The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy

Judith A. Swanson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501740848
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being of the political order.

Swanson presents an innovative reading of The Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life—maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private.

The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women.

1

THE HOUSEHOLD: A PRIVATE SOURCE OF PUBLIC MORALITY

According to a widely accepted interpretation, one promoted unreservedly by Hannah Arendt, Aristotle depicts the private in the following ways: (1) as distinct and separate from the public; (2) as corresponding to the household; (3) as serving only individual and species survival; and, most notably, (4) as justifying “force and violence . . . because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves.” On this interpretation, Aristotle reveals “tremendous contempt” for the private by depicting it as a dark, despotic, and subhuman sphere in which freedom does not exist. “In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities.”¹

It follows in this widespread interpretation that Aristotle thinks that a “truly human” life awaits in the public sphere. One must earn this life by mustering the courage to leave the sheltered and predictable (if wretched) household.² One needs courage also to participate in the unpredictable world outside the household: the speeches, deeds, and political affairs of men. Moreover, in challenging men to initiate speech and action, the political realm calls on each “to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all (aien aristeuein).” Freedom lies exclusively in the political realm because only through political speech and action can one excel and reveal one’s individuality. On this account, Aristotle connects freedom with excellence and excellence with individuality, and he specifies agonistic political action as the means to all three. Accordingly, Arendt claims, “the ‘good life,’ as Aristotle called the life of the citizen, therefore was not merely better, more carefree or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different quality.”³

As I noted in the Introduction, I contest the view that Aristotle equates the private with the household. I argue that he conceives the private as activities, not as sites, and as activities not restricted to the household. An activity qualifies as private, if it cultivates virtue without accommodating or conforming to common opinion. Because in Aristotle’s view the household can and should contain private activities, my interpretation acknowledges that he regards the household as a private place; that is, the private status of the household derives from its affording an opportunity to practice unqualified virtue.⁴

In the first three chapters of this book I consider the activities (and, to illuminate them, their agents) that Aristotle believes the household should contain and contest Arendt’s interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of the household. I do not dispute that Aristotle thinks the purpose of the household is to meet basic needs and foster the survival of the species, but I do dispute that he thinks fulfillment of this purpose requires force and violence. Chapters 1 and 2 show that he thinks the exercise of prudence on the part of household rulers can bring about the satisfaction of needs. Chapter 2 shows that in his view nature facilitates meeting needs without coercion by providing human beings who are inclined to do necessary tasks. Chapters 1 and 3 show that fostering species survival through marriage and child rearing does not require violence or despotism according to Aristotle. In these three chapters I also contest the view that Aristotle thinks the only purpose of the household is to meet individual and species needs. The household’s other main purpose is to cultivate moderation and judgment in its members. Members may distinguish themselves by the way and the extent to which they exercise these virtues. Finally, these beginning chapters show that Aristotle does not perceive a “gulf” between the public and the private: ideally, human beings serve the public by exercising the uncompromised virtue acquired in the household both inside and outside the household. More precisely, my discussion shows that the household is, as Arendt says, distinct from the city, but not in the way she claims—and thus is not separate in the radical way she attributes to Aristotle.⁵

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN THE HOUSEHOLD AND THE CITY

Rejecting Arendt’s interpretation that Aristotle conceives the household to be radically separate and opposed to the good life offered by the city points to the hypothesis that he conceives it to be like the city and thus to foster living well. But does rejecting her interpretation entail endorsing the claim that Aristotle conceives the household and the city to be virtually or essentially identical? How far does Aristotle go in assimilating the household and the city?

Does he go as far as Hegel, for example? According to Hegel, the family is “the first . . . ethical root of the state.”⁶ The state is prior to the family insofar as the purpose of the latter derives from the former:

The philosophic proof of the concept of the state is the development of ethical life from its immediate phase through civil society, the phase of division, to the state, which then reveals itself as the true ground of these phases. . . . Actually, therefore, the state as such is not so much the result as the beginning. It is within the state that the family is first developed into civil society, and it is the Idea of the state itself which disrupts itself into these two moments.⁷

For Hegel, then, the family is theoretically a moment of the state, reflecting the state’s rational foundations. The family maintains its distinctiveness only insofar as it is a particular instance of the universality of the state; that is, it “contains the moments of subjective particularity and objective universality in a substantial unity.”⁸

