The social and the intimate
3 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the seventh in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
In the past couple of articles we’ve been discussing some of the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers and their infelicitous rendering of Greek terms like politeia into Latin ones like res publica. In this article I will continue in the same vein by discussing yet another example of how Latin mistranslations obscure our understanding of Aristotle.
My focus in this article is on the term social. As with the term public, which we looked at in the previous article, there is no Greek cognate for the Latin socialis. So when Seneca rendered Aristotle’s zoon politikon in Latin as animal socialis — thereby setting a precedent that would persist into the late middle ages — he did more than any other Roman writer to obscure the fine picture that Aristotle painted of politics with a cheap Latin veneer. Even in the twentieth century, the Catholic Church maintained this misreading by summarising, in the Index Rerum, Aquinas’ interpretation of Aristotle’s claim that “man is a political animal” as homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis (“man is by nature political, which is to say, social”). Aquinas himself does not use the word politicus, which did not exist in Classical Latin, and seems only to have been invented in scholarly Latin in the fifteenth century — but, as Arendt argues, the Index summarises Thomas’ meaning correctly, (as can be seen by glancing at Summa theologica i. 96. 4; ii. 2. 109. 3).
A decisive historical shift is conveyed by that apparently innocuous phrase: politicus, id est, socialis — “political, which is to say, social.” It eloquently conveys the unconscious substitution of the social for the political which Hannah Arendt identifies as perhaps the preeminent predicament of modernity. The phrase also betrays the extent to which the original Greek understanding of politics had long been lost by the time the Index was composed.
It is not just that the word social is derived from Latin rather than Greek; Arendt argues that the term “has no equivalent in Greek language or thought” (Human Condition, p.23; emphasis added). Its origins lie in the specifically Roman concept of societas as “an alliance between people for a specific purpose,” such as “when men organise in order to rule others or to commit a crime” (ibid.) — or to form a joint stock company. If we are going to be scrupulously precise, we might reject the often-repeated modern claim that the Roman societas publicanorum had precisely the corporate personality of a modern joint-stock company with tradable shares, but the general point is nonetheless clear: the Roman economy was remarkably modern, and resembled the economy of contemporary capitalist societies far more than it resembled that of Classical Athens. Arendt elaborates this point in some detail (Human Condition, p.24):
It is not that Plato or Aristotle was ignorant of, or unconcerned with, the fact that man cannot live outside the company of men, but they did not count this condition among the specifically human characteristics; on the contrary, it was something human life had in common with animal life, and for this reason alone it could not be fundamentally human. The natural, merely social companionship of the human species was considered to be a limitation imposed upon us by the needs of biological life, which are the same for the human animal as for other forms of animal life. According to Greek thought, the human capacity for political organisation is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose centre is the home (oikia) and the family. The rise of the city-state meant that man received “besides his private life a sort of second life, his bios politikos. Now every citizen belongs to two orders of existence; and there is a sharp distinction in his life between what is his own (idion) and what is communal (koinon).” It was not just an opinion or theory of Aristotle but a simple historical fact that the foundation of the polis was preceded by the destruction of all organised units resting on kinship, such as the phratria and the phyle.
Roman thought differed dramatically from Greek thought in this matter by emphasising economic rather than political motives as the basis for human gregariousness. For Roman thinkers, it is the societas rather than the polis that provides the model of group-formation in human beings. And, as Arendt points out, “it is only with the later concept of a societas generis humani, a ‘society of man-kind,’ that the term ‘social’ begins to acquire the general meaning of a fundamental human condition” (ibid.). [Note that Arendt uses the hyphenated man-kind to designate the human species and the unhyphenated mankind to refer to the sum total of human beings.]
Arendt reserves the term society for the distinctively modern phenomenon — dating to no earlier than the late eighteenth century — in which “housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organisational devices” fully emerge “from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere” (Human Condition, p.38). This, she argues, “has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen” (ibid.). In the modern world, it is in the privacy of one’s own home that one finds freedom from work and seeks happiness in the intimacy of family life, while for the Greeks a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, was idiotic by definition. The earliest origins of this notion of a private sphere of intimacy may perhaps be traced as far back as late Roman antiquity, and certainly no earlier, and most definitely not to Classical Greece. It is only in the modern age, however, that the “peculiar manifoldness and variety” (as Arendt puts it, ibid.) of this notion finally emerges.
If — unlike the Greeks, who saw the household as a realm where people were deprived of the necessary conditions for realising their full humanity — we moderns no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word privacy, this is, Arendt claims, “due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism” (ibid.). But modern privacy is not just opposed to the public sphere of politics; even more importantly, it is also sharply opposed to the social realm — which was unknown to the ancients. “The decisive historical fact,” Arendt maintains, “is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related (ibid., emphasis added).
