: limits and limitless. Traditionally, humans recognized limits of their power. Modernity meant a break. Its protagonists aspired to bring worlds of their imagination into reality. They taught a new anthropology. Humans could ascend to a God-like status. Schabert analyzes the history of the project and its result: a civilization in a perennial crisis. Symptoms of the crisis have been exposed, today mostly in ecological terms. Schabert takes his material from many fields: philosophy, cosmology, natural sciences, literature, social studies, economics, architecture, and political thought. While modernity is endlessly disrupted, a world beyond modernity can be traced, especially in the modern theory of constitutional government. Constitutional governments are formed by limitations within a civilization that is meant to have no limits. What appears to be paradoxical has its own logic, as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Montesquieu, John Adams, the Federalist Papers, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and Woodrow Wilson have shown. Schabert carefully explicates their constitutional thought. It realized the limits through which modernity holds a promise.

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe—including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China—The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones—and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us—to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

Let us imagine that we decided to visit cities at different places in the world. During our journey we would probably consult often one or more of these books known as “travel guides,” which, in our case, describe one or more cities for the benefit of the traveler who knows nothing about them or has only a slight idea of what they are like.Presumably we would be told not infrequently that in the cities being described something is “reflected” - that the city architecture of Paris reflects the immortality - obsessed self-glorification of French kings, emperors, or national presidents; that the baroque layout of Rome reflects the triumphant Catholicism of the counter- Reformation ; that the skyscrapers of Manhattan reflect the unbridled creativity of American civilization.

Does modernity still have a future? The news from the modern world suggests a negative answer. It is true, the project of modernity, in the fourth century after its inception, has still not been brought to its completion. Modern man has not yet succeeded in establishing himself as maître et possesseur de la nature. Nevertheless, he has elevated himself above his earthly existence by mastering the laws of space travel; the man in the moon, formerly a mythological figure, has now an American name. Modern man has not yet reached Utopia where the necessity of labor and the ease of leisure would be reconciled; in many regards, he is still bound to toil for his subsistence. But he has invented artificial intelligence and thus has found a humanoid substitute for an endless number of cumbersome tasks; work is transformed into computer games. Modern man has not yet become the Lord of his life, he continues to miss a complete control over infirmities, afflictions, and, finally, death. But he has fathomed the biochemical basis of life and acquired the skills to manipulate the forms of being; the breath of life is recorded as genetic code.