Welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Bart with me as always since. My good friend, and Gregor, and McBrayer. How are you Greg?
Peachy King, baby Peachy King. Don't ever address me that way. So Alex, how are you doing Alex? Doing well.
I'm also a Peachy King. Yeah, but you're not in the Peach state like I am. Yeah. What's the Peach symbol for?
You by judging by your surroundings during the state of an e-creation. We just recorded an episode on German, I was on a joke about a paps blue ribbon sign. He now just shifted his computer and I see now a Heineken sign in a bunch of Guinness boxes. That's right.
Oh no, that's a lamp. That's a guest lamp. I also see pictures that usually come behind dark plastic covers, you know, up on Greg's wall. Listen, this isn't my house, okay?
It's my dad's and he's I'm not allowed to be in the service. You know, those guys, they live by a different code. They long, long times away from the family. I forgive all of that.
Yeah. I forgive all of that. You're welcome. It's freedom.
You're freedom. Right. You pay for it. Well, I mean, you're serving as a co-host on the podcast.
So what are we doing? What are we doing? We're talking about Aristotle, Uno, Punta, Uno of the politics. That sounds like fun.
Right. I thought it was book one, chapters one through two. That's right. Yeah.
Not a whole hell of a lot of reading for the boys. But there's a lot back in there. You know, the politics has always been a difficult book for me because it seems disjointed and it's less accessible, it's less immediately accessible than say the ethics. Do your students feel that?
I know you guys teach this text frequently. Do the kids walk away? I mean, in isolation, the books, I think are understandable. Peasing together the whole can sometimes be challenging.
I think that's right. Actually, I mean, I've had great success teaching this, just chapters one and two, and some other parts of the politics. I'm interested to hear what Alex has to say. But yeah, by and large, my students are much more receptive, much more attuned to the ethics state, the parts on friendship really speak to the longings of their soul.
They're interested in justice, although greatly dissatisfied by ourselves, the count of it. Courage, these things, moderation. But yeah, the politics, they're sort of like, okay, I guess this is interesting. But the first two chapters I've had great success with when it gets into the nitty-gritty and seeing the argument of the whole.
Yeah, I think you may be right. Alex will be you. Yeah. I mean, I've never talked the whole thing for that reason.
I'm going to be doing it actually this and this. I've taught selections like Greg from books one, three actually taught just as last semester, the, particularly the Republic, which interestingly, this is sort of aside the point kind of maps on to air-self and assembly women, a lot of the points that it raises, but because they both focused on similar issues. Yeah, the whole, I remember trying to, I spent one summer just working on a paper on the politics. I remember just trying to get the gist of the argument, the whole thing.
And it is, if you're trying to argue, as I think Alastry hasians always want to do, right, that this is a coherent book. It is one complete whole properly understood. It is one of the harder chooses, whereas the ethics is probably easiest one. I think you can make the art out of four.
Yeah. So we're not the title and just how it's similar to the title of the Republic. I think this sometimes gets, and the political, what's the other one you always work on, the statesman, right? So we lose this in English sometimes that these words are all closely, etymologically related.
So politics is related to, Palatea, the regime and the politician or the statesman, play a statesman. So a lot of these works, these key fundamental works of Greek philosophy had very similar titles. That's all I want to say and I'm much to add to it. Well, kick me in the Jimmy, Greg, I didn't know any of those things.
Is that right? Well, that's why folks at home turn into the new Thinkery Bay, I've collected that. So more seriously, I have to have a really good email. Let me ask you a dumb question, Greg.
All right. Is the politics the kind of response to what was going on in the Republic? Do people interpret it in this way? Or is there something else altogether?
Well, I mean, he directly responds to Plato's Republic in book two, right? Alex, and to the laws and to other sort of potentially potential versions of the best regime, Sparta, and so on a way, in a way, yes. I think that it's typically the way it's typically taught as this is much more practical than the Plato's Republic. And even others, folks, Strauss, for example, I don't think this is simply Strauss's view, but this is actually work of political science.
Yeah. Whereas, whereas Plato's Republic is thought to be a work of little flossies. This seems to be much more scientific work. We didn't run this up in the run show, but there's a comparative analysis of regime.
Exactly. And I was going to point out that Aristotle actually famously wrote scores of accounts of actual regimes, of which we only have one, his account of the Athenian regime or Athenian constitution, which was only found in the 19th century in the toilet of a very impressive Egyptian gourmaul in Cairo. Greg, is this like my intro to Harvey Mansfield where none of it's true, but it sounds right? That is the next true.
This is a... Not none of that's true. It was a bit of embellished, but yes, they only found it in the 19th century in a grave or something like that. Is that right?
I guess not. It was discovered 150 years ago. So, for 2000 years, we didn't even have any of them. So, we only just recently discovered one.
So, fingers crossed, we'll find your own dialogues. But that makes the commentary on the politics an interesting kind of question, right? Yeah. For sure.
Filling with imprecise manuscripts for a long long time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It also, I mean, he explicitly refers to the Republican laws in book two, but in the first chapter. Oh, right. The states take aim at Plato's statesmen.
Specifically, the Iliatic strangers. This is early on in the statesmen, a type of collapse, political rule, the movement of the nation, the rule of the household, the village. All is having the same sort of art. The same in Zenofins education, by the way, the opening presents it, as though those were all the same.
And just like in Plato, I presume, I think in Plato. Also in Zenofins, I think that's just an artifice that eventually is done away with it. It's not really that Zenofins, or Plato's final view, that's my guess. Yeah, yeah, and the Iliad Exchranger ultimately, I think, he tries to get at a kind of science and to make it wholly cognitive and to give us a kind of pure science of politics that's even if you're not ruling, you're still the true actual statesman.
