The Ontological Nature of Politics

Abstract

The article is devoted to clarifying the understanding of the nature of politics. Having documented the lack of consensus in the scientific discourse even regarding the very concept of politics, the author proposes an approach that, from his point of view, allows to obtain the most consistent conceptualization of the political. In his study of the nature of politics, the author relies primarily on the analysis of the phenomenon of polis, because, despite serious disagreements in the scientific circles about what politics is, its origin is generally associated with polis. Based on the works of Plato and Aristotle and drawing on the works of modern historians and political philosophers, he demonstrates the inadequacy of the interpretation of polis as a city, state or society, and proposes to consider polis as a sphere of “supra-physical” and “supra-economic” activity of citizens in external and internal harmonization of public space. In the development of the transcendentalist tradition, the article shows that polis is primarily an ontological reality, a place where (in the eyes of the Greeks) the existence of being was manifested. Taking into account the connection between polis and politics in the ancient world, the author comes to the conclusion that politics as a practice of organizing life in polis is an activity for the formation and maintenance of ontological reality. Such an understanding of politics, in his opinion, is valid not only in relation to antiquity. Therefore, he defines politics as an ontological action, in which a struggle for the fate of being unfolds every time. In this respect, the nature of ancient politics differs little from the nature of medieval and modern politics. Despite all the differences between modern and pre-modern political discourse, this definition quite adequately characterizes the nature of the political per se.