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if only intellectual. This problem goes beyond straightforward dualisms of good and evil, elite
and mass, saved and damned, enlightened and immature, healthy and sick, noble and slave,
authentic and inauthentic, even though it is visible in problems stretching from the condemnation
of the unexamined life and the elevation of the bios theoretikos to the complex hierarchies of
Christian thought on the relation between worldly life and the demands of heaven, from Hume’s
view of the conflict of life versus philosophy to Kant’s view of enlightenment and immaturity,
from Hegel and Marx ‘s re-groundings of history to Nietzsche’s order of rank, from Emerson
(and later Cavell) on moral perfectionism to Weber on asceticism and politics, from Sartre and
Camus on ethics and terror to Foucault’s aesthetics and political resistances.
Answers to the question of how to conceive difference and its implications for how
politics deals with "other’s lives," have taken many different forms, rooted in very different
historical conditions, configurations, social structures, and cultural frameworks, very different
perspectives due to the positions occupied by the philosopher/political theorists within different
societies, and very different forms of hierarchy in quite varied social and political worlds. The
way in which the question is posed derives partly from the particular position of the
philosopher/political theorist/intellectual in different social structures and conditions. And it
derives partly from the more removed perspective of the “contemplative” life which seems to
exist universally. But in each of the “imagined hierarchies” I have mentioned, the answers have
come down to the ranking forms of difference, forms of life, forms of people, forms of politics,
forms of beliefs, and forms of principles, rooted in some reconfiguring of the social and political
hierarchies of each thinker’s world, whether that hierarchy is affirmed, rejected, ignored and set
aside, or rethought on bases that are radically different from that world.
Convention