Aristotle's Politics

Living Well and Living Together

Eugene Garver

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226284040
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

"Man is a political animal, " Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the Politics. In this novel reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, Eugene Garver traces the surprising implications of Aristotle's claim and explores the treatise's relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle's specific moment in time, in fact the Politics challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today.Close examination of Aristotle's treatise, Garver finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. Completing Garver's trilogy on Aristotle's unique vision, Aristotle's Politics yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, ancient and modern.

CHAPTER ONE

Book I:
Slavery and the Will to Power

My exploration of the Politics begins by focusing on its most notorious feature, the endorsement of slavery. This might be thought a minor feature of the Politics, important only because it highlights the distance between Aristotle’s moral world and ours. His discussion of slavery occupies only three chapters in Book I and part of another in Book VII. But the issues slavery raises cut deep into Aristotle’s way of thinking and help us understand what he means by saying that people are political animals (I.2.1253a7–18, III.6.1278b15–30; NE VIII.12.1162a16–19, IX.9.1169b16–22; EE VII.10.1242a19–28).

Looking back, we reasonably see Aristotle’s discussion of slavery as defending the indefensible. The justification of slavery, coupled as it is in Book I with an analogous denigration of women, is so easy to take as the occasion for outrage that it is hard to get past that feeling to examine the details of his arguments. He defends the naturalness of slavery in Book I and, to make things worse, in Book VII gives a racial interpretation to slavery as he locates those suited to be slaves in Asia, as opposed to Europeans too wild to be domesticated and to the Greeks whose ideal psyches make them natural masters. We can be appalled, or we can separate Aristotle the philosopher from Aristotle the Greek who was not able to overcome the prejudices of his time. Aristotle’s defense of slavery is then a depressing example of a great mind unable to escape the prejudices of his times, and of philosophy enlisted as rationalization in the service of a hidden and distasteful political agenda.¹ If we temporarily suspend those reactions, though, and look at some of the details of Aristotle’s discussions of slavery, I think we find a richness that makes both his moral vision and our own moral lives more complicated.

For starters, while contemporary discussions of Aristotle’s treatment of slavery typically describe it as a “justification” for slavery, Aristotle himself would be surprised to learn that he was justifying or even defending slavery.² The discussions of slavery have a different purpose within his larger project. The Politics begins by criticizing those—such as Plato’s Statesman—who do not see that statesman, king, household manager (oikonimikon), and master of slaves (despotikon) are different kinds of rulers (1.1.1252a7–8, I.3.1254a17–19). The discussion of slaves and masters in Book I is part of his larger project of showing how the polis emerges out of the household and therefore how the good life emerges out of aiming at life itself, without being reducible to it. His “defense” of slavery is more a matter of fencing slavery in, part of the project of cabining economic activity that occupies the first book of the Politics as it develops the autonomy of politics. Greece knew slaves who were not part of a household: there were the workers in the silver mines, and the Scythian archers who served as a police force in Athens, but Aristotle’s vision is narrowed to household slaves.³ The helots of Sparta don’t fit his account either. He devotes more of Book I to economics—household management—than to ruling slaves, but it is the latter activity that has to be separated from the art of the statesman.

Citizens have political relations toward each other, not relations of mastery and slavery. Therefore, strictly speaking, slavery is not a political but rather a prepolitical problem. In consequence, Aristotle treats questions about slavery as fairly easy; they can be solved by philosophical analysis rather than political deliberation, in contrast to the difficult subjects about citizenship and justice that require the nuanced division of labor between philosopher and statesman. Yet Aristotle also recognizes ways in which slavery can expand beyond this restriction to the household, and so become a more serious political problem, of greater interest to people who live in a world that doesn’t accept his separation of the economic from the political. We have succeeded in abolishing slavery for the most part, but at the price of making economic activity much more dominant in our lives than Aristotle would have wanted. Compared to the world as Aristotle described it, slavishness and the pursuit of wealth are no longer shameful. Slavishness and the desire to dominate others have not disappeared along with the abolition of slavery. Even if poleis aren’t around anymore, the tension between Aristotle’s claim that man is a political animal and his observation that relatively few people live politically is a problem that remains with us.⁴

I. SLAVERY: INCOMPLETE ACTIONS
AND INCOMPLETE SOULS

Slaves have incomplete souls; they are incomplete people. To make such claims intelligible, I have to appeal to more of Aristotle’s technical language and ideas from other works than I will need to do for most of the book. Aristotle sees a substance, such as a soul, as incomplete if it is defined by an essence, a formula or logos, outside itself. Its completion consists in reference to something outside itself.

