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The Concept of Hierarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Aurel Kolnai
Aurel Kolnai
Affiliation:
Bedford College, University of London
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Extract

The Concept of Hierarchy, as well as various problems, aspects and doctrines attaching to it, was preposterously overrated in Greek philosophy, especially Platonic and Neo-platonic; probably even more so in medieval Scholastic philosophy which attempted to rationalize its supernaturalistic obsession with arguments taken from Greek, chiefly Aristotelian and thus semi-Platonic perfectionalism as a putative “natural” basis for it. Some great exponents of the modern German philosophy of Value, Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, represent the same tradition in a doubtless more critical and more properly philosophic, less naively metaphysical, but still in a pretty dogmatically intuitional fashion. The counterpart to this we find to be rampant in modern English-speaking philosophy dominated by the thought-style of Logical Positivism, though many of its more recent representatives would disown that label. Mouthpieces of an egalitarian, machine-ridden and (at least apparently) utilitarian and functional society intolerant of the idea of kings, aristocrats, slaves, serfs, even rich and poor nay literate and illiterate, these thinkers idolize human “wanting” as such, whatever its contents and characteristics, would reduce all value to “needs” or “desires” and their different “intensities” and in their turn, I venture to say, seek preposterously to evade the very concept of Hierarchy, not only on the plane of social philosophy but also in the context of Axiology. They postulate a flattened world from which the experience of Verticality is all but wholly excluded.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 46 , Issue 177 , July 1971 , pp. 203 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1971

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References

1 Standard types of subordination differ between them significantly in particular as regards their teleological pattern. Personal “servants” (in the widest sense) are most unequivocally “subordinates” of their “masters” in that they are instrumental to their masters' ends. The lower members of a military or civil hierarchy, however strict the discipline they are subject to, are only “subordinate” to their “superiors” in the limits of their being all ordained to a common end. Members of a society (even, normally, of the same estate or profession) who hold an “inferior” position or rank are not properly “subordinate” to “superior” ones at all. Thus, the First Sea Lord is not the or a superior of a colour-sergeant of infantry. In the subordination involved by expertship (cf. “Doctor's orders”), and again by education, the teleological relationship is reversed: the physician's authority exists “for the sake” of the patient's health; parents and teachers are “superiors” of their children or pupils, but the latter (predominantly) embody the “superordinate” ends.

2 The Eleatic-Platonic attitude survives in Aristotle's “Physics” in the shape of the “spheres”, the stars and the “regularity” of their movements.

3 There exist not only certain specific aspects of dignity in some peasantries and some types of small craftsmen but also certain specific aspects of vulgarity in the middle and upper classes. This applies to many “upstarts” but also to the disproportion, necessarily present in some upper-class people, between their awareness of their social position, of their genetic past, etc., and the actual contents and levels of their mental lives.

4 The Latins of the East, the robust and remarkable Roumanian people, have long been the victims of alien oppressors: Turks and Tatars, Phanariotes (a thin aristocratic class of Constantinopolitan Greek origin), Hungarians, Russians, and even for some time a Serb ecclesiastical hierarchy. Among Roumanian peasants, a saying used to be current which picturesquely expresses the attitude fustigated by Shaw: “Dacặ musặi, bucuros” (Since you must, better do it willingly).