But he ends up coming down to much more earthly realm of law, right? And at that point, the distinctiveness of the city, I think, comes into. But in a way, Aristotle just kind of jumps past that. And then it was right to law.
So we're only doing two chapters. And in the first chapter, basically, I think Aristotle's just trying to explain what he thinks human being is and what the city is. And in the second chapter, he's trying to lay out his view. I think the second chapter is him arguing that the city exists by nature and that man is by nature a political animal.
But before we jump into the heart of the text, I thought it might be worth, maybe I'm gonna put Alex on the spot, where do you put Aristotle's little science within his works as a whole? Like where does it fit? Well, you should ask. Well, I should ask.
Well, you know, I was just, what did David say? It's in his nasty works? I didn't hear it. I think he said it's in his nasty.
He made it say a lot of days, a lot of clear. For the folks at home. No, no, no, no. Well, at the end of the ethics, you know, he says, well, we need to turn to political matters so as to complete the philosophy of human affairs, right?
Now, I'm really interested in this. When I teach the politics, I'm playing an open it with a sort of selective reading of the ethics, but the ethics is trying to find the human good and by the end of book 10, it seems like you haven't. It's the philosophic life, the contemplative life devoted to the science of wisdom. And it would seem like the next thing you wanna do there is to go read the metaphysics, which is specifically examining whether the science exists and if so, what does it look like or what philosophy is in this more high flu instance.
But it's said he says, yeah, that's great. That's the highest life. But ultimately, I've been arguing to people who are persuadable, right? A lot of people just need laws.
They need to be compelled to do what's in the interest of the community. So we really need to come up with the best regime. And in a way, the place of the philosopher, I think we'll talk about this now. If you ever do the end, I think this will also be really explicit.
Is this in the end about education? Yeah, about politics. That's why I thought it was in the end. It's not simply educating philosophers in a way, right?
People who will be utterly useless to the community. And so in a way, he takes a step back, but in a way, maybe to the most more fundamental point of, okay, we've talked about human virtue, but we've virtually, what does it actually look like in the city, right? The pursuit of the good look like an actual institution and stuff like that. And that's, I think typically people read this after the ethics, but I think there's some big questions that come out of that.
So do you mind if I take a step back? Like even further out or further back? I think it's great. I love the way you situated it with the ethics, but for me, what an only cosmos man.
Thank you. That's actually, you laugh at that. That's where I'm going to go here. I'm trying to situate aerosols, political science within his account of science writ large.
And I think I'm drawing this from two places. One is metaphysics book six, the very opening lines. But also, I want to say, is it's a Jacob Klein had that thing, an introduction to aerosols, that was only a thing. An introduction.
That's it, very good. So for me, all thought for Aristotle, the beginning of the metaphysics book six, he says it divided into science and art. And then science or knowledge is divided into theoretical and practical science. And so the theoretical sciences are things like the natural sciences, maybe mathematics, metaphysics.
On one hand, and then practical sciences on the other are the human sciences. And so aerosols drawing the distinction that we no longer make between theoretical and practical science. Modern political science is mirrored or imaged or copied a copy of theoretical science. But for Aristotle, there are different kinds of sciences and the subject matter of the science is ought to be studied in different ways.
And so very simply, the human affairs ought to be studied on the following lines. You take an individual, you take a human being, the human being lives individually, he lives within a family, and he lives within a political community. And therefore, if you want to understand the practical science of human beings, you need a book or a science devoted to the individual, ethics, what the human being is like in the family, economics. And we have a spurious work attributed to Aristotle called the economics.
And then third, what does it look like for a human being in the political community? And that's the politics. And so for me, I like to situate the students. I like to situate the politics by saying, it's a human science, it's a political science.
The politics is the narrow version of the general idea of political science because it's focusing on the political community. And he distinguishes it very clearly from theoretical matters. I think it has to do with the variation of human affairs, the fact that humans have volition. And so that provides some distinction.
And I would also say, and this is based on my regular verse, although he doesn't say this explicitly, human beings are partially conventional and partially natural beings. And therefore, you have this, the scientific understanding of affairs is not simply a natural investigation like it would be with biology or something like that. I wasn't very precise there in my language. So listeners at home, folks at home might want to press me and defend myself a little better.
But it's not as neat in the human sciences as it is in the theoretical sciences. But he does, sorry, just to contradict myself once more. In the ethics, he does, he actually does leave open the possibility of a theoretical science of human affairs when he talks about the architect versus the geometrition. Yeah, and I would even go so far as to say that by turning from the ethics to the politics rather than to the metaphysics, by turning from the good life to politics rather than wisdom, right, in the full-fledged, or being as such, he's actually contextualizing our inquiry into nature, right, physics, but also metaphysics as well.
And therefore, having us take seriously the fact that when we start philosophizing, it's coming out of an education that serves, except in the best case, but maybe even in the best case, that serves, ends other than that of wisdom, right, that serves the ends of the city. And therefore, when we take our metaphysics, and there's traces of us all over the metaphysics, when we take our metaphysics, you better be aware of where these longings are coming from and where they might be directed. You might even want to read after the politics before the metaphysics, the poetics, for example, on tragedy and on, you could say, a kind of religious, the way in which people are religiously educated. So can I press this over quick?
Do you think the ethics and politics both start out in the same way? With nearly a 10. Yeah. Well, I think Greg wanted to jump in.
Yeah, actually, Greg, you go ahead. Yeah, I just had a question regarding, so I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate here. So I mean, we all know that we've progressed in science, right, and so we know that Newton has surpassed aerosol and Einstein's back, right? So we know that aerosol science is sort of way outmoded and out of date.
