Dimitris Vardoulakis

Ancient monism matters today because it reveals an alternative answer to a problem faced by ontology “after the death of god,” namely, how to distinguish between good and bad actions after the disappearance of transcendence. The modern answer in Continental philosophy was systematized by Heidegger and consists in positing that the everyday is permeated by instrumentality whereas there is a different kind of action that is noninstrumental, such as art or the thinking of being. By contrast, ancient monism holds that all actions are instrumental and employs on a typology of action that relies on the distinction between techne and phronesis. Recognizing a different answer from the dominant Heideggerian one has the potential to renew the conception of the ethical and the political in Continental philosophy.

The difficulty with democracy is always how to define the demos—the people. Can we think of democracy in a different way? My starting point is to ask what it would mean to take kratos (power) rather than demos as the starting point of the thinking of democracy. I will argue that this is consistent with Solon’s first democratic constitution and that it leads to a thinking of democracy in terms of agonism. Maybe such a conception of agonistic democracy will allow us to conceptualize as well as actualize a political space not predetermined by the “fickle multitude” that can be manipulated and is pray to the forces of populism.

Sophocles seems to have already reached in Antigone the same insight about the body politic which will again be expressed in the seventeenth century by Spinoza: namely, the political has as its condition of possibility the potential for being challenged from within. Sophocles’ play starts immediately after Thebes has successfully stoved off a challenge from an external enemy – from Argos, another city state. However, during the battle, Eteocles, the king, and his own brother, Polynices, who in fact was heading the Argeans, both died. Thus afterwards Creon is elected ruler of Thebes. Creon’s first act of government is to decree that Polynices’ body is to remain unburied. If the new king thought that the worse was past him after the end of the battle, he was sorely mistaken. A challenge to his degree from one of the citizens and his own niece, Antigone, will not only lead to the decimation of his own family, but also to the new king being stranded alone at the end of the play, in charge of a self-incurred desert. Antigone, a stubborn teenage girl, is the cause of challenging the sovereign of Thebes and hence the city’s body politic

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’.