1. PHIL 219
Aristotle Politics, Pt. 1

2. Aristotle ( B.C.E.)
Aristotle was born in Thrace (what is now northern Greece).
His father served as the court physician of Amyntas II of Macedon, the grandfather of Alexander the Great.
At the age of 17, Aristotle was sent to Athens to study with Plato at his Academy. He stayed there until Plato’s death.
After Plato’s death, Aristotle left the Academy and travelled around the Greek world for a few years. His travels came to an end when he was call to serve as a tutor to Alexander until Alexander became King.
He eventually returned to Athens and set up his own school, called the Lyceum after the area of Athens in which it was located.

3. Plato’s Metaphysics

4. Plato’s Politics
Plato’s poltiical theory is articulated in a number of different works, but the most important is a dialogue entitled Republic.
It’s a dialogue devoted to the question: What is Dikaiosune?
Dikaiosune is a complicated Greek word. It is usually translated as ‘justice,’ but probably means something closer to ‘the proper way to live one’s life.’
Plato identifies dikaiosune in the city as the well-orderedness of the city: each sort of person doing what they are best suited for.
Injustice is the opposite (persons with one soul taking on the role of persons with another).
Famously, Plato insists that a city/nation will be just only when philosophers rule.
He’s advocating an aristocracy (rule of the best/finest).

5. What does this city look like?
A large part of Book V of the Republic is devoted to articulating a social structure that is consistent with and supportive of this just city.
Notable features include:
Recognition of the differences between men and women combined with the recognition that those differences don’t necessarily lead to differences in function. Women can pay any role in the city.
Arranged marriages (eugenics).
Shared, common rearing of children.
No ownership of private property in the guardian/ruling class.

6. From Aristocracy to Tyranny
Of course, the aristocracy advocated by Plato is an ideal. In reality, this ideal can be corrupted and thus fall short of its promise.
In Book VIII, Plato offers us an analysis of the possible stages of this corruption (matched with states of the soul), which is also a presentation of and analysis of the limitations of other political forms.
Timocracy: government of ambition or honor (spirited soul dominates).
Oligarchy: government dominated by interests of the wealthy (appetitive soul dominates, but not exclusively).
Democracy: government of the many: poor outnumber the rich, so they take over (total domination of appetite).
Tyranny: government of one: the anarchy of the ‘freedom’ leads people to yearn for a protector who inevitably takes all power for themselves (the tyrannical soul, completely without justice)

7. An Inevitable corruption?
“…when your guardians...arrange unseasonable marriages, the children of such marriages will not be well-endowed or fortunate. The best of them will be established in power by their predecessors; but nevertheless they will be unworthy of it...”(112c1).
“…the instant the son has seen and felt this (the ruin of his honor loving father)...he turns to money-getting, makes mean and petty savings...he is a squalid man, making a profit out of everything...the oligarchic city...values money above everything” (117c1-2).
“Is not the transition from oligarchy to democracy brought about by an intemperate craving...to become as wealthy as possible?...Democracy...arises whenever the poor win the day” ( ).
“…democracy, and only democracy, lays the foundation of tyrany” (125c1).

8. Why Justice?
So, why does this all come out in a discussion of Dikaiosune?
As we’ve just seen, the explanation for the degeneration of governments is ultimately attributable to souls that are out of balance: souls that lack Dikaiosune.
The tyrant is just the most striking and obvious case of this.
The only remedy is to cultivate dikaiosune in souls and in cities, and the only cultivation possible is philosophy.