And so if his biology's out of date is a kind of the natural world, is false. What sort of justification can we turn to his science if human affairs wouldn't say like Tom Chimes, or even contemporary social scientists say, clearly we've made great strides in understanding human affairs since aerosol science. Why, I mean, physicists don't read aerosol. Why should political scientists read aerosol?
I don't want to help those people out, Greg. I've silenced them. They're nobody who's in aerosol. Okay, my family gave me Hawkins book, The Physicist.
A brief history of the world. Or a line or something like that. Anyway, so if I remember correctly, the opening paragraph is about how aerosols and philosophy is outmoded. And they simply do not answer.
It cannot answer the types of inquiries we have today. I mean, the most obvious response to that, maybe this is more from the perspective of Plato than of Aristotle. But modern science speaks to certain hopes and longings that are not scientific, right? I mean, you cannot understand the scientists within the context of modern science.
There is to tune in political science like platonic, socratic thought, tries to cooperate within it and understanding of the ends of human beings, right? Now, you could, a Hawking had did responses, things like this was saying, well, that's just idealism, right? That's just a kind of plainism. But he was at pains therefore, to justify his claims about reality, right?
So. Yeah, I realize I raised the objections and we should turn to the text, but I think that I can't give a waste in my impersonation. No, you can't. I would say in aerosols, defense, be Bob Boop.
Oh, God, there we go. There we go. In great books, 2019 to 2021. Philosophy is useless.
I guess what I would say is I think aerosols of epistemology is actually superior in some ways because understanding of what the science of science or the understanding of science actually, I think is, I don't think that's been surpassed by the modern sports work. Let's just jump into what's going on here with, maybe we should, can I just read the opening lines? Yeah, that's how I was gonna. Why don't you read it?
You have such a... I don't have the Bartlett translation. It's the Carnes Lord translation. Kearney Lord, I'll reinforce that.
I thought that Bartlett wrote a new one. Into the ethics with two columns. It's a second edition of Carnes Lord translation. Oh, it's a second, that's right.
Yeah, yeah. So you have, is it a document? You mean instead of partnership? Yeah, theoretically.
I'll read this and I'll change it to community instead. Okay. Parenthetically Greg, I would like to think that Carnes Lord, just in appearance strikes me as the scariest trouser. I've never seen him.
Take a gander. Okay, here it is. Okay, all right. I'm actually reading from the first volume.
So I forgive me if I know that there were some changes and I think you made a difference regarding this word, Greek word. Five new additions, do you want me to read it? Why not? Yeah, sure, go for it.
I think the only word that's different is partnership for community, or community for partnerships. Go for it. Since we see that every city is some sort of community, that every community is constituted for the sake of some good, where everyone does everything for the sake of what is held to be good, it is clear that all communities aim at some good and that the community that is most authoritative of all, and embraces all the others does so particularly, and aims at the most authoritative good of all, this is what is called the city or the political community. So I mean, I'll just throw out some things that occur to me and you guys should throw out things that occur to you.
The first is that the city is a species of a larger variety of things called a community or a partnership. So there are various kinds of disciplines that there are other kinds of partnerships we'll go on to learn that the village is a kind of partnership, the family is a kind of partnership. The new thinker is a kind of partnership, doesn't it? It's not my nature.
No, no, very much by force. It's very unnatural. And so I guess one of the things that occurs to me is that the first thing we're talking about the politics, and city of course, in Greek is politics. So the politics is the city thing.
I think it's, is it Carnes Lord or is it someone else who talks about who draws a connection between athlete and athletics, right? So the Greek word athletics is a noun derived from an adjective and so politics is the same thing, right? So what does athletics, what athletes do? So what does politics, well, it's what cities do, something like that.
And so it's a partnership. It's some kind of a community. It's some kind of a common good therefore, or it aims at some common good. And every kind of community is constituted for the sake of some good.
The new thinkers constitute for the sake of some good. The United States of America is constituted for the sake of some good. David's high school biker gang was constituted for some good, right? I don't know what it was.
Maybe you could explain yourself in just a moment. And he's because Aristotle parenthetically mentions, and this seems like a variation on a very sporadic maxim to me, everyone does everything for the sake of what is held to be good. And we can move on, but the city is the community or the partnership that aims at the most authoritative of all goods. So that somehow it subsumes all lesser partnerships or communities below it or what's where.
Yeah, in cities, there's so much packed into the oppressed faces. The cities that aim at a good weather, they understand it or not. And the ancients used to talk about regime types and rank them based on aim on our loving regimes, things like this. We don't talk about it in this way, but it is an extremely useful framework to think about, I think about the goods at which certain political candidates during campaign season appear to aim or how they elucidate and explain what they take to be, though they wouldn't phrase it like this, like the common good of America.
Yeah, of course. Well, just maybe press a little bit more. It's not even clear that the good that they do everything for the shaker is actually good, right? Right, it's held.
It says held, yeah. Yeah, and it's, so for example, David's spiker gang, they were skinheads actually, and what they really enjoyed doing was harassing old women and stealing purses. They were cut purses. It's not a phrase you hear much anymore.
And so the good that they were aiming at was robbing old ladies blind, but we all know now and David has seen the air of his way is that that's wrong. And so he held it to be good and no longer does it to be good. So you're right, but I mean, to be a little less silly about it, right? The Soviet Union actually aimed at something that had held to be good, the Nazis aimed at something that held to be good.
The communists in rounding up the Uighurs and killing them by the hundreds of thousands aims at something that it holds to be good. And maybe Alex and healthier, because what I find very common on my students is that they want to quickly collapse Aristotle therefore into a kind of relativist. Everyone's just doing what, you know, the good is relative because everyone's doing what they think is good. So how does this, how does this differ from like relativism?
