Professor Steven Smith:
I've always been told that any
serious introduction to
political philosophy has to
start with a big piece of Plato.
We've made some effort to do
that.
Now, we have to move on.
So we move to Plato's son,
his adopted son,
in a manner of speaking,
Aristotle.
There's a story about the life
of Aristotle.
It goes something like this.
Aristotle was born.
He spent his life thinking and
then he died.
There is, obviously,
more to his life than that.
But, to some degree,
this captures some of the way
in which Aristotle has been
perceived over the centuries.
That is to say,
the ultimate philosopher.
Aristotle was born in the year
384,15 years after the trial of
Socrates.
He was born in the northern
part of Greece,
in a city called Stagira,
which is part of what is now
called Macedonia.
It was called that then.
When he was about your age,
when he was 17 or thereabouts,
maybe slightly younger than
many of you,
he was sent by his father to do
what you are doing.
He was sent by his father to go
to college.
He was sent to Athens to study
at The Academy,
the first university,
spoke about and established by
Plato.
Unlike most of you,
Aristotle did not spend four
years at the Platonic Academy.
He remained attached to it for
the next 20, until the death of
Plato.
After the death of Plato,
perhaps because of the choice
of successors to The Academy,
Aristotle left Athens,
first for Asia Minor and then
to return to his home in
Macedonia where he had been
summoned by King Phillip to
establish a school for the
children of the Macedonian
ruling class.
It was here that Aristotle met
and taught Phillip's son.
Who was Phillip of Macedonia's
son?
Student: Alexander.
Professor Steven Smith:
Alexander.
You all remember the recent
movie of a year or two ago about
Troy with Colin Farrell about
Alexander.
Who played Aristotle in that
film, do you remember?
Student: Anthony Hopkins.
Professor Steven Smith:
Anthony Hopkins,
excellent.
Was it Anthony Hopkins?
I have in my notes here it was
Christopher Plummer.
I'll have to check.
I'll have to Google that when I
go home.
Maybe you're right.
I have a feeling it was Anthony
Hopkins.
Whoever, he was an excellent
Aristotle, didn't have a large
enough part in the film.
In any case,
Aristotle returned to Athens
later on and established a
school of his own,
a rival to the Platonic Academy
that he called the Lyceum.
There is a story that near the
end of his life,
Aristotle was himself brought
up on capital charges,
as was Socrates,
due to another wave of
hostility to philosophy.
But rather unlike Socrates,
rather in staying to drink the
hemlock, Aristotle left Athens
and was reported to have said he
did not wish to see the
Athenians sin against philosophy
for a second time.
I'll go back to that story in a
minute, because I think it's
very revealing about Aristotle.
In any way, this story helps to
underscore some important
differences between Plato and
Aristotle.
At one level,
you might say there is an
important difference in style
that you will see almost
immediately.
Unlike his intellectual
godfather, Socrates,
who wrote nothing but conversed
endlessly,
and unlike his own teacher,
Plato, who wrote imitations of
those endless Socratic
conversations,
Aristotle wrote disciplined and
thematic treatises on virtually
every topic,
from biology to ethics to
metaphysics to literary
criticism and politics.
One can assume safely that
Aristotle would have received
tenure in any number of
departments at Yale,
whereas Socrates could not have
applied to have been a teaching
assistant.
These differences conceal
others.
For Plato, it would seem,
the study of politics was
always bound up with deeply
philosophical and speculative
questions,
questions of metaphysics,
questions of the structure of
the cosmos.
What is the soul?
What is the soul about?
Aristotle appears from the
beginning to look more like what
we would think of as a political
scientist.
He collected constitutions,
158 of them in all,
from throughout the ancient
world.
He was the first to give some
kind of conceptual rigor to the
vocabulary of political life.
Above all, Aristotle's works,
like the Politics and
the Nicomachean Ethics,
were explicitly intended as
works of political instruction,
political education.
They seem to be designed less
to recruit philosophers and
potential philosophers than to
shape and educate citizens and
future statesmen.
His works seem less theoretical
in the sense of constructing
abstract models of political
life than advice-giving,
in the sense of serving as a
sort of civic-minded arbiter of
public disputes.
