• NOS4A2
    10k
    Question

    When dissecting the polis in his Politics (Book 1) Aristotle begins at two kinds of human couplings, one between man and woman, and the other between natural ruler and natural subject, masters and slaves. To him these are unions of “those who cannot exist without each other”.

    He then charts the evolution of these unions through the poems and histories of Homer and Hesiod, imagining as they grow from families, to households, to villages, and to the polis as the final cause. The polis is the end of all other relationships; and since nature is an end, the polis exists by nature. Accordingly, “the impulse to form a partnership of this kind is present in all men by nature”, as if the flower is always present in the seed. It is from this assumption of human nature that Aristotle reckons “man is by nature a political animal”.

    Some, like Aquinas, figure Aristotle meant something like “social animal”. However Hannah Arendt writes in her Human Condition that this was a Roman mistranslation which “betrays the extent to which the original Greek understanding of politics had been lost” (pg. 23). To Arendt the exact opposite was the case, as “the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family” (pg. 24). At any rate, there appears to be some equivocation between "political" and "social" among various translations and interpretations of Aristotle's Politics.

    I wanted to farm some insight on the matter and am curious as to what far more superior minds think about the question. If not a mere social animal, what sort of man does Aristotle envisage when he describes the political animal (πολιτικὸν ζῷον)?

    I have my own opinion below for those who care to read it.

    ***

    Opinion

    I agree with Arendt that the concept πολιτικὸν ζῷον ought not be conflated with the concept “social animal”. Though Aristotle claims in his first assertion that “Every polis is as we see a sort of partnership [κοινωνία]”, as if every polis began with some sort of agreement between men of equal standing, Aristotle’s inclusion of the master and slave as a fundamental and natural partnership inherent to the polis, along with his exclusion of barbarians and presumably other stateless individuals, is telling. It opens his theory to criticism and lends his polis an anti-social quality rather than a social one. Further, the master/slave relationship is a matter of convention rather than of nature. Others (though he does not mention who, as far as I’m aware) commonly raised this objection even in his own time.

    The use of the word κοινωνία (partnership, association, communion) to describe the polis at the outset of his Politics implies a form of social contract theory, that perennial myth of how states form. We’re supposed to imagine that everyone got together to form the polis as if they were raising a barn, and we’ve all been working together to maintain it. To refute this all we need do is show that this partnership is in fact not a voluntary one, or is otherwise applied to people who have zero social relations, and so is not a partnership in any meaningful sense. Should one of Aristotle’s elemental partnerships prove to be involuntary, then so is the polis, at least if we apply his own method. The master/slave relationship is involuntary. And more often than not these relationships are applied mistakenly to those who might have no social relations, for instance between one slave and another. Therefor, not only is the πολιτικὸν ζῷον not a mere social animal, but also the polis itself is not a society in the in Latin sense. It is not a fellowship, communion, or partnership formed for any specific purpose as might be found among groups of voluntary association and other actual relations.

    Another thrust to the equivocation between the political animal and the more natural and social animal was raised by Hobbes. Social animals live in society, but unlike men, they do not require any coercive power. The difference here is that the “agreement” of creatures such as bees and ants is natural, whereas with man it is by covenant, and thereby artificial. Hobbes adds another component necessary to conceive of the political animal, and to maintain the covenant, “which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit" (Chapter XVII).

    With all of this in mind, I believe the πολιτικὸν ζῷον would be better conceived as a sort of state animal, a creature of the polis, who accepts and embodies the state covenants as described by Hobbes. The state animal possesses something of the master and slave quality that Aristotle sees. With them he possesses the desire to lead or be led, govern or be governed, and will accept his standing as one or the other or both. He sees his relationship to the Common Power as a pairing of “those who cannot exist without each other”. Moreover, he has “the impulse to form a partnership of this kind”. He does not feel that no man is fit enough to be another master, or that involuntary relationships are morally illegitimate, and no amount of conscience will lead him to question it. The unnatural and anti-social arrangements provided by the state and other state creatures suits him well enough.