It might not, I mean, on a certain level, right? On a certain level, it might be just what you said, right? That there is a kind of, now does he hold there to be an actual good in that properly understood? Now, another thing I'll say is another place where it seems like there's a kind of watering down of what we think location is he says, this is what is called the city, or the political community, right?
Who says, who says that the community, that most aims at the good is even a city at all. So the city, like in the Greek polis, there's nothing like that in existence anymore. Perhaps it's an empire that aims at what is held to be good. So there's a particularly Greek understanding.
So you might be more and further and say, that seems to be a second assumption, that what is held to be good, probably understood the most authoritative good would be aimed at by the city. Now, it might be that ultimately in the best regime as he goes on to describe in book seven and eight, you might get something like a city that does aim at the highest good, but that highest good is no longer something like the common good. It seems to be the philosophic life is the goal of that community. Hi, quick question for either you or Greg, before we go on.
It, can you guys say a little bit about Aristotle's exceedingly careful or playful or plain frustrating manner of writing? So we both, the three of us have blazered in obviously on. He said, words that he uses, where he seems to pull his punch, it's held to be something, or he likes to say it seems that. And so why does he write in this manner?
I mean, I can lay out a few reasons why, and Alex should feel free to augment whatever I say, but one is simply, I think, as I mentioned before, that I mean, he does this in theoretical writings, as well as maybe this isn't fair, but it's a political work, and one has to treat political matters politically. And so I think that part of it is pedagogical, he's simply trying to teach you how to think and to ask the kinds of questions that you and I just asked, why does he just say it's held to be good? Why does he say it's called the political community? Why does he say it's called the city?
Another is, I mean, this is just to sort of amplify the same point, trying to get you to think through what these things are. So the National Socialists do aim at something that they hold to be good. Is it truly good? I think those are the kinds of questions he wants you to raise.
And I also think he wants you to see, I don't know, maybe this is going too far, but like there's a tendency, especially among the youth to see the world in sort of mannequin terms, right? They're aimed at bad things, we're aimed at good things. I think he's trying to point out that actually every kind of community is aimed at a partial view of what is good. Now that view might be distorted, it could be wrong, it could be partial, it could be partially correct, but it aims at something that holds to be good.
And so I mean, I think part of it is just trying to eluce it, help us understand things. You don't understand politics, if you don't understand that every little community aims is something that holds to be good. If you think that the Soviet Union is simply committed to evil, you don't understand what they're up to. They may be evil in the last analysis.
And I think they were, but I don't think you understand what they're up to if you don't understand that. I mean, I'm reminded of the conversation we just recorded, but it will probably come out the week before this on Strauss's German I was in, but he talks about the longings of these souls, they're trying to figure out what's going on, they're directed on a remarkably evil path, but aware of certain limitations of the society in which they live, yeah, correct. And I hate to be a Australian drum here, but I also think that it's possible, I think the one thing he ourselves pointed here is that it's possible, and he's just alluded to this as well, that the political community does not actually aim at the highest good. And so there's a kind of deference to the political community that ultimately I think he chips away at.
In other words, go ahead. Just that the political community will get to this in just a moment that maybe if man is political by nature and man is rational by nature, on one hand, that seems to point to the idea that the political community is his natural home. But on the other hand, it might point to a different kind of relationship that could satisfy his social and rational nature, which would not be the political community. Maybe the Lycian or the Academy or the New Fingery is the place where actually man can satisfy his deepest longings.
Oh, certainly in his basis too. Right. That's in the basement of the New Fingery. Let me jump off of that and go into one of the most famous claims he makes that the city is by nature.
Right. So one thing you could say is there's obviously a relativistic way to read that first paragraph, but it's an intimation. He does not say, well, let's now go through what's held to be good. He just jumps to the naturalists of the city.
And over and again, to those who want to reduce all communities to the same thing, including reducing political role to the relationship of master overslades when things maybe of their semiquets or calicles. Or Marx. I mean, all power is just different in size, not different in kind. I mean, it's just one group of wrestling and other be it husband over life or a revolutionary, bourgeois or proletariat.
Yeah. So maybe he's trying to offer a kind of political science that over and against the statistic for today, Marx's teaching, actually gives politics a bit of a basis. And Republican rule, a more scientific basis, it seems not just what we're used to, our kind of city, what's we posit, but seems actually to be the right way of life. Now there's problems that arise from that claim of the naturalists of the city.
But the naturalists of the city is a way of offering a much more, you can say pedagogically sound starting point. Even if by the end, he's done a kind of bait and switch. And the naturalists of the cities replace by the naturalness of the contemplative life or something like that. You mentioned the city, I know you don't mean this.
And so you mentioned that aerosol is focused on the city, might be sort of an artifact of the fact that that was the kind of political community saw that he may have been oblivious to empires and these things. I just want to press back on that because I mean, he's clearly aware that there are other kinds of associations. There are other kinds of partnerships. Right, right, right.
And I think that the polis as a way of associating was actually on its decline by the time aerosol is right in politics. Right. And so it's not like he's simply saying, well, the kind of political association I see around me is the best kind of political association. I actually think he's saying very clearly that other forms of political association are insufficiently conducive to human flourishing.
So there's something you mentioned empire, so I'll mention that. Humans aren't meant to live in empires. Not meant to, that sounds a little too, maybe a little too past teleology, but by nature human beings are meant to live in cities, not empires. There's something degrading to human nature about living in empires.
There's something degrading to human nature about living in a village. Like, you know, we get a goldilocks that, you know, where villages are too small empires, they're too big, the city is just right. So there's something about a city that allows humans to realize their political nature that gets snuffed out in an empire, but that's not even ever allowed to blossom in a village. So that question, go ahead, sorry.
No, no, keep going for that. Well, just the question that occurs to me is what's insufficient about a village? Why can't human beings, why isn't it natural to live in a village society or a sub-political society? You know, you see sort of romanticism, there's something of this in Rousseau, right?