Unlike Socrates,
who famously in his image in
Book VII of the Republic,
compared political life to a
cave, and unlike the
Apology where Socrates
tells his fellow citizens that
their lives,
because unexamined,
are not worth living,
Aristotle takes seriously the
dignity of the city and showed
the way that philosophy might be
useful to citizens and
statesmen.
Yet, for all of this,
one might say there is still a
profound enigma surrounding
Aristotle's political works.
To put it simply,
one could simply ask,
what were the politics of
Aristotle's Politics?
What were Aristotle's own
political beliefs?
Aristotle lived at the virtual
cusp of the world of the
autonomous city-state of the
Greek polis.
Within his own lifetime,
Aristotle would see Athens,
Sparta, and the other great
cities of Greece swallowed up by
the great Macedonian Empire to
the north.
What we think of as the golden
age of Greece was virtually at
an end during the lifetime of
Aristotle.
Other Greek thinkers of his
time, notably a man named
Demosthenes, wrote a series of
speeches called
Philippics,
anti-Phillip,
to the north to warn his
contemporaries about the dangers
posed to Athens from the
imperial ambitions of Macedon.
But Phillip's warnings came too
late.
Again, the autonomous Greek
polis that Plato and
Glaucon, Adeimantus and others
would have known came to an end.
What did Aristotle think of
these changes?
What did he think was going on?
He is silent.
Aristotle's extreme reluctance,
his hesitance to speak to the
issues of his time,
are perhaps the result of his
foreignness to Athens.
He was not an Athenian.
Therefore, he lacked the
protection of Athenian
citizenship.
At the same time,
you might think his reticence,
his reluctance to speak in his
own voice may have also been a
response to the fate of Socrates
and the politically endangered
situation of philosophy.
Yet, for a man as notoriously
secretive and reluctant as
Aristotle, his works acquired
over the centuries virtual
canonical status.
He became an authority,
really one could say the
authority on virtually
everything.
For Thomas Aquinas,
who wrote in the thirteenth
century, Aristotle was referred
to, by Aquinas,
simply as "the philosopher."
There was no reason even to say
his name.
He was simply The Philosopher.
For the great Jewish medieval
philosopher, Moses Maimonides,
Aristotle was called by him
"the Master of those who know."
Think of that,
"the master of those who know."
For centuries,
Aristotle's authority seemed to
go virtually unchallenged.
Are you with me?
Yet, the authority of Aristotle
obviously no longer has quite
the power that it once did.
The attack began not all that
long ago, really only as late as
the seventeenth century.
A man, who we will read later
this semester,
named Thomas Hobbes,
was one who led the pack,
led the charge.
In the forty-sixth chapter of
Leviathan,
a chapter we will read later,
Hobbes wrote,
"I believe that scarce anything
can be more repugnant to
government than much of what
Aristotle has said in his
Politics,
nor more ignorantly than a
great part of his
Ethics."
Think of that – "nothing more
repugnant to government than
what Aristotle wrote in his
Politics."
Naturally, all thinkers,
to some degree,
have read Aristotle through
their own lenses.
Aquinas read Aristotle as a
defender of monarchy.
Dante, in his book,
De Monarchia on
monarchy, saw Aristotle as
giving credence to the idea of a
universal monarchy under the
leadership of a Christian
prince.
But Hobbes saw Aristotle quite
differently.
For Hobbes, Aristotle taught
the dangerous doctrine of
republican government that was
seen to be practiced
particularly during the
Cromwellian Period in England,
during the civil war.
Aristotle's doctrine that man
is a political animal,
Hobbes believed,
could only result and did
result, in fact,
in regicide,
the murder of kings.
There are certainly echoes of
this reading of Aristotle as a
teacher of participatory
republican government in the
later writings of democratic
thinkers from Tocqueville to
Hannah Arendt.
Anyway, this returns us to the
enigma of Aristotle.
Who was this strange and
elusive man whose writings seem
to have been enlisted both for
the support of monarchy and for
republics,
even for a universal monarchy
and a smaller participatory
democratic kind of government?
Who was this man and how to
understand his writings?
The best place to start is,
of course, with his views
stated in the opening pages of
the Politics on the
naturalness of the city.
His claim that man is,
by nature, the political
animal.
That's his famous claim.
What does that mean--we are the
political animal.
