April Flakne

The Affection In Between argued that the Aristotelian concept of sunaisthesis, or sensing in common, revived through contemporary theories of intercorporeity and affect, ought to play a larger role in current ethical and political philosophy. But the historical neglect of this concept did not leave it intact. What effect did its longstanding marginalization and relegation to the private or intimate sphere have on sunaisthetic practices, and how might this impact any revival? This article charts opportunities and hazards for a contemporary deployment of sunaisthesis by drawing on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann. First, I connect Bachmann’s “moral impulse before all morality” to sunaisthesis as a sense-making activity at the limits of language. Next, I read her literary theory as charting attempts to traverse these limits and reawaken sunaisthetic experience. Finally, a close reading of a key passage from Malina illustrates the dangers of restricting sunaisthetic affect within strictly policed borders of intimacy.

ABSTRACT Can “facts” survive the advent of modern political practices of lying? This essay revisits Arendt's “Truth and Politics” to explore this question. Arendt ties the fate of facts closely to that of common sense, which both depends upon facts and is charged with combating the lies that would assault not only individual facts but factuality itself. Arendt hewed closely to our two major philosophical traditions of common sense. While she recognized the ways in which common sense as koine aisthesis, or an individual faculty of epistemological coherence, could be co-opted by totalitarian ideology, she was less aware of how her own notion of “community sense” could be pressed into the service of an accelerating democratic/capitalist conversion of facts into opinions. Given the co-optation of these traditions of common sense by modern practices of political lying, I argue for an alternative approach, inspired by Aristotle and rooted in perception, where “sensing in common” nurtures a sense of [what can come to be held in] common.

Sunaisthesis is a generally overlooked or misconstrued concept central to Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship, and therefore to his entire ethical and politicalproject. As opposed to Stoic uses that presuppose ethical self-relation, in Aristotle’s coinage, sunaisthesis indicates the genesis of a self-relation mediated through the friend. Both the “merged selves” and the “mirrored selves” approaches to Aristotelian friendship distort this peculiar mediation. Through a close reading of relevant texts, I show that sunaisthesis provides the missing link between the De Anima’s non-reflexive perceiving self and Aristotle’s requirement of a robustly reflexive yet socially inculcated ethical self. Sunaisthesis accounts for ethical responsibility while reinforcing rather than denying our embodied and socially embedded nature.