You see this in anthropology that actually human life is better, we flourish when we're in villages, people are connected, they know another better. But I think Aristotle's point of view, from Aristotle's point of view, village life is radically insufficient. It's not good enough. Yeah, I think that's right.
At the press of, you know, under the pressure of maybe moralizing a little bit too much, there is a way in which Republican deliberation calls upon versions of a kind of virtue or a kind of openness or, you know, the Greek status word parisia, this freedom of expression, freedom to speak openly. There's a way in which that does offer a kind of approximation or intimation of the full range of human rational abilities that we would not have under an empire. At the same time, though, you could conversely say, well, an empire is so oppressive that you most realize that you can't be political, that you have to live kind of step up. I mean, there's ways around that, but I do think there's something, not just morally but also politically, philosophically rather salient about the justification of the city.
And maybe in that way it is serious that there is something kind of natural about the city. Yeah. And what's insufficient about a village? Know what?
I mean, they- It's too, it's too monarchic, it seems, right? I think that's a big part of the problem. Yeah, it's too insular. You're in the family.
And so patriarchal monarchical, I think that's right. But I also think the other problem of the village that he implies is that life is consumed with simply satisfying the necessary desires of the body. There's no room for anything higher in life in a village. Right?
You're working in your eating, sorry. Yeah, that's right. Well, at least there's no leisure. A few people may have it, but even then.
So that's a shorthand way of saying this might be that it's difficult for philosophy to exist under those kinds of circumstances. And even, I think that's right, philosophy, and villages. And if human nature reaches its own philosophy, then no, there's no philosophy. But even self-philosophy are sort of just philosophic-ish kinds of things, art, literature, these kinds of things.
They also wouldn't be there. Although, is that fair? I mean, don't we have some sort of pre philosophic, interesting works? Oh, Greg, don't you currently reside in a village?
I do, yes, with a lot of one-eyed monsters. These talk about cyclops. Cyclops. Cyclops.
Right. Yeah. But I think you're right that in a city, you have the leisure, the leisure that allows for the cultivation of the arts, but also philosophy as well. Let me throw one other thought on the naturalness of the city.
It strikes me that the argument that the city is by nature can be understood as a kind of politically helpful idea. It takes seriously that this association isn't just random or positive, but might point to something more. But it also strikes me that this is great for Aristotle, as well, right? If you can give an argument to the effect that the political community is the best sort of community, this would be a great boon for philosophy as well, right?
How so? Well, because it's philosophy that justifies the way. Oh, I see. Oh, I see.
So there's another natural ally now of the political community. Yeah, yeah. So the city not only could make philosophers, but hey, if they argue things like Aristotle does, even as he suddenly indicates it might not be wholly true, if they argue things like Aristotle does, they might not only be sort of an ornament on society, they might be quite necessary in providing that kind of basis. And this goes in line with something Thomas Panglenitz in his book, just glaring absence of religion from the beginning of this.
I don't think it's absent here, actually. And so this is as we talk about the alternatives. When I teach this to my students, I'm like, you know, I yourself thinks that the city is just by nature and the man is by nature, but I'm all these sort of like, yeah, OK, that sounds persuasive. And I think that one of the reasons they don't find it controversial is because Aristotle doesn't make explicit, although I think he does imply what the fundamental alternatives are to his view that the city exists by nature.
And usually I've taught them the republic prior to this, so I can make very clear, very quickly to them, one of the fundamental alternatives to the city exists by nature is, no, the city exists by force. It's somebody conquered a bunch of people and he's duped them into doing what he tells them to do, right? The sophisticated view that there's some key in view, right? The city rests on force.
It's completely unnatural. It's just a dude powering over everyone else. And once you point this out to them, like, oh, yeah, that's actually a really popular, yeah, of course, that makes a lot of sense. It's ubiquitous, in fact, that all there is is power, and it's just one group of pressing another.
So once you flesh out what Aristotle only leaves implicit, that that's a serious alternative, then you say, oh, OK, yeah, all right, maybe Aristotle is actually saying something controversial here. So that's on one hand. On the other hand, I think he does imply that the alternative to the city existing by nature is that it exists by divine sanction, right? That God made the city.
And so it's our laws. God gives us exactly. So on one hand, the city exists by power. On the other hand, no God did it.
And Aristotle's saying both, and by the way, those are the two most common views of politics, right? It's power or God. We believe you think about the relationship between two. But Aristotle's saying both of those views are wrong.
It's actually, it exists according to nature. And I think there's some evidence. This is in chapter two. This is around 1252 B.
I don't know. Talk about that, Greg. I don't know. It's not about the state.
We've been saying that the city is by nature. But he also adds a wrinkle. And he says it's prior to the family and to the individual, which I think is confusing for some students. It's very confusing.
So we can skip to that and come back to this question of the religious founding of the city at a moment. So this is at, this is, I guess, in the original section 13. It's the 1253 A 20 or so. He says the city is thus prior by nature to the household and to each of us.
And yeah, my students are usually confused by this. Of course, the household came first in time. And so when Aristotle says that it's prior, he's not necessarily talking about chronological priority. It didn't have to come first in time.
So what I try to help students think about is, what do you think about a house? So you build a house. Does the house exist prior to the blueprints? Or which one comes first?
Well, obviously the blueprints come to the house. So there's a way in which the thought of the house is guiding the thing that you're moving forward. And so in a similar way, when we come together to form a family, Aristotle says, we recognize that the family is an insufficient, like what we're doing is we're trying to satisfy our political nature. And so we come together in a family to satisfy that.