Aristotle states his reasons
succinctly, maybe too
succinctly.
On the third page of the
Politics where he remarks
that every city or every
polis exists by nature,
and he goes on to infer from
this that man is what he calls
the zoon politikon,
the political animal,
the polis animal.
His reasoning here,
brief as it is,
is worth following.
Let me just quote him.
"That man" he says "is much
more a political animal than any
kind of bee or herd animal is
clear."
Why is it clear?
"For we assert," he says,
"nature does nothing in vain
and man alone among the animals
has speech.
While other species," he notes,
"may have voice,
may have sounds and be able to
distinguish pleasure and pain,
speech"--logos is his
word for it.
Man has logos--reason or
speech.
The word can mean either.-- "is
more than the ability simply to
distinguish pleasure and pain."
He goes on.
"But logos," he writes,
"serves to reveal the
advantageous and the harmful.
And hence," he writes,
"the just and the unjust.
For it is peculiar to man as
compared to other animals that
he alone has a perception of
good and bad,
just and unjust and other
things."
In other words,
he seems to be saying that it
is speech or reason,
logos,
that is able to both
distinguish and create certain
moral categories,
certain important moral
categories that we live by--the
advantageous,
the harmful,
the just and unjust,
and things of this sort that
constitute, as he says,
a family and a polis.
But that's Aristotle.
In what sense,
we could ask ourselves and I
think you probably will be
asking in your sections,
in what sense is the city by
nature?
In what sense are we political
animals by nature?
Aristotle appears to give two
different accounts in the
opening pages of the book that
you might pay attention to.
In the literal opening,
he gives what looks like a kind
of natural history of the
polis.
He seems there to be a kind of
anthropologist writing a natural
history.
The polis is natural in
the sense that it has grown out
of smaller and lesser forms of
human association.
First comes the family,
then an association of families
in a tribe, then a further
association in a village,
and then you might say an
association of villages that
create a polis or a city.
The polis is natural in
the sense that it is an
outgrowth, the most developed
form of human association,
in the way that one used to see
in natural history museums,
these kind of biological charts
of human development from these
lesser forms of life all the way
up to civilization in some way.
That is part of Aristotle's
argument.
But there is a second sense for
him and, in some ways,
a more important sense in which
he says the polis is by
nature.
It is natural.
The city is natural in that it
allows human beings to achieve
and perfect what he calls their
telos.
That is to say their end,
their purpose.
We are political animals,
he says, because participation
in the life of the city is
necessary for the achievement of
human excellence,
for the achievement of our
well-being.
A person who is without a city,
he says, who is
apolis--without a
city--must either be a beast or
a god.
That is to say,
below humanity or above it.
Our political nature is our
essential characteristic.
Because only by participating
in political life do we achieve,
can we acquire the excellences
or the virtues,
as he says, that make us what
we are, that fulfill our
telos or fulfill our
perfection.
When Aristotle says that man is
a political animal by nature,
he is doing more than simply
asserting just a truism or just
some platitude.
In many ways he is advancing a
philosophic postulate of great
scope and power,
although the full development
of the thesis is only left
deeply embedded.
He doesn't fully develop it in
this work or in saying.
He isn't saying that man is
political by nature.
Note that he is not saying,
although he is sometimes taken
to be saying this,
that he is not saying that
there is some kind of
biologically implanted desire or
impulse that we have or share
that leads us to engage in
political life.
That is to say we do not,
he wants to say,
engage in politics.
To say it's natural for us to
do so is not to say we engage in
political life spontaneously and
avidly,
as you might say spiders spin
webs or ants build anthills.
He is not a kind of
socio-biologist of politics,
although he sometimes appears
this way when he says that man
is a political animal.
In some ways, to the contrary.
He says man is political not
because we have some biological
impulse or instinct that drives
us to participate in politics,
but, he says,
because we are possessed of the
power of speech.
It is speech that makes us
political.
Speech or reason in many was
far from determining our
behavior in some kind of
deterministic biological sense,
speech or reason gives us a
kind of freedom,
latitude, an area of discretion
in our behavior not available to
other species.
It is a reason or speech,
not instinct,
that makes us political.
But then the question is,
for Aristotle,
the question he poses for us
is: What is the connection
between logos,
the capacity for speech of
rationality, and politics?