    The danger I see is that this creature is forced to divide his social reality into two realms, as both Hobbes and Arendt do, into Public and Private, and exist within the interface between the two. In that sense I think Aristotle was somewhat prophetic. We have the actual social reality, formed by the “natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family”, and then we have the artificial, purely symbolic one—Leviathan (to get a sense of the symbolic nature of political society, John Searle makes a decent case in his The Construction of Social Reality). Over a long period of time and enough evolution I fear one will eventually subsume the other, and the political animal will supersede the merely social one if it hasn't already.
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition," will answer this for you. There are various free PDFs you can find online. You'll have to enter into a different constellation of thought to understand where Aristotle is coming from.

    Relationships end in the Polis because that is the Public Sphere of Equality. The private house hold is where the inequality of relationships was housed.
  • J
    2.1k
    Further, the master/slave relationship is a matter of convention rather than of nature.NOS4A2

    I believe Aristotle said it could be either. There are "natural" slaves, and also those enslaved forcibly whose nature is otherwise. Probably in the Politics?
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    I know, I cited it in the OP. Also Hobbes. Also Aquinas. But I was hoping to start a discussion, not a reading.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    I believe Aristotle said it could be either. There are "natural" slaves, and also those enslaved forcibly whose nature is otherwise. Probably in the Politics?

    You’re correct, but since Aristotle I think we’ve come to find that there is no such thing as a natural slave, that they are all slaves by “convention”.
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    Fair. Fair. I thought maybe you were asking because of some section you may have read vs the whole.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    I think Aristotle has an archetype in mind, and am wondering what that archetype may have looked like. Part master, part slave, maybe?
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    Well, Arendt states that the Social class was vastly different in Rome than in Greek... lemme pull it up.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    Sure, but I was more curious as to what you believe. Is it a civilian? A city-dweller? Who or what possesses the qualities Aristotle sees?
  • J
    2.1k
    I hope so! I wasn't sure how closely you wanted to adhere to Aristotle's conceptions here.

    The public/private question is extremely interesting. You may know that Jurgen Habermas has suggested a different understanding of what a "public sphere" might encompass. Habermas sees the public sphere as a "third space" (in Hartmut Wessler's phrase) between the private world of family life (and, possibly, economic life), and the public world of the state and political practice. Broadly, the public sphere is meant to be the place where private citizens, qua private citizens, meet to discuss issues of common concern, up to and including questions of political and state authority in which they themselves may also participate.

    Without delving too deeply into this, it suggests an interpretation of "political animal" that might have interested Aristotle. If there is indeed this "third space," then it seems to represent a co-dependence between the role of private citizen and that of participating member of the polis. Can these two aspects of human nature indeed "exist without each other"?
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    It opens his theory to criticism and lends his polis an anti-social quality rather than a social one. Further, the master/slave relationship is a matter of convention rather than of nature.NOS4A2

    The proportion varied and is certainly exaggerated in Xenophon's report from Sparta, where among four thousand people in the market place, a foreigner
    counted no more than sixty citizens (Helknica iii. 35).
    — Reference 23 in Human Condition

    I feel Aristotle perhaps reified the notion that master and slave was a natural thing because of how few citizens there were which were actually considered as equals. The private realm of Citizens was part of the ruling class because each house had its own "army of slaves," which was a wide array of craftsmen, to law makers and of course the common slave.

    Every citizen was of the ruling class. Not just the tyrant alone...

    Every citizen his own king, where as the social is more like one big family controlled by the Nation State. The Nation State monopolizes power and violence.

    Where as Power and Violence was seen as a necessity to the Greek.

    What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polls life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimmla, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. — Hannah Arendt

    The social man of today is just a tamed domesticated house cat compared to the political man of the Greek. The political man of the Greek assumed the rights to his own values...