But driven also by the recognition that the family doesn't fully satisfy it. So we need some association that's larger or bigger or more comprehensive to the village. But that actually what we really want fundamentally is the association that is complete and that's the city. So are coming together points to a coming together that will actually satisfy the part of our nature.
I'll also point out we're gonna talk about this with the Empire of it, that there are forms of association that surpass the fulfillment of that nature that are too big or that go beyond. And so I don't know, like anytime you're planning of something or thinking about something, I think what Aristotle would say is, the priority comes from, I mean, philosophers use this fancy word. Now they talk about ontological priority here, something like that, Alex, which I think is for silly, but the idea is that the thing that you're aiming at, the goal is what exists first. You tell us, the goal.
The goal is what exists first. And so all the things that are stepped into the goal, they might come first in time, but they don't come first in terms of priority, intellectual priority or teleological priority for what it's worth. And there's a, yeah, I think that that's sort of helpful here. So go back to the religion thing, because I wanna hear where you were going with that.
I was sure it's entirely absent, you said it is in a way. I don't think it's absent at all actually. Well, I think it's muted, but this is on, in the Lord Translation page 36, this is at 1252B, 20ish or so. So he's very subtle, I think, because he doesn't wanna draw this out in a way that's obvious.
And so Alex already mentioned a little bit ago that one of the alternatives to the idea that the city is just by nature is that the city exists by force and that therefore there's this monarchical, there's this, I'm gonna use the word natural here, I'm not really happy with that. There's a kind of natural tendency among human beings to associate monarchically or patriarchy. I didn't say that adjective right in a patriarchal fashion. Why?
Because it seems like that's the natural power structure. So the dad sort of seems like the natural ruler of the family. So therefore we have a king, the king seems like the natural ruler of the global community. So therefore we create gods that are images of this patriarch monarch, but then there's this weird feedback loop where because we've now invented gods who are monarchical, we now have a retroactive justification for kings and a justification for fathers and households.
And so I think that here on the, I'll just read the passage and he's quoting Homer here and that's why I'm thinking religion because Homer of course being the religious authority for aerosol in the Greeks. He says, this is why cities were first under kings and even nations are now. For those who joined together were already under kings. Every household was under the eldest as king and so also were the extensions of the household constituting the village as a result of kingship.
This is what Homer meant when he says that, quote, each acts as a law to his children and wives, and quote, for men were scattered and used to dwell in this manner in ancient times. And it is for this reason that all is certain that the gods are under a king because they themselves are under kings now or were in ancient times. For human beings assimilate not only the looks of gods themselves but their ways of life as well. And so what I think is going on in this passage Alex is that aerosol is trying to explain in human terms why humans give their own political communities a religious founding.
So it's an entirely a human account of religion, I think. Yeah, that's exactly it. So the primacy is of nature, not of religion, right? No, no, no, no, I just have a question.
No, sure, I just meant that what he's, I didn't mean to imply that aerosol thought the beginning was religious but I said that I apologize. I took him to be pointing to the alternative of religion and showing why that's wrong. And the reason we think it's religious is because we have families and therefore we deify our fathers and forefathers and therefore, yeah. But you could say, and people have said as my colleague Wayne Ambler for one and also I think Thomas Engel makes this point, early in chapter two at 1252, like one or two.
He says, the female is distinguished by nature from the slave for nature makes nothing in an economic, makes nothing in an economizing spirit as Smith's to make the Delphic Knight. But one thing with a view to one thing and each instrument would perform most finely if it serves one task rather than many. It's just so fascinating because he talks about nature as maker, right? So it's a kind of agency.
Probably kind of deifies nature, yeah. I think that's right. And then, but then he compares it to the way Smith's make the Delphic Knight, right? The Delphic Knight is a religious artifact, right?
And so there's again a kind of subordination of the understanding of religious sort of procedure, you could say, it's a naturally economic economizing, to sort of naturally, you could say richness, right? But at any time pointing to nature as a kind of maker. So you wonder then whether in subordinating religion to human terms, he hasn't just made nature into a new goddess. Yeah, I think that's probably rhetorical, but I think that that's right.
But hopefully you see here at least for a long way. What I see as a human explanation for why it's the case that so many humans think that the founding of political communities is religious. Yeah. Yeah.
But why he doesn't make that clear, I mean, other than politically sensitive reasons, I don't really have a good answer. But that's all I have is that it just wouldn't be prudent to make open the falsity of the claim that all, because of course, by the way, all political communities in Greece at the time claim to have a divine origin. And he is implicitly saying, when he says all, when he says the political communities is by nature, he is essentially saying, you're all lying or you're wrong. None of you has a divine founding.
You all exist by nature. It might be open to that. I mean, maybe to, you know, you go back to Thucydides, you already see a decay, at least in Athens, right, of traditional piety. You get, I think a beautiful portrayal of this in Republic as we've discussed in past episodes.
But if I don't get the Aristotle's, you point out, right, the policies in complete decay and disappearing. In a way, the naturalness of the city and the divinization of nature is not just maybe just a politically salient thing. It might be pointing in the direction of how they might begin to start understanding politics better. It might be less shocking than we think, especially in light of what we think we understand, at least of Greek history and what was happening in Athens at least.
Should we jump to the- Jump away. All rational or inlet? Sure. Because this is, I think, one of the most famous passages here.
Okay. You're gonna read for us? Yeah, why don't I do that? This is from 1253 A1 on.
Okay. This is after, this is right when he makes this claim about, it's one of the few times that he claims this one. He says, from these things, it is evident from the fact that the city is the end of all these prior organizations. That the city belongs among the things that exist by nature and that man is by nature a political animal.
He was without a city through nature, rather than chance, is either a mean sort or superior to man. He is quote, without clanned, without law, without heart, like the person reproved by Homer, the Cyclops. For the one who is by nature has by this fact a desire for war as if you were an isolated piece in a game of back game. That seems anachronistic, but we'll pass over that.