The deliberative part of the soul is entirely missing from a slave, a woman has it but it lacks authority; a child has it but it is incompletely developed. (I.13.1260a12–14)

Since a child is incompletely developed, it is clear that his virtue too does not belong to him in relation to himself but in relation to his end and his leader. The same holds of a slave in relation to his master. (1260a31–34)

The soul of a child is incomplete because it is not yet complete. One cannot understand a child except by seeing her as on the way to becoming an adult. The souls of earthworms and of domestic animals are not incomplete; they just cannot do a lot of the things my soul can do. Slaves, in contrast to children but like women, are permanently incomplete. Biology speaks about “maimed” individuals of a species—lacking a hand, or the capacity to digest peanuts without allergic reaction—but not incomplete ones, and certainly not whole large groups of incomplete individuals. The oddness of such people is signaled by the fact that in Book I Aristotle argues first for the necessity of slaves, and of the naturalness of the master/slave relation, and only then looks around to determine the existence of people who fit the bill. Thus chapter 4 ends: “It is clear from these considerations what the nature and capacity of a slave are. For anyone who, despite being human, is by nature not his own but someone else’s is a natural slave” (1254a12–15). And chapter 5 starts: “But whether anyone is really like that by nature or not, we should investigate next” (1254a17–18). (To see how odd it is for Aristotle first to show that natural slaves are necessary, and then that they exist, imagine proceeding in the same way, first showing the necessity of the male/female relation, and then proving the existence of women.) Aristotle’s ensuing investigation is less empirical than one might expect, since nature does not act powerfully enough for us to identify natural slaves by inspection (I.5.1254b26–1255a1). So the argument in I.5 shows that there have to be natural slaves, not what they look like. The account of what makes someone naturally suitable for slavery will have to wait until VII.7.

I understand the slave’s incompleteness this way. The slave’s actions are by their nature incomplete; his acts fit the definition of motion in the Physics as the actualization of the potential qua potential (III.1.201a 10–11, 27–29, b 4–5), an incomplete activity whose completion lies outside itself in the end aimed at. It is no defect for a making, a poiēsis, to be a motion, just as it is no defect in a cow not to be a human being. Motions and makings are supposed to be incomplete, because they are done for the sake of an end outside themselves. With respect to poiēsis, there is nothing wrong with what slaves do; their performance is completely adequate. Otherwise it would be a burden to keep them around. It is, though, a failing for action, praxis, to be incomplete. Slaves have incomplete souls because they cannot fully engage in action.⁵ It is because slaves cannot engage in praxis and so, a fortiori, in the good life, that slaves are instruments (organa) with respect to praxis, not poiēsis. Slaves might be defined as instruments for action, but they themselves can only engage in making.

When Aristotle defines motion as the actualization of a potential qua potential, he goes on to say that motion is incomplete because “the subject of whose potentiality kinesis is the energeia is incomplete” (Ph. III.1. 201b31–33; see also Met. IX.6. 1048b23–35). So here: incomplete praxis is the praxis of an incomplete human being. All humans engage in productive actions. But slaves differ from complete human beings because their central, essential, characteristic activities are incomplete. They act for the sake of something outside the actions, namely, the master. Since their actions are essentially incomplete, or, what is the same thing, essentially instrumental, children, women, and slaves are all in different ways incomplete human beings: “The activity of imperfect things is imperfect” (EE II.1. 1219a37–38); “Nothing incomplete is happy because it is not a whole” (EE II.1.1219b7–8).⁶

It follows that slaves are by nature part of a master/slave relation. If their actions are incomplete, then those actions, and the slaves themselves, must be part of someone else. That argument doesn’t apply to domestic animals. Their souls are not incomplete, and they are not part of the master. The master, in an important sense, is the household. The ruler of a polis, by contrast, is not the same as the polis itself. L’état, c’est moi is the definition of tyranny. A household comprises a master and a set of other people who are incomplete and so depend on the head of the household. A polis is a selfsufficient community of self-sufficient people (III.1.1275b20–21).

