During these days of forced rest due to an operation, I had the opportunity to listen to an old report on the much-publicized sociologist of the progressive left, Beatriz Sarlo, who recently passed away, splashing about rather than talking, for a long time, about the public sphere on the powerful channel 13 of Buenos Aires television, and when it ended, I realized that I had been left in the dark. So, I set about trying a very brief meditation based on philosophy to see if I could say something and not rather nothing as the aforementioned sociologist did.
The adjective “public” was one of the most prestigious in Roman political discourse; its high esteem due to its meaning: belonging to the people, to the public thing that was called res publica. The adjective designated the people as the protagonist and recipient of the government’s political activity in the administration of the State.
Since the time of the Greeks and their great masters of philosophy, it was established that the formal or specific object of politics is the bonum commune—common good—but as this concept was always surrounded by a halo of imprecision and vagueness, philosophers from the Middle Ages onwards tried to define it more precisely. [Today formal means serious, judicious, but in philosophy a formal object is understood to be that which determines the essence of the thing or subject studied. Form also has a reason of final cause, since the meaning of the action is given by the end]. Thus, they argued that it is not the sum of the goods of each individual but the conditions for the “good life” of the whole. At that time, they spoke of salus populi—the health of the people. This concept was taken up by Hobbes, the French Revolution spoke of public health, and the last great political scientist, Julien Freund, assimilated the common good to the public good [Freund, What is the Political].
As a first approximation, which we will see later, is incomplete, we can say that the public sphere is constituted by the sphere of shared interest of the forces of a society.
From the modern idea of the State as a neutral entity that emerged in the face of the wars of religion (Protestants vs. Catholics) the public sphere was born as a counter-position to the private sphere. Thus, religion ceased to be a public matter and was reserved to the private sphere.
The ethical-political neutrality with which the public sphere sought to define itself characterized it in such a way that the citizen can only manifest him or herself as public in the public sphere (e.g., one cannot cook in a square or urinate on the sidewalk).
Thus, liberalism limited the public to the political, to the State, reserving the private for society, especially in its socio-economic sphere. This was how it thought it could free society from political tutelage, speaking through one of its great philosophers, Karl Popper, of the open society.
But all this has changed radically since the last decade of the last century. The exponential development of communication technologies (Internet, digital TV, mobile phones, media monopolies, etc.) has made it possible to “publish” the private. They make the private public, even in its most intimate details (e.g., in reality shows).
And this invasion of the public into the private is then transferred to all areas of doing and acting. (e.g., in architecture, glass buildings; in communications, the Echelon system; in religion, where applause and shouting in church have replaced the prayer of the faithful).
Back in the 1980s, the philosopher of discursive democracy, in conversational Creole, came to argue that the public sphere was, above all, a space. A space where citizens debate issues of common interest. And this thesis, to which the theory of consensus was attached, was adopted by all progressive social democratic democracies in the world. The public sphere ceased to be an end in itself, as a public good, and became confined to parks, squares and other spaces of social interaction.
By reducing the public to space, in the first place the common citizen—not Habermas’ enlightened citizen—appropriates the space, settles in and uses it for himself, as do the “rag-tag” car park attendants, the street vendors, the picketers, the street markets and all those who live in and from the street. And secondly, the difference between the public and the private becomes increasingly blurred.
The fact is that the public sphere, its meaning and purpose having been castrated and reduced to mere space (Habermas’s very serious mistake), has come to be understood as belonging to no one and therefore can be taken over. Of course, this does not happen in Germany, where everyone is enlightened, but it happens every day all over in our little world.
The public sphere should be thought of as a function (e.g., public enterprise, public land, public television); it cannot and should not be reduced to a public space where the deliberative practice of discursive democracy (Habermas) takes place. This is stupid, a trick, a “leopardism” so that everything can stay the same.
If we add to this the disastrous theory of consensus and we want to put it into practice at a popular level, when people only demonstrate, when they do so, for or against, and the only ones who reach a consensus are the interest groups or those in power, this ruins the direct democracy that the people exercise by themselves when they demonstrate in the acclamatio.
There is also another spurious version of the public sphere, that of the philosopher Arendt [The Human Condition], who argues that the public sphere is that which can be seen and heard by all, and which concerns us all as a common good.
That is, mutatis mutandi, the same thing that happened to the handsome Alcibiades with Plato, when, wanting to study the essence of the horse, he said to him, “Master, I only see the horse and not the horse-ness,” to which Plato replied, “It is that you have the eyes of the body but lack the eyes of intelligence.”
Thus, by limiting the public to what is seen and heard by everyone, a further step is taken in the bastardization, in the estrangement of the public, since seeing and hearing lack the mediation that all deliberation involves, however pompous and inconsequential it may be, such as that proposed by Habermas.
Another aspect of the public sphere that should be highlighted is its “management.” From a liberal point of view, it is said that the public sphere is inefficient, that what belongs to everyone belongs to no one, and therefore the public sphere should be left to private management (e.g., the mail, water, gas, electricity, police, health, etc.). And so, by privatizing public services, sooner or later private companies driven by the logic of profit end up fleecing the people with high tariffs and poor services.
Historical experience, the case of Argentina being an extraordinary example, indicates that the most efficient and effective way of managing public affairs has always been when they are administered by the social organizations of the people themselves. Our trade unions administer health services efficiently and more or less fairly, and the Church does the same with education.
It is the social management of the public sphere that must be rescued, deepened and perfected because it brings together two ideas: efficiency in execution and social justice with the people.
It is worth noting that this idea is rooted in the Roman publicus, which is very different from our public, which is limited to the state. While the publicus indicated popular participation in the government of their own interests.
To conclude this brief meditation, we maintain that in the tension between the public and the private, we must recover the public as an instrument of the common good and the private in the rescue of intimacy in the form of modesty in our relationship with ourselves and with others, through friendship as antiphilia or reciprocal affection. The most genuine source of all political community.
Featured: The Temperate and the Intemperate, by the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book (ca. 1475-1480).