How are these two combined?
Why does one lead to or entail
the other?
In many ways,
he's not making a causal claim
so much.
He's not saying that it is
because we are rational
creatures possessed of the power
of speech that causes us to
engage in politics.
He has more of an argument of
the kind that this attribute of
logos actually entails
political life.
He makes his argument,
I think, because logos
entails two fundamentally human
attributes.
First, the power to know,
you could say.
The power to know is our
ability to recognize,
by sight, members of the same
polis or city.
It is, above all,
speech that in a way,
ties us to others of our kind.
That we share not just the
capacity for language in the way
a linguist might assert,
but that we share a certain
common moral language.
It is this sharing of certain
common conceptions of the just
and unjust that make a city.
It is the capacity to know and
to recognize others who share
this language with us that is
the first sense in which
logos entails politics.
But reason or logos
entails more than this capacity.
It also entails for Aristotle,
interestingly,
the power of love.
We love those with whom we are
most intimately related and who
are most immediately present and
visible to us.
In many ways,
Aristotle believes our social
and political nature is not the
result of calculation,
as we will see in Hobbes,
Locke, and other social
contract theorists,
but such things as love,
affection, friendship,
and sympathy are the grounds of
political life and are rooted in
our logos.
It is speech that allows a
sharing in these qualities that
make us fully human.
But to say, of course,
that man is political by nature
is not just to say that we
become fully human by
participating with others in a
city.
It means more than this.
The form of association that
leads to our perfection is
necessarily something
particularistic.
The city is always a particular
city.
It is always this or that
particular city.
The polis,
as Aristotle as well as Plato
clearly understand,
is a small society,
what could be called today a
closed society.
A society that leads to our
perfection that leads us to
complete and perfect our
telos must be held
together by bonds of trust,
of friendship, of camaraderie.
A society based simply on the
mutual calculation of interests
could not be a real political
society for Aristotle.
We cannot trust all people,
Aristotle seems to say.
Trust can only be extended to a
fairly small circle of friends
and fellow citizens.
Only a small city,
small enough to be governed by
relations of trust,
can be political,
in Aristotle's sense of the
term.
The alternative to the city,
the empire, can only be ruled
despotically.
There can be no relations of
trust in a large,
imperial despotism.
It follows, in one sense,
that when Aristotle says that
man is by nature a political
animal and the city is by
nature,
the city can never be a
universal state.
It can never be something that
incorporates all of humankind.
It can never be a kind of
cosmopolis,
a world state or even a league
of states or nations.
The universal state will never
allow for or does not allow for
the kind of self-perfection that
a small, self-governing
polis will have.
The city, as Aristotle
understands, will always exist
in a world with other cities or
other states,
based on different principles
that might be hostile to one's
own.
That is to say not even the
best city on Aristotle's account
can afford to be without a
foreign policy.
A good citizen of a democracy
will not be the good citizen of
another kind of regime.
Partisanship and loyalty to
one's own way of life are
required by a healthy city.
To put the argument in terms
that Polemarchus,
from Plato's Republic
would have known,
friend and enemy are natural
and ineradicable categories of
political life.
Just as we cannot be friends
with all persons,
so the city cannot be friends
with all other cities or the
state with all other states.
War and the virtues necessary
for war are as natural to the
city as are the virtues of
friendship, trust,
and camaraderie that are also
necessary.
Note that in the opening pages
of the book, Aristotle doesn't
say anything yet about what kind
of city or regime is best.
All he tells us is that we are
the polis animal by
nature and that to achieve our
ends, it will be necessary to
live in a polis.
But what kind of polis?
How should it be governed?
By the one, the few,
the many, or some combination
of these three categories?
At this point we know only the
most general features of what a
polis is.
It must be small enough to be
governed by a common language of
justice.
It is not enough merely to
speak the same words,
but in a sense,
citizens must have certain
common experiences,
certain common memory and
experience that shape a city and
the people.
The large polyglot,
multiethnic communities of
today would not,
on Aristotle's account,
allow for sufficient mutual
trust and friendship to count as
a healthy political community.
So Aristotle seems to be
offering, in some respects,
a kind of criticism of the kind
of states with which we are most
familiar.