Aristotle does not write slaves out of humanity, though, because of their incompleteness. As we will see, slavishness, the psychological attitude manifested most obviously in slaves, is a truly human trait. Beasts and gods form the nonhuman boundaries around humanity: “Anyone who cannot form a community with others, or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a polis—he is either a beast (thērion) or a god” (I.2.1253a28–29; cf. NE VII.1.1145a20–28); this is very different from saying that without a polis people are either masters or slaves. It is wild beasts—not the domesticated animals with which he compares slaves—and gods, not despots, who can and must naturally live outside cities. Beasts and gods are perfect exemplars of their kinds, unlike masters and slaves, who are incomplete human beings. (We will later see the senses in which Aristotle does and does not follow Hegel in seeing masters as well as slaves as incomplete.) Any people who can fully live their lives without a polis are complete in some nonhuman way, as beasts and gods are, rather than incomplete or corrupt in some human way, like slaves and the unruly Europeans whom we will meet in VII.7. In contrast to beasts and gods, people are political animals.⁷

Both the slave and the person who makes mastery the center of his life fail to live politically; they do not successfully live some other way, as animals do. They are failed political animals. Slaves fail in a way that makes them incomplete. Mastery is more complex. The full human being and citizen is a master, but only of slaves. Someone who makes dominating others, especially free people, the organizing goal of his life is a failure in a more serious way that I will turn to in later sections of this chapter. Our human nature impels us to live as citizens in poleis, although not everyone can or does; not everyone wants to.

Not being able to engage in praxis makes someone an incomplete human being. Praxis is tied to human nature and the human function in ways making is not. There are no natural farmers or poets: “a slave is among the things that exist by nature, whereas no shoemaker is, nor any other sort of craftsman” (I.13.1260b1–2).⁸ There are natural men and women, adults and children, and, according to Aristotle, free men and slaves. All these natural distinctions are connected to praxis. Praxeis are constitutive of the good life and the good community. Makings are essentially incomplete, and slaves are in no way inferior to freemen in the performance of poiēsis. But excellence in craft cannot qualify anyone for citizenship.⁹

II. SLAVERY AND SLAVISHNESS

I now want to look at slavery outside its literal application within the household to see its political significance, and then, in the next section, consider mastery and its expansion beyond the household. There is slavery and there is slavishness. Slavishness is not confined to the household but is more widely distributed. In I.13 Aristotle notes that “vulgar craftsmen have a kind of delimited slavery” (ho banausos technitēs aphōrismenēn tina echei douleian) (1260b1). “A slave shares his master’s life, whereas a vulgar craftsman is at a greater remove” (1260a39–40), although which of these undesirable situations is ethically preferable, Aristotle does not say.¹⁰ The metaphorical extensions of slavery to the craftsman who works for money in Book I is recalled in Book VIII, where he says that those who play music or practice other crafts to win attention or wealth aim at pleasure rather than what is good and so they too are banausic (VIII.6.1341a5–14). Slavishness as a psychic condition extends more widely than the institution of slavery itself. “It makes much difference what object one has in view in a pursuit or study; if one follows it for the sake of oneself or one’s friends, or on moral grounds, it is not illiberal, but the man who follows the same pursuit because of other people would often appear to be acting in a menial and servile manner” (VIII.2.1337b17–21; see also see III.4.1277b3–7, VII.16.1335b5–11, NE IV.3.1124b31–1125a1, Rh. I.9.1367a–31). People engaged in trade and moneymaking try to please their customers, and so choose the pleasant over what is truly good.¹¹ Therefore they cannot be good citizens, and will not be citizens in a good state.

Slavishness is even more threatening today, since it is less shameful. Slavishness is in a sense a default position: if people are not brought up properly, they will choose life rather than a good life, and so lead vulgar and slavish lives. People who organize their lives around acquiring wealth are slavish, even if not slaves, because to aim at wealth is to aim at satisfying the ends of people other than oneself. The customer, rather than virtue, is always right. Being wealthy might protect someone in Greece against being sold into slavery, but it does not protect anyone from living a slavish life. (If part of slavishness is directing one’s actions toward satisfying another, it does not follow that the opposite of slavishness is selfishness. It is choosing things that are their own end, things worth doing for their own sake.)

Slavish people cannot lead a civic life and cannot be happy, because they aim at life rather than living well: so much for the civil society Adam Smith sees emerging out of people’s desires to please each other and satisfy their demands instead of through servile emotions. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”¹² The trouble, for Smith, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of Aristotle’s Works
• Introduction: Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together
• 1. Book I: Slavery and the Will to Power
• 2. Book II: Aristotle’s State as a Work of Art
• 3. The Justice of Book III and the Incompleteness of the Normative
• 4. Practical Knowledge and the Four Orientations to the Best
• 5. Factions and the Paradox of Aristotelian Practical Science
• 6. The Best Life and the Common Life
• Conclusion: People as Political Animals
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Names
• Index of Passages in Aristotle’s Works