    Hence the greatest utility of polytheism Joyful Wisdom 143 Nietzsche:

    The Greatest Utility of Polytheism.—For the individual to set up his own ideal and derive from it his laws, his pleasures and his rights—that has perhaps been hitherto regarded as the most monstrous of all human aberrations, and as idolatry in itself; in fact, the few who have ventured to do this have always needed to apologise to themselves,[Pg 179] usually in this wise: "Not I! not I! but a God, through my instrumentality!" It was in the marvellous art and capacity for creating Gods—in polytheism—that this impulse was permitted to discharge itself, it was here that it became purified, perfected, and ennobled; for it was originally a commonplace and unimportant impulse, akin to stubbornness, disobedience and envy. To be hostile to this impulse towards the individual ideal,—that was formerly the law of every morality. There was then only one norm, "the man"—and every people believed that it had this one and ultimate norm. But above himself, and outside of himself, in a distant over-world, a person could see a multitude of norms: the one God was not the denial or blasphemy of the other Gods! It was here that individuals were first permitted, it was here that the right of individuals was first respected. The inventing of Gods, heroes, and supermen of all kinds, as well as co-ordinate men and undermen—dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils—was the inestimable preliminary to the justification of the selfishness and sovereignty of the individual...

    Hence Sisyphus was actually rewarded with with his own demigod status of the ideal representing Eu Prattein, because in life he was the definition of Aristeuein from assuming the rights to his own values and triumphantly affirming those demands of his own life, besting multiple gods.

    The "well-born" simply felt themselves the "happy"; they did not have to manufacture their happiness artificially through looking at their enemies, or in cases to talk and lie themselves into happiness (as is the custom with all resentful men); and similarly, complete men as they were, exuberant with strength, and consequently necessarily energetic, they were too wise to dissociate happiness from action—activity becomes in their minds necessarily counted as happiness (that is the etymology of εὖ πρἆττειν)—all in sharp contrast to the "happiness" of the weak and the oppressed, with their festering venom and malignity, among whom happiness appears essentially as a narcotic, a deadening, a quietude, a peace, a "Sabbath," an enervation of the mind and relaxation of the limbs,—in short, a purely passive phenomenon. — Nietzsche, from Genealogy of Morals 10
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    Very interesting, I wasn’t not aware of Habermas’ thoughts on the matter. Thank you.

    I like your thinking here. Personally, I believe the political animal and the social animal, and also the public and private realms, can exist without each other. But I fear one realm, or at least the conditions one might find in such a realm, is replacing that of the other.
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    Hannah Arendt mentions that on page 31 or so...? The government became the right bearer of necessity rather than the individual. The social was to make a more calculable man, easier to control, a norm of society that all think similarly through the collective housekeeping of society.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    Good work. Much to chew on here. It’s interesting to note that to Aristotle (if I remember correctly), any man who was without the polis was either a beast or a god.
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    Thanks for bringing up the discussion, I hadn't got the connection quite yet in my mind, it was there, as a "hintegedanke" but this solidified the bridge for me. Appreciate it.
  • J
    2.1k
    Glad it struck a chord for you. And -- again, not to get too sidetracked on Habermas -- but he started out being very critical of the public sphere in contemporary life, feeling that the role of the state was increasingly intruding upon private life, turning "public (sphere) discourse" into public relations conducted by interested parties. This speaks to your concern that the political may often represent a forced indoctrination, thus in effect "replacing" a private realm where society can be viewed as apolitical. Habermas then tempered this a bit, saying that it was "too simplistic." He came to have a higher regard for the social animal's ability to resist politicization.

    God knows what Aristotle would think of current Western democracies. Not much, is my guess.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    Now you’re speaking my language. Do you remember the work? I always found Habermas too difficult to read and never got into him. But your summary here has inspired me to give him another shot.
  • J
    2.1k
    Do you remember the work?NOS4A2

    The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989. He is hard, or at any rate not a brilliant stylist, but I've always found him more than worth the trouble. There's also a critique called Habermas and the Public Sphere (1993) in which other philosophers respond to him, and he replies with more optimistic reflections about the public sphere. That might be a good place to start.
  • Paine
    2.9k

    It was stated as a limit for man which some did (or could) not observe:

    From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune city-less is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the ‘clanless, lawless, hearthless ’ man reviled by Homer, for he is by nature city-less and also a lover of war) inasmuch as he resembles an isolated piece at draughts. And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to signify those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.

    Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the The State prior in nature, household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but to bear their names in an equivocal sense. It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.
    — Aristotle, Politics, 1253a forward, translated by H Rackham
  • J
    2.1k
    This passage suggests that, for Aristotle, the state is a "whole" with parts comprising households and individuals. Do you know whether he ever considers the question of how a state, in turn, might be a part of some greater whole? Or did he see the polis as both a practical and a theoretical limit point of social organization?
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    I suppose his biological divisions into animal kingdoms might indicate a greater whole, but I’m not aware if he believed in higher political partnerships.

    It’s interesting to note, though, that his metaphor of the state as a living body, particularly a human body, has been used until modern times. Head of state, corpus (corporation), body politic, for example, are remnants of that metaphor and have persisted through the history of statism. Perhaps Hobbes was right that we must conceive of it as an Artificial Man.
  • Paine
    2.9k

    Well, he was aware of the Persian empire through the long struggle with them. Alexander was out on his horse conquering it around then. The issue here is that life of a city is said to be natural. The city
    is the result of the partnership, not the other way around. The capacity for the activity has to be present. The whole thing is tits-up if the only humans around are "incapable of entering into partnership:

    if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. — Aristotle, Politics, 1253a forward, translated by H Rackham

    What interests me is how the "divine" is also a disability from this point of view. The gods are really not fond of sharing stuff.
  • J
    2.1k
    This fits with what I (think I) know about classical Greek culture -- there really wasn't a concept of "civilization" or "humanity" (as a non-scientific category). Presumably Aristotle didn't see any further wholeness to be achieved by, for instance, thinking in terms of a united "Grecian civilization," rather than the various city-states. That would have been so hypothetical as to be not worth taking seriously, I guess. Of course, many today still draw the line at the idea of a "United Nations" or even a "European Union." What I'm getting at is that the "part - whole" picture stops with the polis. There's no further whole to which a polis might stand in relation as a part, as @NOS4A2 says.

    That quote about "either a lower animal or a god" is a bit tricky. Aristotle didn't think it was possible for a man to be either a lower animal or a god, right? So this is rhetoric. What he's really saying seems to be, "Since this is impossible, all humans are capable of entering into partnership; they are political animals."
  • Paine
    2.9k
    Aristotle didn't think it was possible for a man to be either a lower animal or a god, right?J

    He recognized that many men live as beasts. He also recognized that a man benefited from seeking the highest life expressed in varying representations of the divine. We are also capable of not being good men:

    but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state. — Aristotle, Politics, 1253a forward, translated by H Rackham
  • J
    2.1k
    Oh, I see. So he's pointing out possible extremes of divergence from our human nature -- not literally "beast" and "god." Makes sense. Interesting, too, that it's partnership in knowledge of "good and bad, right and wrong" etc. that leads us from individual to household to city-state. The capacity for partnership must be realized in this particular way, not just any form of partnership or cooperation.
  • Paine
    2.9k
    The capacity for partnership must be realized in this particular way, not just any form of partnership or cooperation.J

    Between the parties with actual interest in what will happen in the future.
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    703
    I believe for example the case that the Barbarian man, as it is detailed by the Greek, to be the man who lives completely without the privacy of a household life.

    The Dionsysian Barbarian for example, was often depicted as the Satyr.
  • Paine
    2.9k

    Aristotle is interesting in that regard because his pupil, Alexander, was reported to have pissed off his fellow Macedonians by adopting some Persian customs and dress. As he conquered very different places, he often paid respect to their divinities.

    Perhaps he displayed an interest in diversity and the cosmopolitan that his teacher would view as being too woke and disrespectful.

    On the other hand, Aristotle was a bit of a stranger himself. He left Athens when a certain group who really did not like him gained power. The dude lost his Visa.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    I don’t know, but Aristotle considered barbarians to be natural slaves, and natural slaves are a necessary component of the polis. But that wouldn’t complete the dyad of “those who cannot exist without each other”, even though they were existing just fine without a master. So perhaps the polis extends beyond the city and the barbarians are just out there waiting for a master.
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