Antics i moderns; noble i baix

Dimarts parlava de la meva relectura de Rosen i a l’article que esmentava he trobat un paràgraf prou il·luminador i contundent com per què valgui la pena incloure’l aquí. El tema és, un altre cop, la diferència entre antics i moderns

                There are of course crucial differences. One such difference, especially important for us,  is that the founders of modernity de-politizice desire and thereby reduce the difference between Thymos (spiritedness) and epithumia (desire) to the homogeneous notion of the “passions of the soul” as Descartes expresses it. For Socrates and his student (including Leo Strauss) the question of the proper satisfaction of human desire is necessarily a political question for the simple reason that we depend  upon each other for that satisfaction. But it is also a question that takes us outside, or rather, above, the city to natural differences in the nobility and baseness of desires. By rendering this dependence physiological, Descartes shifts the emphasis from the community to the isolated ego, from politics to psychology. Nobility and baseness do not quite disappear, but they are redefined as “generosité” or autonomous greatness of soul, that is, egotism. The subsequent shift back  to the predominance of society and history, begun in the eighteenth and completed in the nineteenth centuries, while in one sense a re-politizicing of desire, retains its physiological foundations; that is, retains the modern scientific conception of nature, which is incapable of sustaining the natural distinction between the noble and the base

                The elusiveness of the ordinary, p. 142