This is an opportune moment to recall my attempt to map the four key terms of my story so far — the public, the private, the social, and the intimate — onto Lacan’s schema L (see fig. 1).
According to Arendt, “the modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life,” was born in “a rebellion of the heart” — not against the oppression of the state but “against society’s unbearable perversion of the human heart, its intrusion upon an innermost region in man which until then had needed no special protection” (Human Condition, p.39). The imaginary quality of the binary opposition intimate/social is due to the fact that “the intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be localised with the same certainty as the public space” (ibid.).
It was through their “rebellious reaction against society” that the Romantics “discovered intimacy,” which “was directed first of all against the levelling demands of the social, against what we would call today the conformism inherent in every society” (ibid., emphasis added). Arendt was certainly not the first person to point out that “society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behaviour, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalise’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement” (ibid.), but she was perhaps the first to perceive how the increasing social pressure to conform that we observe in modern times fits into a much broader and deeper historical logic.
This logic has to do with the emergence of mass society, in which “the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength” (Human Condition, p.41). In words that anticipate Foucault, Arendt argues not only that “society equalises under all circumstances,” but also that “the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction and difference have become private matters of the individual” (ibid., emphasis added). She further adds:
This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in society and possible only because behaviour has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek city-states. To belong to the few “equals’’ (homoioi) meant to be permitted to live among one’s peers; but the public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all (aien aristeuein). The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were. It was for the sake of this chance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all, that each was more or less willing to share in the burden of jurisdiction, defence, and administration of public affairs. [ibid., emphasis added]
In terms that are strikingly reminiscent of Lacan’s visceral dislike of behaviourism and “behavioural science,” Arendt sees the all-encompassing dominance of the social in today’s world most clearly in the rise of the “behavioural sciences” (Human Condition, p.45):
To gauge the extent of society’s victory in the modern age, its early substitution of behaviour for action and its eventual substitution of bureaucracy, the rule of nobody, for personal rulership, it may be well to recall that its initial science of economics, which substitutes patterns of behaviour only in this rather limited field of human activity, was finally followed by the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as “behavioural sciences,” aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal. If economics is the science of society in its early stages, when it could impose its rules of behaviour only on sections of the population and on parts of their activities, the rise of the “behavioural sciences” indicates clearly the final stage of this development, when mass society has devoured all strata of the nation and “social behaviour” has become the standard for all regions of life.
The rise of society — of the social — involves the relentless intrusion of household and housekeeping activities (economics) into the public realm. “Home economics” ends up devouring, not just the ancient realms of the political and the private, but also the more recently established sphere of the intimate.
In another perceptive observation that again anticipates Foucault — though this time it is specifically his concept of biopolitics rather than the coercive nature of the modern state in general that she foreshadows — Arendt argues that the growth of society, “whose no less constant acceleration we can observe over at least three centuries,” derives its strength from the fact that “through society it is the life process itself which in one form or another has been channelled into the public realm” (ibid, emphasis added).
In Ancient Greece, “the private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed” (ibid.). But now the domain of biological necessity has spilled out of the oikos and colonised the agora, with the result that the distinction between public and private has collapsed, rendering both terms obsolete. This “unnatural growth of the natural” (p.47) has now reached such an extent that “mass society, where man as a social animal rules supreme and where apparently the survival of the species could be guaranteed on a world-wide scale, can at the same time threaten humanity with extinction” (Human Condition, p.46).
Even if the biological species of Homo sapiens continues to exist for millenia to come, our humanity is already on the verge of extinction due to the almost complete victory of biopower. Zoe (ζωή) has almost completely destroyed bios (βίος) — or at least that specifically verbal (logike) kind of bios that we call human life. And the most visible sign of this destruction consists in the way that the modern world reduces human beings to mere cogs in the capitalist machine, mere workers — labourers, jobholders, employees — so that instead of asking someone, when we first meet them (as Socrates tells Chaerephon to do on meeting Gorgias — see Gorgias 447d), “what he is” (ὅστις ἐστίν, óstis estín), we now ask merely what they do — that is, what they “do for a living,” or what their job is. Or, as Arendt puts it:
Perhaps the clearest indication that society constitutes the public organisation of the life process itself may be found in the fact that in a relatively short time the new social realm transformed all modern communities into societies of labourers and jobholders; in other words, they became at once centred around the one activity necessary to sustain life. (To have a society of labourers, it is of course not necessary that every member actually be a labourer or worker―not even the emancipation of the working class and the enormous potential power which majority rule accords to it are decisive here — but only that all members consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families.) Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public. (Human Condition, p.46)
This is the nightmarish world in which we now live, and from which psychoanalysis is called upon — not to deliver us, for that would be too much of a tall order — but at least to provide some relief. Psychoanalysis does this by carving out a new space for human freedom from the empire of necessity — a space for the symbolic in the desert of the real — and thereby transforming our neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.
