I’m helping to build an instance, and we had a debate recently on whether Platonism is left-winged or right-winged. It’s an ancient philosophy, mind you. Created by Plato. One small side said it was right-winged, one small side said it was left-winged, and the majority said it couldn’t be either. Someone remarked “what do you mean it’s neither? Marx cited him!” Admittedly it’s frustrating when you’re researching these things so you can give it a respectful comparative review and someone says “you can’t judge people of ancient times based on your left-right mode of measurement” in a world where something like whether Obama can do a public prank April Fool’s Day is a “political” issue (remember when he said he was building Iron Man as an April Fool’s joke and everyone on the right claimed it was unprofessional while the left enjoyed his sense of humor). That’s somehow more worthy to put under the microscope than Plato, the world’s first “public” philosopher (after Socrates and Thales who weren’t of specific opinions and Ptahhotep who was more of a superior advocating an approach that worked for him)?
In my eyes at this point, as well as the eyes of the groups I help out in, everything is equally politicized as a default; that is, “politicization” is what the individual makes of it at a given moment. But I know that isn’t how the world operates. Marx himself was known to write about an enormous number of topics, from faraway cultures to appropriate punishments for oddly specific crimes. How does the inherent potential of everything that exists to be politicized square with the idea that certain things are also inherently seen as non-left-or-right based on the circumstances that they hold in their own setting?
I’m not following how “everything can be politicized” and “a given (initially perceived neutral) topic can be viewed as either left/right” are incompatible. Both statements can be true. Maybe you’re not talking about the time lag between something being stated and it being exploited by one of the camps?
Can you elaborate on how this affects your instance? Are you trying to align with left/right, or only allow neutral topics? Something else?
Politicization implies it can be graded on the left/right political system, correct? So if anything can be politicized but only certain things can be left/right, doesn’t that render it moot that anything can be politicized in the first place?
To use an analogy, it seems like if you were to say “I know the cat is in the living room and I know where she is in the living room, but I can’t point to her because that cannot be determined”.
So that I can understand, can you give me an example of a topic that is causing trouble in this regard?
I can probably politicize the cat in the living room if that’s what you were going for.
Kind of. Suppose you’re reviewing work from a philosopher from a political lens and want to incorporate it somehow into discussion of an ideology. If someone looks at it and asks “is this a left view or a right view”, you have corrupted politik out of bounds.
But then suppose, like you said, someone politicizes the cat in the living room. Naturally you’d ask “what would it take to put my writings in political bounds if I have all these things I don’t actually want to consider issues having a better time than what I am trying to assess? Where do I cross over from the act of politicization to the act of putting things on the political spectrum?”
I think I’m confused about the term “out of bounds”. Do you mean something that is so extremely left or right that all members of either camp would say, “No no I don’t want to go that far”