Producing the High Achiever: Hobbes and Power

Abstract

It does sound strange to say that the most powerful understanding of human power is that we are ‘master neither of time nor the future’ (Gadamer, 1975: 320). According to Gadamer, this is an insight into power which brought forth tragedy as an art form, the art form which makes the experience (of finiteness) of the most powerful both available to and exemplary for all humanity. This insight acknowledges or recognizes the essential finiteness of human power and knowledge, but (by virtue of the Socratic tradition) sees the need for a sense of potency developed through the interrelation between the human capacity for self-understanding (in relation to limits) and the life of moral action (‘seeing particular situations in their true light in line with a general grasp of what it is to be a complete human being, and to live a proper human life’). This understanding therefore combines the recognition of essential limits with an ambitious sense of developing the capacity of seeing/understanding a collective and collecting good. It is an understanding which, in the terms of Plato’s Republic, sees power and the love of wisdom as realizing themselves in relation to each other.