Think about that when you have
your sections or when you talk
about this text with your
friends.
What is Aristotle saying about
us?
The citizens of such a city can
only reach their telos or
perfection through participating
in the offices,
in the ruling offices of a
city.
Again, a large cosmopolitan
state may allow each individual
the freedom to live as he or she
likes,
but this is not freedom as
Aristotle understands it.
Freedom only comes through the
exercise of political
responsibility,
which means responsibility for
and oversight of one's fellow
citizens and the common good.
It follows, for him,
that freedom does not mean
living as we like,
but freedom is informed by a
certain sense of restraint and
awareness that not all things
are permitted,
that the good society will be
one that promotes a sense of
moderation, restraint and
self-control,
self-governance,
as Adeimantus says,
that are inseparable from the
experience of freedom.
In many ways Aristotle there
offers, as does Plato,
a certain kind of critique of
the modern or even the ancient
democratic theory of freedom,
which is living as one likes.
You can see these opening pages
of the book, dense argument
being condensed in very deep
ways, carry a great deal of
freight.
There's a lot in there that
needs to be unpacked.
I've only tried to do a little
of that here with you today,
to go over what Aristotle is
suggesting in this idea of man,
the polis animal.
Whatever we may think about
this view, whether we like it or
don't like it or whatever your
view might be,
you must also confront another
famous, more like infamous,
doctrine that is also very much
a part of Book I.
I refer to his arguments for
the naturalness of slavery.
Aristotle tells us that slavery
is natural.
The naturalness of slavery is
said to follow from the belief
that inequality,
inequality is the basic rule
between human beings.
Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson
seem to disagree over the basic
fact of human experience,
whether it's equality or
inequality.
If this is true,
Aristotle's Politics seems to
stand condemned as the most
antidemocratic book ever
written.
Is that true?
Aristotle's claim about
naturalness seems to require,
as he told us,
slavery, the categorical
distinction of humanity into
masters and slaves.
How to understand that?
Again, Aristotle's argument is
deeply compact and will be
easily misunderstood if you only
read it once.
It will just as likely be
misunderstood if you read it
three, four, five,
or ten times,
if you are not attentive to
what he's saying.
You must learn to read closely.
What was Aristotle saying?
In the first place,
it's important that we avoid,
I think, two equally unhelpful
ways of responding to this.
The first, which one finds
among many modern-day
commentators,
many kind of neo-Aristotelians,
we might call them,
is to simply avert our eyes
from the harsh,
unappealing aspects of
Aristotle's thought and proceed
as if he never actually said or
meant such things.
We need to avoid the
temptation, in many ways
understandable as it might be,
to airbrush or sanitize
Aristotle, to make him seem more
politically correct for modern
readers.
Yet, we should also avoid the
second, equally powerful
temptation, which is to reject
Aristotle out of hand,
because his views do not
correspond with our own.
The question is what did
Aristotle mean by slavery?
Who or what did he think was
the slave by nature?
Until we understand what he
meant, we have no reason to
either accept or reject his
argument.
The first point worth noting
about this, is that Aristotle
did not simply assume slavery
was natural,
because it was practiced
virtually everywhere in the
ancient world.
You will notice that he frames
his analysis in the form of a
debate.
He says at the outset of his
argument, "There are some," he
says, indicating this is an
opinion held by many people.
"There are some who believe
that slavery is natural,
because ruling and being ruled
is a pervasive distinction that
one sees all societies
practice."
But he says,
"Others believe that the
distinction between master and
slave is not natural,
but is based on force or
coercion."
Even in Aristotle's time,
it appears slavery was a
controversial institution and
elicited very different kinds of
opinions and responses.
Here is one of those moments
when Aristotle,
as I indicated earlier,
seems most maddeningly
open-minded.
He's willing to entertain
arguments, both for and against
the debate.
Aristotle agrees with those who
deny that slavery is justified
by war or conquest.
Wars, he remarks,
are not always just.
So, those who are captured in
war, cannot be assumed to be
justly or naturally enslaved.
Similarly, he denies that
slavery is always or only
appropriate for non-Greeks.
There are no,
he is saying,
racial or ethnic
characteristics that distinguish
the natural slave from the
natural master.