On the one hand, some of Aristotle’s claims seem to support such an understanding of the household, implying that the aims of the household and the city are the same and even that the household should serve the city rather than itself. First, in being “partnerships,” the household and the city each “aim at some good” (Pol 1252a4). Moreover, the aim of the city, being “the most authoritative good of all” (1252a5–6), must subsume the good at which the household aims. Second, since “the household as a whole is a part of the city” and “the virtue of the part must have regard to that of the whole” (1260b13–15), one might infer that every aspect of the household should reflect the moral standards set forth by the regime. For example, parents should raise good citizens (1260b15–16, 19–20). Third, Aristotle seems to imply similarly, and in a part of the Politics concerning the best regime, that individuals should serve the city: “One ought not to think that a citizen belongs to himself, but that all belong to the city, for each is a part of the city” (1337a27–29). Thus again, one may infer that the household should generate good citizens. Notably, the source of one of Hegel’s claims is found in Aristotle: “The city is prior by nature to the household and to each of us” (1253a19, 25–26), suggesting perhaps that the household should adapt its purposes to those of the city. Indeed, this view seems to be strengthened by Aristotle’s explanation that the city stands to the individual as the body to the hand: a person cannot exist, or at least live well, without the city (1253a18–19). Perhaps Aristotle thinks, as Harry V. Jaffa infers, that “the polis . . . [is] the only community adequate for the fulfillment of man’s specifically human potentiality,” in which case all lesser communities must exist for the sake of it.⁹

On the other hand, not all these statements from Aristotle unequivocally support a Hegelian interpretation of his conception of the household as a phase of political goodness, its purpose virtually one with the city’s. Most of them support equally the view that the household’s purpose is different from but in accordance with the city’s. Furthermore, other passages work against interpreting Aristotle’s household as mirroring the ethical life of the city. First, the Politics opens by challenging the assumption that a household differs from a city only in size (1252a9–13). Aristotle shows, for example, that a household is more diverse than a city in that it can accommodate several forms of rule at once (1253b9–10, 1259a37–39, b1, 10–11). Second, he indicates that within a regime citizen virtue must be the same insofar as it derives from the regime (Pol 1276b30–31), yet he says that a city must be made up “of human beings differing in kind” (Pol 1261a22–24). The context—a critique of Plato’s alleged proposals for communism—indicates that Aristotle is advocating moral as well as occupational pluralism (1261a16–22, 30–37).¹⁰ Moral diversity must then derive from private sources.¹¹ Indeed, in contrasting the good man (agathos) and the good citizen (spoudaios) (Pol III.4), Aristotle indicates that their respective goodnesses derive from different sources and intimates that the good man’s goodness derives in part from the household. According to Aristotle, human beings become “good and excellent [agathoi kai spoudaioi]” through “nature, habit, and reason [phusis ethos logos]” (Pol 1332a38–40; NE 1103a23–26, 1143b6–7, 1144b4–14). Men become good citizens (spoudaioi) by being ruled in the ways of the regime and discharging a particular function within the regime (Pol 1276b30—1277a1).¹² Thus, civic virtue is incomplete insofar as it derives from only habituation and listening (not nature); furthermore, it must always be defective except in the best regime insofar as it derives from and sustains the particular standards of a regime rather than deriving from and sustaining the good life (Pol 1277a1–5, 22–23).¹³ But should we infer that good human beings can exist in regimes inferior to the best—in democracies, oligarchies, polities, and even tyrannies? To the extent that unqualified virtue derives from nature, the answer is yes, since regimes cannot determine natural ability. But because natural ability alone does not make someone virtuous (NE 1144b4–30), the possibility of good human beings in defective regimes depends on there being in the regimes a source of habituation and education other than the regime. By Book III of the Politics, where Aristotle contrasts the good man and the good citizen, he has already indicated such a source of habituation and education, for by then he has noted or discussed domestic forms of rule (politikē, basilikē, despotikē, gamikē, patrikē, oikonomikē). But he affirms the possibility of the household’s cultivating, not simply virtue that differs from civic virtue, but unqualified virtue, when he notes in Book III the possibility of a regime being constituted of (unqualifiedly) good men (1277a4–5). A reader of Aristotle must infer that the goodness of good men may derive from the household for the following reasons.

First, insofar as goodness comes from nature, and insofar as a human being’s parents are a medium for nature, a good human being’s goodness comes in this indirect sense from the household. Second, the best regime must be constituted of excellent parts, since a whole cannot be excellent without its parts being so (Pol 1332a32–34). Moreover, if such a part is truly excellent, then it must be excellent also in itself or apart. To maintain the possibility of an excellent city is then to maintain the possibility of excellent human beings and excellent households existing in defective regimes.¹⁴ The possibility of excellent human beings in inferior regimes indicates that the household may be a source of their goodness—since it is among the private sources of habituation and education in a regime. It must be inferred as well that even in the best regime virtue must come from private as well as public sources, for otherwise it would be incomplete. Laws and public institutions, even of the best sort, cannot make one fully human.¹⁵

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Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translations and Texts
• Introduction
• 1 The Household: A Private Source of Public Morality
• 2 Mastery and Slavery
• 3 Women, the Public, and the Private
• 4 The Economy: A Public Place for Private Activity
• 5 Preservative Law: Ordering the Regime
• 6 Political Education: A Preface to Justice
• 7 Private Friends and Public Citizens
• 8 Philosophy: Reciprocity between the Most Private and the Public
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index