That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For we assert nature does nothing in vain as that same claim again about nature as doing or making. And man alone among the animals has speech. The voice indeed indicates the painful or pleasant and hence is present in other animals as well.
Their nature has come this far, that they have a perception of the painful and pleasant and signal these things to each other. But speech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of the sort. In community in these things, it is what makes a household and a city.
I'll just point out just one thing that jumps out every time I read this is the distinction between voice and speech. Voice is indicating pleasure and pain, but speech as revealing the advantageous and the harmful, the sort of abstract entities. And it might be that our speaking about what is just and what is unjust and a sort of state of affairs and we have to make a decision, ultimately relies on the attempt to reveal the abstracts principles or the ideas to which we lay claim. And that might be a kind of natural.
Now the question is, what is the proper motive speech to understand those things? That might not be something conducive to deliberation. But it would, I think there's an intimation here of a connection between human rationality and politics, obviously, on the one hand, but maybe human rationality and being on the other. And how those parts swear, whether this is duality, that's felicitous or it's got a kind of tension within it is another question that's left open.
And are you referring to the duality of logos as a reason and speech? No, no, I'm sorry, duality of man and political and rational. It's obviously a way in which they're deeply related, but there might be a way in which they're intentioned. With one's true of course.
I'm struck by a few things. One is that Hobbes says it's precisely this speech capacity that proves we're not political, precisely because we argue over things like the Just and the Unjust. And therefore, I think that Aristotle opens himself up to the accusation of being somewhat sort of simple minded. Oh, you think that we're political because we could talk?
You know, come on, man, what's wrong? We talk and so therefore we kill each other. Like we argue. I mean, I turn on Twitter, turn on Fox News, turn on MSNBC, turn on whatever.
I'm like, people are like, explain how talking shows that we can live together. It almost seems like if we could just be quiet, maybe we could live together. It's sort of, let me try this later. I'll use these and the ants seem to live together spontaneously.
And so, I think that political community seems to come about without any external force. Isn't Aristotle open to the accusation that he's sort of being a little too nice about human affairs? Oh, they talk and so therefore, they form political communities. Is it kind of nuts?
Yeah, there's definitely something to that. I mean, you know, and sort of underscore that. He says we're more political. More political.
Or rational. Whereas if you look at, I mean, one could go the other way and say, I don't know, be high if we might say it as a queen and everything, but it's really political or is. But I think there's a certain understanding of nature that we're going to announce. And this gets the tea and the illogical part.
There's a certain power. There's a certain understanding of nature that would say, I think that natural is most closely associated with that, which is spontaneous. And so therefore, bees and ants are more political as far as their acuity seems to be more spontaneous. Ours seems to be much more the product of thought or even convention.
Aristotle even goes so far as to say the first man who founded the city was a great man. And so he recognizes that it took some dude to do it. And so I mean, I guess maybe I'm, I hate to answer my questions, but I think Aristotle here is when he's saying that man is more political by nature than bees and other gregarious animals. He's not saying that it's due to a spontaneous understanding of nature.
It's actually the stele illogical. We're more naturally political because our goal is better accomplished living in the political community than these other animals. I don't know. I guess just like I think the religion really just part lurks beneath the surface.
I think Aristotle is particularly well aware of the nastier side of politics. And that's just also going to lurks beneath the surface here. Yeah, sure. And it comes up later in the politics.
There are passages that sound like they're out of hops or something like that. But there's something, you get a sense that though he paints this was your picture, he's not an integrative of how the sausage is made. I mean, that's right. I'll say another, just to keep, I don't know.
For me, when I think about his man political by nature, and I sort of think about Hobbes as this sort of, the guy who argues most clearly against this, you know, when I teach this text to my students, I don't know, David, what do you think? I feel like there's so much evidence in the world to show young people that, I mean, the ubiquity of social media, right? The fact that no man would want to live without friends. It just seems so obvious to me that there's something to this argument that there's something in us, just like there's something in an acorn that makes it a tree.
There's something in us that inclines us to live in community with other human beings. And I think it's our, maybe it's ourself, our lack of self-sufficiency that we need other human beings. I mean, it's saying that you go to students that reject that. No, I think that when I point this out, they're all like, yeah, I mean, you know, especially the young, right?
Cause they're so inclined to friendship, which is a form of political association, that they're very open to this. That yeah, of course we're inclined to these kinds of things. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I mean, speaking, you want to go back to the rationalist.
Speaking is always speaking to another, right? I mean, speak to yourself, but you need common language, which relies on common opinions that determine how those words are used, right? And so, I mean, yeah, we fight about things due to the diversity of opinion, and maybe politics is deeply aware of this, but a very kind of ugly manifestation of this disagreement. But it might be ultimately that friendship, which you keep citing, which is, I think, a good example, right?
Because friendship typically has greater charity towards those with whom you disagree, right? Or even in this context, he speaks to the human, the longing, the natural and strong human longing to leave something behind the rip that looks like you. And that that's only possible in a political community that seems. Does that make sense?
Do you see that? I mean, he says, this is at, I don't know, 1252 A, something A, 10, or something like this. Humans come together for the sake of reproduction because there's a natural striving to leave behind another that is like oneself. And so, to preserve yourself in a manner of speaking.
And it seems as though you can only, that's perhaps too strong, your best chances of ensuring that something that resembles you sustains over time is if we have something like little communities. I don't know. I think it's fair, yeah. Yeah.
So, I guess just the question, like, David, press me on this, like, no, how is it prior, how is it prior? That's when you come together, you have relations, you're trying to make a baby, but like it points to politics. And so far as like, you're trying to leave something in mind that looks like you, but it's not sufficient to do that in the wilderness. I don't know.
