Posted by
Zentrist on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 2:05:11 PM
I borrow the title from a book by George Anastaplo, human being and citizen. Like many books, his is perhaps in a roundabout way nothing more and nothing less than autobiography. Thank you, George.
Plato knew it, and Aristotle too: We are both human beings and citizens. Yet, if so, there is clearly a tension there, a potential and actual conflict of interest.
The human being in Socrates was at odds with the citizen within him, even though, we learn, he fought bravely for his city when it was at war. He had been a soldier before he became famous as Socrates, or so it would seem. Perhaps he did not like being a soldier--and that experience had something to do with his becoming Socrates. Solzhenitsyn in our time was a soldier who not only fought but thought as well, just like Socrates. To read "August, 1914" is to read the story of a man who has mixed feelings about military life or rather--the military establishment. But it is like any other job in many respects, this military way of life. Leaving aside the extreme cases of bloodshed on a large scale, the life is full of regular people doing a job. When the time comes, however, decisions of import by individuals have to be made. Their characters have pretty much been set. Then, at the crucial juncture, they act. He makes a decision, and carries it out--say, this general or lieutenant. Solzhenitsyn puts these men and women under a microscope, so to speak. He gets a closer look at the good, the bad and the ugly. First of all, one sees that there is a good versus a bad. A noble over against a cowardly. A right in the face of a wrong. The lieutenant whose name I'll abbreviate with the letter V, becomes one of the normative characters in S's epic. When another, apparently younger officer encounters this V in the described Russian retreat (from the Germans), we find yet another "normative" character, a young human being/soldier/officer--an intellectual. But V, too, is an intellectual. Not all intellectuals are the same. Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn were certainly not the same and they did not stand for the same ideas; rather they stood and stand for very different ideas. They also stand for the same idea, or the same reality, rather, namely, Russia, Holy Mother Russia. In this sense, both "intellectuals" were and are citizens and human beings.
In Plato's "Apology," the human being makes a stand against the city while defending the city--very ironic.
As practicing Christians we make our stands every day against some aspect or other of the City of Man. For example, I might speak out in some way, maybe on a blog like this, against the reality that I have to pay taxes for policies I consider immoral, unjust. I may object to federal spending on certain placements of our troops. Which I do.
I do object to the fact that our troops are stationed all over the place. Some of these "places" are offended, the people are offended, by the presence of our troops. It would be helpful, I think, in my perhaps naive way, if we could just remove our military from sites perceived to be sacred to others. The human being in me thinks this way. But also the citizen.
(For Christmas I received a nice new copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Julie or La Nouvelle Heloise." Thank you, dear. I'm looking forward to seeing for myself just how this great thinker-artist thought about an aspect of the question, The Human Being and the Citizen.)