9. From Plato to Aristotle
Though Plato had a clear influence on Aristotle’s thinking, Aristotle comes to very different metaphysical conclusions than Plato.
For Aristotle, the fundamental level of reality is what he calls ‘substance’ (ousia), actually existing, particular things.
Substances are unities of form and matter, which can be thought independently but never are separate from each other.
Form is the ‘whatness’ of a thing; matter is what the thing is made of.
Example: Statue

10. Nichomachean Ethics
The Nichomachean Ethics is one of Aristotle’s most influential works. It continues to influence discussions in ethics up to the present day.
It is a study of human character, the forms it takes, how it is influenced, and how it can be shaped.
It is also an explicitly political work, as the ultimate goal of social organization is human well-being, a goal that is necessarily informed by questions of human character.
Rather than begin by just asserting the desirable elements of human character, Aristotle opens the discussion in the Nichomachean Ethics with an analysis of what is good for human beings.
The answer that he arrives at is Eudaimonia: usually translated as happiness, it is defined by Aristotle more technically as a state of the soul that expresses virtue.
For Aristotle, “soul” is a way of pointing to those activities characteristic of a living thing.
The word translated as “virtue” (Arete) is perhaps more accurately translated as “excellence.” It refers to the highest functioning of a thing.
A soul expresses virtue when it exhibits its characteristic activity to the highest possible degree.

11. Virtue
Understanding human character then is ultimately about understanding the activities characteristic of human beings, in their highest functioning.
That’s why Aristotle devotes so much of the Nichomachean Ethics to the discussion of virtue.
As Aristotle analyzes it, virtue can be distinguished into two different types.
Intellectual virtues are excellences of the mind, and have their origin in teaching (exs. are wisdom and prudence).
Moral virtues are excellences of what we typically call moral character and have their origin in habituation/training (exs. are courage and temperance).
In either case, it’s important to recognize that we are not naturally virtuous, but can become so.

12. A Mean
One of the most influential elements of Aristotle’s account of virtue is his insistence that as a state, it has to be understood as an intermediate one (one that is neither superfluous nor deficient).
Virtue, in other words, is a mean, not in a mathematical sense but in the sense of a relative value, specific to the individual.
More determinately, it is a mean between two extremes (which Aristotle calls vices), one of excess and one of deficiency.

13. Justice
Aristotle’s treatment of justice both clearly expands on and responds to Plato’s account offered in the Republic.
For Aristotle, justice is one of the moral virtues, but understanding its nature as a mean is more complex than in the other cases.
This becomes clear right away, when Aristotle tries to define justice.

14. A Complex Definition
Aristotle offers us a series of defining feature of justice.
Justice is “that kind of state of character which makes people disposed to do what is just" where doing what is just is explained as acting justly and desiring justice (153c1).
Justice is both "the lawful" and "the fair" (153c2).
Justice is whatever produces and maintains happiness and its parts for a political community (154c1).
Finally, justice is "complete virtue…in relation to our neighbor" ( or "the greatest of virtues”) (154c1).

15. From Plato to Aristotle (Redux)
This last sense is in particular of a piece with Plato’s account, but Aristotle thinks that its generality is too vague. We need an account of justice that is more specific.
We need such an account because sometimes we want to identify an act as unjust that is not specifically connected to any particular vice (for example, adultery).
A. suggests that the more specific sense of justice is of a piece with the more general sense. The issue thus becomes: what differentiates the one from the other?
Provisionally, he asserts that justice in the specific sense concerns itself with 'divisible goods' and thus with concern for profit (maximizing control of such goods).
A. then goes on to make a further distinction in the specific sense of justice between distributive justice and rectificatory justice (justice in exchange).
This latter category is further specified into justice when the exchange is voluntary and justice when it is involuntary.

16. Justice and Law
One of the important themes of the rest of the discussion of justice is Aristotle’s recognition of a gap between justice and law.
The important thing to recognize about the law is that it is a contingent and particular expression that can, but need not, express justice (it can also express custom, culture, prejudice, etc.).
This is obvious when we consider the closely related concepts of equity (fairness) and the equitable. These are concepts that serve an important corrective function when the law cannot adequately address the specific features of a situation. They help to make the law more just.

17. The Politics
Unlike the Nichomachean Ethics, the textual status of the Politics is unclear.
Many Aristotle scholars insist that it was not written as a single, integrated work.
It may very well be a collection of lectures that Aristotle gave at different times on different themes, collected later by students.
It’s certainly true that he at times seems to say contradictory things.
The books of the Politics collected here do form a thematic, developmental whole (we’ll be working on that assumption).

