On the Ancient Uses of Political Fear and Its Modern Implications

Presented to the Muslim Student Organization and the Hispanic-American Student Association at the University of Detroit Mercy, November 16, 2010

2021

The last months disclose not only the fatal consequences of a global pandemic 1 but also the tight link between collective fear and social behavior, as well as power structures and political decision making. 2 The recent global events vividly illustrate how differently individuals and social groups perceive such threats and how differently they respond to it depending on cultural conditions and political climates in states, societies, and individual sub-cultural groups. Fear was and is omnipresent-everywhere and always. Thinking of plagues like the Black Death and the Spanish Flu, of periods of war like the Thirty Years' war and the First and Second World War, or local events with a more or less global impact, like terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes (droughts, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions, etc.) collective states of fear have been known and dealt with throughout history. They have made an irreversible impact on collective memories and they illustrate how fear can be used and misused. Effects and coping are dependent on the collective state of mind of a certain social group as well as contingent on the emotional climate prevailing and the emotional regime established. In the wake of these recent events, it seems somewhat timely to take a look at the phenomenon of collective fear in ancient cultures and how this fear was dealt with on both a non-recurring and daily basis. 1 This refers to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic status has been declared by the WHO on the March 11 th , 2020. https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-generoal-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19-11-march-2020. Last time assessed 06.08.2020. 2 First studies analyzing the effect of fear of an infection with Covid-19 virus have already been issued in the fields of psychology and medicine in general. See, e. g., D.

Philosophica 4 , Ed. Ca' Foscari, 2019

In the discussion on bravery in Eth. Eud., III, 1 Aristotle determines the objects that are absolutely dreadful by means of an explicit reference to 'human nature'. This reference has not received much consideration from scholars in the field. The present paper argues that the reference under discussion entails a notion of 'human nature' that corresponds to a human being's psychological disposition to endure fearful emotions-that is to say, painful emotions that imply the representation of a pain capable of destroying a human being-up to a certain degree of intensity. Furthermore, this article claims that the same notion of 'human nature' is implied in Eth. Eud., II, 8 in the discussion of involun-tariness concerning the cases of mixed actions where Aristotle refers to the 'nature' of the agent as a criterion to determine the involuntariness of an action.

The Triumviral Period: Civil War, Political Crisis and Socioeconomic Transformations, éd. par Fr. Pina Polo, Séville, p. 229-248, 2020

2014

Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian war was the arena for a dramatic battle between politics and religion in the hearts and minds of the people. Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens, originally published in German but now available for the first time in an expanded and revised English edition, sheds new light on this dramatic period of history and offers a new approach to the study of Greek religion. The book explores an extraordinary range of events and topics: impiety charges and prosecutions; the horrors of the plague; the mutilation of hermai and the profanation of the mysteries; the controversy created by the adoption of new gods; the impressive architectural structures of the sculptor Phidias; the military conflicts of the Peloponnesian war; and the thoughts of the mysterious philosopher Socrates. Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens will be an indispensible study for students and scholars studying Athenian religion and politics.

2009

2017

While scholars in the field of ancient Near Eastern Studies without doubt focus on the physical evidence of past human cultures, some core issues of personhood have rarely come to their attention. Investigating human cultures in the past or present, however, inevitably raises the subject of emotions, especially the issues surrounding fear, including its stimulation, appraisal, coping/management and prevention. Moreover, the investigation of humans as social creatures leads to the question of collective fear. Collective fear – or more precisely the preventive behavior associated with collective fear – is a strong driving force in social, religious and political behavior. While collective fear may be a universal human characteristic, its stimuli, management, and prevention take different shapes throughout time and space. This paper resorts to both texts, as the most obvious and ostensibly most direct sources, and to the archaeological record that has not yet played a substantial rule in the reconstruction of emotions. In this respect, this paper provides a methodological perspective on the whole matter of collective fear in the ancient Near East. Thus, it explores the potential of textual and material sources, the approaches that can be taken, and the insights we can gain with respect to the social and political structures of past societies, especially those of the ancient Near East, where collective fear clearly played an important role that extends deeply into the domains of power, politics and religion.

Fear is one of the strongest motivations and incentives for human actions. A basic or primary emotion, fear does not only govern reactions to immanent stimuli, but it also influences reactions and decisions that concern situations that are yet to happen. The human capacity to anticipate future events and to act prophylactically on them are considerably fostered by fear: Fear of what could potentially happen. Collective fear is especially entangled with its sociocultural and historical embedding. It feeds to a large extent (also not exclusively) on shared social self-images, mutual ideologies and common values. Religious and political world views as well as current discourses and established power structures determine how fear is appraised and how strategies are developed to face it. In past and present times, people cope with collective fear and anxiety on very different levels. In our days, state-run risk and hazard analyses, counter terrorist measures, and disaster control can be mentioned. Likewise, we observe engagements with dystopia in movies, literature, and the fine arts. How fear and anxiety based on (alleged) knowledge of events of the past and their possible reoccurrence have been expressed, mastered, managed, exploited, or tabooed, is a desideratum for research in the study of the Ancient Near East. In this vein, this workshop proposes to tackle these issues through the different and complementary perspectives of the text and material based sciences. It hopes to bring into focus such phenomena as coping with fear (e.g. laments and myth), preventing damaging incidents and situations (e.g. rituals, the construction of defense and protection architecture, building up stocks), and dispelling the instrumentation of fear and anxiety (e.g. threat of divine punishment and of losing divine favor). By taking the different perspective of material and text studies and by looking at various socio-cultural circumstances, we hope to gain insight into the omnipresent relationship of humankind and collective fear that has been politically and ideologically (mis-)used until present times

In the present paper, I argue that the Stoic view of the world, based on reason (λόγος) and providence (πρόνοια) – which complement each other – had a massive influence on Epictetus' conception of fear. Thus, fear is generally treated in his works as one of the most common manifestations of errors in logic. Fear without an explicitly named agent, fear of the decay of the body or diseases, of the tyrant or the loss of property and means, as well as fear with respect to family, or friends, and especially regarding one's own death can be reduced to the lack of adequate knowledge that ultimately leads to errors of judgment.

In Laws 646e4, right after the puppet allegory, the Athenian introduces a distinction between ‘two virtually opposite kinds of fear’ (δύο φόβων εἴδη σχεδὸν ἐναντία). The first is described very generally as the expectation of evils, whereas the second refers, more specifically, to the fear of a bad reputation, also called ‘shame’ (αἰσχύνη; αἰδώς). Contrary to common fear, this second kind is to be fostered in the citizens’ souls. Based on this positive account of the emotion of shame and the considerable emphasis it receives throughout the dialogue, this paper offers a close reading of the relevant context that precedes this passage, leading to the assumption that in the Laws certain emotions not only help to acquire virtue, but actually partake in virtue. Furthermore, an analysis of the connection between the introduction of two kinds of fear and the puppet image reveals a reverse analogy between courage and moderation, and moreover, of no less importance, strongly suggests that in the Laws the tripartition of the soul continues to be Plato’s underlying thought pattern in regard to psychology.