Abstract
All terms that compose a basic vocabularyl draw their meaning from their capacity to function as hinges or primary articulations of discursive totalities. Their meaning is completely dependent on the degree of articulateness, or flexibility, with which they manage to endow the given discourse that hinges on them. So it is with my use of the terms “form” and “event,” which are intended, at first, to articulate what I understand to be the basic discontinuity between classical and modern political thought, as this discontinuity is staged in Machiavelli’s discourse. My claim is that classical political thought understands the relation between political forms and historical becoming in and through the privilege accorded to the former, hence the priority of form over event in the ancients. Conversely, in modern political thought, beginning with Machiavelli, political form is historicized and there emerges a priority of the event over the form.
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References
I refer to the discussion of the concept of vocabulary in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch.l.
For a general statement of this interpretation, see Carlo Diano, Forma ed Evento. Principi per una interpretazione del mondo greco ( Venice: Marsilio, 1993 ).
Diano, Forma ed Evento, 718 Diano understands the hero of the Iliad,the “poem of force” to use the expression of Simone Weil, as the hero of form: “because between form and form there can only be relationships of force: the form is an absolute that excludes mediation…. this is the force of action which has its end in itself, the force which is proper to the form.” Conversely, the hero of the Odyssey is the hero of the event; the hero of practical intelligence (metis) and mediation. “Achilles dies young, because the form, being unable to change or bend itself, breaks upon clashing with the event: Ulysses, changeable and flexible, follows the spirals of the event, and death catches up to him in old age.” (Ibid., 64). On metis and its opposition to the theoretical access to forms through phronesis and nous,see M. Detienne, 7.-P. Vernant, Les Ruses de l’Intelligence. La Métis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
That some aspects of Greek thought, both in philosophy and literature, argue that this danger is ineluctible, and that, as a consequence, the priority of form over event is ultimately “tragic,” clearly does not invalidate this priority itself. For an interpretation of the problem of chance in the Greeks along these “tragic” lines, see Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Diano, Forma ed Evento, 40. Diano gives a detailed analysis of Anaxagoras’s crucial vocabulary shift with respect to the concept of tyche in an important essay, “Edipo figlio della Tyche,” in Saggezza e poetiche degli antichi ( Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1968 ).
Diano, Saggezza e poetiche,143–148On Anaxagoras and the conception of technical progress that his desacralization of chance makes possible, see Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Presss, 1967), ch. 2.
In the following discussion of chance in Thucydides I rely on Lowell Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
See the discussion of political immortality in the Greek polis found in Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History — Ancient and Modem,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 46–48.
For the best discussion of this topic see Santo Mazzarino, La Fine del Mondo Antico (Milan: Rizzoli, 1995).
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Vatter, M.E. (2000). The Priority of Form over Event in the Ancients. In: Between form and Event. Topoi Library, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9337-3_2
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