Time goes by, but classics stay. And it’s probably from the never-aging power of ancient knowledge that we derive our current state of the world.
The very fact of acting as social beings – prone to gathering and sharing thoughts within the safe space of a collectivity – reminds us of how we indirectly allocate an incredible importance and value to ancient philosophers and thinkers, whose precious insights on life have happened to shape the behavioral patterns of all human beings living in a free society.
The existence of societies tends to be associated with the representation of thriving individuals, whose happiness arises from them benefitting from the advantages of being part of the same community, as well as from nurturing their souls by talking to all different sorts of people. These all-comprehensive feelings of thriving and serenity which pervade societies, or at least the ideal models we have of them, reflect Aristotle’s understanding of human beings as political animals and social creatures, whose scope in this world is that of interacting with their fellows and enriching themselves solely through the act of speaking, sharing and learning from the experiences of others.
The modern conception of “collectivity” might find its very roots in the philosophical questions posed by Aristotle and his disciples and might be looked at as the final destination of a spiritual journey, whose beauty lies in the simplicity and yet magnificence of the thoughts elaborated by the glorious philosophers of the past. The mere realisation of how advanced and forward-looking these thoughts are, especially if considering the undeveloped and intellectually prehistorical context in which they were born, makes me wonder about the extent to which the human mind is able to produce brilliant ideas, independently of the environment in which the latter are conceived.
Plato’s mystification and deprecation of the role played by masses within a society translates into modern populism, similar to how Manzoni’s deprecation of crowds, seen as easily influenced by the invisible hand of deceiving political leaders, is the foundation of the current debate about political expertise and accountability.
Evolution brings about progress, but progress itself would never be possible in the absence of a flourishing history of knowledge, that can be retrieved in order to understand the world we live in and, possibly, try to make it better.
The way we picture ourselves in a society and the role we play in it are to be considered the result of a deeper understanding of our own identity, which is fabricated by our minds but also indirectly affected by the idea of a society not too dissimilar from the ones envisioned by the Aristotelian and Platonic theories in the first place. When we act wisely within a community, and lean towards the decision-making process, we are enacting, perhaps unconsciously, the principles that have guided the most insightful theories of the past, addressing the way society is structured, how citizens behave in it and the way the community as a whole evolves as a result of the selection of political leaders.
The mere act of labelling any human being as a πολιτικὸν ζῷον, namely a political animal, is quite powerful in itself, considering the latter expression is able to convey a powerful message about mankind, which should be naturally comprising individuals prone to gathering and engaging in reciprocal interactions, aimed at achieving the ethereal objectives of peace and prosperity within a community.
Politics and society are terms forged by humans who find their existence as indissolubly connected to the one of those of their kind, and whose vital lymph lies in the chance of learning about other people’s perspectives, facing inevitable collisions with opposing interests and eventually benefitting from the enrichment developed through healthy confrontations inter pares.
The irreplaceable advantage attached to the fact of existing as humans is that of being capable of formulating thoughts that corroborate the solid structure of our brains, along with the intrinsic and computationally outstanding ability to absorb and process an amount of information and stimuli destined to be translated into personal conceptions, formally explicated through verbalisation.
Humans carry the weight of a privilege, that of being able to think, which is biologically taken for granted but that philosophically entails the responsibility of pondering about how we see ourselves in a society and about the way we plan on providing some value to the people living in it, by elaborating reflections and being willing to express them to a collectivity that is, indeed, a political community.
Thus, human beings are political animals, in the sense that they assume on themselves the duty of acting in a manner that fosters the well-being of the societal structure they happen to belong to, while concurrently living in the acknowledgment of the responsibility associated with the incredible privilege of being able to reason, speak and potentially take the lead within the political sphere of a certain society.
The word “classics” encompasses a multifaceted ensemble of critical reasonings about the nature of mankind along with the role ideally played by individuals within a society, which happen to be laying the philosophical foundations of modern thinking and that represent the pillars of the societal dynamics among human beings. The classical world may be thought of as a parallel reality, whose traces disappear in the memories of an under-cherished past and that could be personified by a distant relative one might not have seen for a lifetime, to the extent that they end up resembling a mythological creature whose existence still needs to be proven. Nevertheless, that relative of yours exists and their silent presence, although often neglected, is an integral part of your ancestral origins. In the same way, classics hide behind the shadow of an ancient tradition that is inevitably interlinked with the present days and that shapes, perhaps indirectly, the ideological background and behavioural patterns of individuals within contemporary societies.
