「スピノザとランシエール --不一致と平等について」 (冨田恭彦教授 退職記念号)

Abstract

In his political philosophy, contemporary French philosopher Jacques Ranciere focuses on the notion of disagreement. Through disagreement, people refuse to be consigned to a "part" of society and assert their original equality with the whole. Ranciere takes consensus to be the guiding principle not only of political discourse but also of political philosophy, both of which suppress truly democratic politics by trying to eliminate disagreement (which challenges the logic of consensus) or to replace it with forms of dispute (which ultimately aim at supporting consensus). On the other hand, Spinoza represents part of the history of political thought that aims at consensus. Spinoza believes that disagreement arises from the passions, which indicate a lack of rationality, and they pose a considerable danger to social harmony. Disagreement indicates a resurgence of the original equality found in the state of nature. Spinoza takes this original equality to be negative for human flourishing and counter-productive for politics. Yet he does not believe that disagreement may simply be eliminated, or sublimated into less harmful forms. Rather, he believes it must be managed as part of the governance of the civil state. This paper is intended to compare these two thinkers and argue that while both Rancière and Spinoza associate disagreement with a form of equality original to human beings, they disagree about the desirability of that original equality, and therefore about the political value of disagreement.