The Second Birth

On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence

Tilo Schabert, Javier Ibáñez-Noé

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780226038056
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226185156
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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. 

Index

action, 32–35; Aristotle on, 33, 34, 35, 143n6; beginnings and, 33–34, 36, 40; meaningless, worthless, 38; Plato on beauty and, 89; political, 35. See also motion

actuality: of human being among many human beings, 63; number and, 12, 13; paradigm as form of, 71; the start and, 6–7, 137n15, 137n17; of world created by human care, 58

Adams, John, 61, 62, 157n10

Alberti, Leon Battista, 150n1

Al-Fārābī, 140n14

allegory of androgynes, 84–85, 93

allegory of marionettes, 88, 90

allegory of wax, 86–87, 90

Amun-Re, 72, 75

Anaxagoras, 72–73

Anaximander, 136n10

androgynes, 84–85, 93

angels, 17–18, 24, 140n6

Anonymous Iamblichi, 22, 106–7, 108, 109, 110

anthropogonic freedom, 50

anthropogonic logic, 29

anthropogony, political, 2, 19, 51

anthropophanous event, 23, 24

Aquinas, Thomas, 24, 140n7

architecture of human beings’ existence, 54–55

architecture of the world, 54, 55

Arendt, Hannah, 62, 133n3

Aristotle: on action, 33, 34, 35, 143n6; beginning of political communities and, 2, 133n3; classical political theory and, 63; on community of free people, 122; on constitutions of individual human beings, 116, 145n20; on human nature, 133n3; on the law, 107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 156n7; on philomythos, 149n10; on the polis, 42, 133n3, 145n22; on politike koinonia, 158n2; on proper work of the soul, 40; role of political science and, 140n15; separation of powers and, 150n14; on unjust or unrestrained person, 144n4, 144n7

Augustine, 13–14, 50–52, 62, 139n15, 139n23, 139n28

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• At the Start
• In Number
• In Body
• In Action
• In Consciousness
• In Grace
• In the Divine
• In Thought
• In Creation
• In Eros
• In Time
• In Law
• In Freedom
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index