Prelude to Politics (2) -- Politics - Anthropological Foundations -- The German Collection

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Continued from here.

My below definition of politics underscores the ubiquity of the phenomenon as a feature that cannot be separated from human existence, no matter how far, in testing the hypothesis, one cares to go back in the history of our species.

A Preliminary Definition of Politics

By politics I mean a kind of human behaviour that is typified by the specific nature of its objective. 

The intention of political action is 

• to exert influence on 

• any forces and mechanisms capable of 

• prohibiting or authorising / ratifying and enforcing forms of socially monitored conduct. 

Put differently:

Politics is the exertion of influence with the purpose of

• establishing in a human community the validity of 

• certain  rules and options for action, notably 

• ensuring the admissibility, toleration or enforcement of 

• certain customs, habits, convictions and interests, including going and new rights.

Human beings are social creatures that cannot live and survive without some interaction with other members of their species.

This is true even for the most radical hermit, who could not

• come into the world in the absence of prior interaction of other people, 

• survive at least until childhood without nurture by other human beings, and

• succeed for long in his hermitage without social contact enabling him to apply innumerous skills developed by his fellow-creatures.

The Anthropological Foundation of Politics

The exertion of influence by human beings on one another is a fundamental condition of man's existence.

The Needs-Inventing Animal, Human Language and the Infinity of Human Learning

Human beings are a special part of nature - not something alien to or outside of nature. What makes human animals special is their ability to survive by a unique form of adaptation: in order to survive, human beings change the environment in which they live. They do this by imagining and inventing or discovering new desires, which they then seek to practically attain. In all other animals, the ability to imagine new desires and to manufacture the satisfaction of newly derived needs is far less developed than in humans. Unlike human beings, whose ability to learn is unlimited, all other animals are narrowly constrained in (a) their propensity to expand their understanding of the world around them and (b) their capabilities to continuously and systematically acquire new knowledge.

This difference is related to the unique features of human language. Certain functions, absent from other animal languages, endow the users of the human language with exceptional learning capabilities. In particular, humans are able to describe inner states, personal experiences and visions intelligibly to fellow humans, thus turning individual perspectives into objects of common experience. In this way, important new dimensions are being opened up that are unavailable to other animals, most notably, experience augmentation by adding to a person's experience the experiences of others and vice versa, thus (a) building unlimited networks of common experiences, (b) partaking in a common learning experience by doubting, questioning, and criticising the common objects of experience. Humans are able to develop new mental techniques that are instrumental in improving the logical veracity and practical usefulness of these common experiences. Continuously, with no end and no limit to it, humans are able to teach themselves and other humans to learn completely new aspects of the world - for instance, how to improve their learning ability.  Indeed, the social nature of processing cognitive input is the key to human intelligence and the broadening and continuous improvement of mankind's stock of knowledge.

Human language vastly increases and alters in quality the human drive to (a) react to, and (b) act to influence other humans.

Epistemologically speaking,

• human objectivity - in the above sense of being able to make subjective cognitive states of one person the object of experience by other human beings -, 

is by itself already an act of exerting influence on others, confronting them with aspects of the world hitherto unknown to them.

This ability of communicating a mutually experienceable world is perforce hugely invasive, as it is liable to make us question, undermine and shatter, perhaps even destroy, the views on which our conception of the world is based. Or it may give rise to new motives of significantly consequential action, including, of course, benign and cooperative forms of interaction.

Language in its specifically human variant and the peculiar form of objectivity that it gives rise to set us apart from all other animals, making us humans, i.e. needs-inventing animals that adapt to their environment by constantly discovering and trying to fulfil new needs.

Discovery of new needs and trials of fulfilling these mind-conceived desires necessarily involve prospects of (a) conflict, on one hand, and (b) cooperation, tolerable or improved coexistence, on the other. People are constantly engaged in figuring out whether they are in a conflict-type of situation or one that allows for cooperation, tolerable or improved coexistence. This holds for other animals as well. But the supply of choices is immeasurably more ample and complex in the case of human animals. For instance, we can figure out what other humans are trying to figure out given their ability to know that we might be figuring out what they may be figuring out.

...

In statu nascendi. Unfinished post.

Continued here.