Ontology versus Practice: Socrates as an Answer to Contingency in Hannah Arendt's Thought

AMAT, DOLORES

Londres

Congreso; 61th Political Studies Association. Transforming Politics: New Synergies; 2011

Political Studies Association

As Oliver Marchart points out in Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau,, ?today it is frequently assumed that the phenomenon of contingency has spread into more and more realms of society and that it is experienced as the absence of a necessary foundation for truth, faith or politics?. Marchart studies the way some of the most important political thinkers of our Time consider the question, and he draws various conclusions from their differences and their common elements. In particular, the author presents the birth of a new and original ontology. This innovative ontology is not based on unchanging essences, but on the acknowledgement of the necessity of contingency. In this sense, Marchart argues ?for the -paradoxical- role of post-foundational political ontology as what once was called ´first philosophy´. But this ontology of contingency presents some important problems and what we seek to show in this paper is that Hannah Arendt´s work provides a much more coherent and open perspective to face the problem of contingency. Like the figure of Socrates depicted in her work, Arendt does not try to replace the dismantled ontologies, but she proposes instead certain practices. In opposition to theoretical solutions, these practices are not supposed to defeat ignorance, their purpose is simply to help us live with it.