In a stunning admission,
he says--listen to this--that
"while nature may intend to
distinguish the free man from
the slave,"
he says, "the opposite often
results.
Nature often misses the mark,"
he says.
Now we seem to be completely
confused.
If slavery is natural,
and if nature intends to
distinguish the slave from the
free, the free from the unfree,
how can nature miss the mark?
How can the opposite often
result?
I mention this because such
complications should alert the
careful reader.
We're trying to read carefully.
What is Aristotle doing in
making this seem so complicated?
At the same time,
Aristotle agrees with those who
defend the thesis of natural
slavery.
His defense seems to run
something like this.
Slavery is natural because we
cannot rule ourselves without
the restraint of the passions.
Self-rule means self-restraint.
Restraint or self-control is
necessary for freedom or
self-government.
What is true,
he seems to suggest,
about the restraint over one's
passions and desires is true of
restraint and control over
others,
just as he appears to be saying
there is a kind of hierarchy
within the soul,
restraint of the passion.
So does that psychological
hierarchy translate itself into
a kind of social hierarchy
between different kinds of
people?
The natural hierarchy,
then, seems to be a sort of
hierarchy of intelligence or at
least a hierarchy of the
rational.
"How did this come to be?"
Aristotle asks.
How is it that some people came
to acquire this capacity for
rational self-control that is
necessary for freedom and others
seem to lack it?
How did that come to be?
Is this hierarchy,
again, a genetic quality?
Is it something we're born with?
Is it something that is
implanted in us by nature in
that sense, or is that
distinction something that is
created by nurture and
education,
what we would call today maybe
socialization?
If the latter,
if this hierarchy of
intelligence or this hierarchy
of the rational is the result of
upbringing,
then how can slavery be
defended as natural?
Doesn't Aristotle call man the
rational animal,
the being with logos,
suggesting that all human
beings have a desire for
knowledge and the desire to
cultivate their minds and live
as free persons.
Isn't there a kind of
egalitarianism,
so to speak,
built in to the conception of
rational animal and political
animal?
He begins his
Metaphysics,
his great book the
Metaphysics,
with the famous opening
statement, "All men have a
desire to know."
If we all have a desire to
know, doesn't this connote
something universal,
that all should be free,
that all should participate in
ruling and being ruled as
citizens of a city?
Yet, at the same time,
Aristotle seems to regard
education as the preserve of the
few.
The kind of discipline and
self-restraint necessary for an
educated mind appears,
for him, to be unequally
divided among human beings.
It follows, I think,
that the regime according to
nature, that is to say the best
regime,
would be what we might think of
as an aristocracy of the
educated, an aristocracy of
education and training,
an aristocratic republic of
some sort where an educated
elite governs for the good of
all.
Aristotle's republic,
and I use that term to remind
you of Plato as well,
is devoted to cultivating a
high level of citizen virtue
where this means those qualities
of mind and heart necessary for
self-government.
These qualities,
he believes,
are the preserve of the few,
of a minority capable of
sharing in the administration of
justice and in the offices of a
city.
It seems to be a very elite
teaching.
Would you agree?
Unappealing to us,
perhaps, for that reason,
very contrary to our intuitions
and the way we have been brought
up.
Yes?
You'll agree with me.
But before we dismiss
Aristotle's account as
insufferably inegalitarian and
elitist,
we have to ask a difficult
question, not just of Aristotle,
but more importantly of
ourselves.
What else is Yale,
but an elite institution
intended to educate,
morally and intellectually,
potential members of a
leadership class?
Think about that.
Can anyone get into Yale?
Do we have an open admissions
policy for all who want to come
here?
Hardly.
Does it not require those
qualities of self-control,
discipline, and restraint
necessary to achieve success
here?
I will leave aside,
for the moment,
what happens on Friday and
Saturday nights.
Is it any coincidence that
graduates from this university
and a handful of others not
unlike it find themselves in
high positions of government,
of business,
of law, and the academy?
Is it unfair or unreasonable to
describe this class,
as Aristotle might,
as a natural aristocracy?
I leave you with this question
to think about.
Before we reject Aristotle as
an antidemocratic elitist,
take a look at yourselves.
So are you, or you wouldn't be
sitting here today.
Think about that and I'll see
you next week.