18. The Polis
Book I begins by focusing on what for Aristotle is the proper object of politics: the polis (city- state).
He defines the polis as a “species of association” where association (koinonia: also “community” or “commonality”) is a communal existence aimed at some good.
That association which aims at the highest good the political one, the one that constitutes the polis.
Note the connection to the Ethics.

19. A Natural Kind
It’s crucial to recognize that for Aristotle, the Polis is a natural development, predicated on more basic, natural forms of association.
The most basic forms of human association reflect our nature as humans:
husband and wife: stems from the natural desire to reproduce;
master and slave: stems from natural superiority: some individuals are naturally suited to be rulers, others to be slaves.
Together, these relationships constitute the household or family. They are "instituted for the satisfaction of daily recurrent needs" (166c2).
Building on this first level of association, a second level is the village. In its most basic form, it's an extended family living in close connection.

20. The Final and Perfect Association
The Polis is a natural outcome of the merging of several villages. Like the household and the village, it is a natural, not an artificial, kind. It exists by physis (nature), not by nomos (convention).
There is a difference, however. While its predecessors came to be "for the sake of mere life", the polis exists "for the sake of a good life” (167c1).
Aristotle connects self-sufficiency with the good life. The final cause (end, purpose, function) of the polis is self-sufficiency, in the sense of enabling individuals to live good lives.

21. Zoon Politikon
The “naturalness” of political association explains why Aristotle insists that humans are “political animal[s].” For him, it is part of human nature to associate with other individuals in a city-state:
...the city belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and ... man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city, by reason of his own nature and not of some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or a being higher than man... (167c1)
The point is not simply that we live in groups -- most other animals do that. Humans are different:
only humans use language
this enable us to communicate with one another about what things are beneficial and what things are harmful
only we can perceive the difference between good and evil, just and unjust
"it is association in these things which makes a family and a city" (167c2).
Aristotle continues, ”…the city is prior in the order of nature to the family and the individual."
By this he seems to mean that a human living apart from a city is not really human; he is either "a beast or a god", even though we might still apply the label "human" to him. An individual is not really or fully human apart from the polis.
The account Aristotle offers here is very different than what Plato does in the Republic. Plato was describing the development of a hypothetical, perfect polis; Aristotle wants to explain how an actual polis comes to exist. But they both agree that the polis is a natural phenomenon, not a conventional one.

22. Households
Most of the remainder of Book I is devoted to the discussion of the various particular forms of association we observe in the household.
As the immediate origin of the others, discussion of these forms helps set the stage for the later analysis.
It’s starting point is the observation that when we look to nature, we see many different, naturally hierarchical relationships.
Ruler
Subordinate
Soul
Body
Rational Soul
Appetitive Soul
Humans
Domestic Animals
Men
Women
Ruler
Subordinate
Soul
Body
Rational Soul
Appetitive Soul
Humans
Domestic Animals

23. A Special Case: Slavery
According to Aristotle, these relationships are all natural and beneficial. The relationship between masters and slaves is like these others: it is also natural and beneficial.
 ...all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service) -- all such are by nature slaves. In their case, as in the other cases just mentioned, it is better to be ruled by a master (170c1).
 A natural slave meets two conditions:
He is capable of becoming the property of another (and because of this actually does become someone's property).
He can understand the reasoning of others but cannot reason well himself -- i.e., he can understand and carry out a plan given to him by someone else, but he can't develop a plan of his own.
Here Aristotle is advocating a natural subordination theory of authority. When it comes to masters and slaves (and to men and women), masters (men) have the moral authority to rule slaves (women) due to the good consequences (for both the master and the slave) that stem from the fact that the party who is naturally superior is controlling the party that is naturally inferior.
This might look like a partial answer to one of our guiding questions: What is the nature of authority. In particular, it might look like an answer to that question that applies to masters and slaves: it is the natural superiority (with regard to rationality) of masters over slaves that justifies the rule of the former over the latter. 
But the authority of master over slave is not political authority. The authority of a legitimate political ruler does not stem from natural superiority, since it is an authority of equals over equals.