I don't know if that's... In an interesting way, what Aristotle's doing is, he's providing up once a manual or not simply new founders, but for, I use this loosely, city planners to get things right. If you understand the politics, I think you could understand, well, what would need to be tweaked in the understanding of, say, your citizens. Doctors, Dr.
Softman has always quick to point out that city planning was a fundamental part of ancient political science. No, really. Yeah. But this is a manual, and it also is a manual on how to understand where cities go wrong.
Right. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, let's just switch gears here a bit. Alex, I asked you in the run of show as we were preparing it.
If you could maybe speak to him on what I take to be, some kind of a misquote of Hesiodon, when he's talking about man being political by nature, I'll read the quote to give you a moment to collect your thoughts. Maybe you can sort of explain what's going on. Aristotle says, from these two partnerships, then that's husband, wife, and parent, child. The household first arose, and Hesiod's verse is rightly spoken, quote, so here's Aristotle quoting Hesiod.
First, a house and woman and an ox for plowing. So according to Aristotle's Hesiod, great Aristotle Hesiod recognized that man is political by nature because we need him, we need a house and a woman and an ox. But am I wrong that he sort of sanitizes Hesiod here to some degree? There's a, and Michael Davis is a book on the politics.
He goes through all of the quotes. One of them we don't have the source for. Another one is the quote from Ifa Janae Dallas, right? Where he's making a distinction between creeks and barbarians, but it's from a play in which human sacrifice takes place.
And this one too, he says, don't, when he's talking about the woman, immediately clarifies in the next line, I mean like a slave woman, right? Like you don't put your wife to work in the fields and put your slave there. And it implies, and he even says you shouldn't have a wife yet, but it implies that in reality, the natural growth, you can talk about teleology, the natural growth of our first association into the city is not so pretty. As it includes slavery.
Yeah, it includes slavery, even, it includes the kind of tyranny of the father, there's an illusion to the psychops where every man is a mall over his own family, right? It has all, so we have implications of the first wives who are actually slaves being raped by the men who own them, implications of, you know, paternal tyranny, implications of human sacrifice that the Greeks themselves were barbarians before, implying that the trip from isolated individuals to full political communities is not like a seed growing into a beautiful flower, that's the sort of classic Aristotelian flourishing, but it's actually quite ugly. And in fact, you know, as people have observed in reading this, if the city is the natural outgrowth, it like almost never comes, he's being, what kind of odd growth is this that almost never achieves its flourishing, maybe only briefly, and for a short amount of time, most of the time it descends into these kind of anarchical, tyrannical empires or nations, these much too large as you put a sort of odd sort of behemoths, if the city is by nature, it would be strange that you get all these abominations and freaks more often than you do get the natural, and usually it's quite the opposite, right? That was very helpful in Separas, that's the same paragraph where he talks, where he alludes to the religious alternative as well, so at least as the paragraph breaks up and down to us, this paragraph would be implying, would be pointing to the two alternatives that I mentioned earlier, force on one hand, or religious founding on the other.
So he has, that's great Alex, thanks, bringing in those, bringing both of those. Yeah, both the alternatives to the notion that the city is just by nature. Go ahead, please. One of the themes that made this a little too big picture, but one of the themes I think we've been coming up with is he presents this claim that, as Greg said, it's kind of Pollyanna's, right?
And yet, and there are these alternatives explored by thinkers like Hobbes, for example, right? And there's even more issues than we've raised, right? Like why, like, for the perfectly natural city according to Plato, there is no family, that will obliterate the family, here the family still is. That seems to be a sign that, well, to reach full flourishing, get rid of the prior form, achieve the full mature form.
He's presenting all this, in a way, it seems like he's going to push this account to its limits, right? To try to kind of maintain ordinary life at the same time exhibiting the problems. We've been kind of struggling to come up, I think with a justification that's not near prudence or something like that, that gets something to feel softly deeper. And I wonder if it's because he's more concerned with bringing out a particular attention between the naturalists of the city.
One can observe the family, but that's something you see tragic, right? And, you know, in taking it, or in a Virginia, all this also, right? Tension between the city and the family. But the tension between the city and the philosopher, the education that will produce philosophers, even in an ordinary city, such as he lives in, I think it's something that he's trying to drive out, at least at the end.
Maybe he's holding his hands so that he can get to a certain point. But you want to jump in with something. I think it was foresight, right? Well, I was going to say that actually, it ties in pretty well, I think you're going, because one of the things he talks about, this is still in chapter two, is that apparently humans are divided into those that rule and those that are ruled.
And that distinction also exists by nature. And it has to do with this ability to see into the foresight basis, to see in the future, to see the outcomes of effects or something like this. And some of that's peculiar to human beings to be able to do this. And those who can do it well, ought to be able to rule, or should rule.
Yeah. Should we talk about the natural sleep? That was one of the mailbag questions. But it's not in a two-chapter.
What's that? Well, I had a question for you guys that, yeah, we kind of wrap up this episode. Let's do it. Is how do you situate to one in two chapters, one in two of book one form a kind of introduction to the whole of the politics?
If so, what's it setting up, say, for the remainder of book one? Does he shift him or practical matters? Like, you know, the comparison of regime types? Or does he continue to kind of play with theoretical things?
I think it does serve as a kind of introduction to book one. And I think that as Alex alluded to him, we didn't really dwell on it in the second paragraph, where he sort of disputes the notion that rule is of a single kind and that there's political rule of husband over wife, master over slave, et cetera. And after all the same, he says, that's wrong. And so what he then does, I think you write this as an introduction.
He talks about the city, he talks about human beings, being political by nature. And then he talks about those various forms of political rule that are different. He talks about the household. So he talks about husband and wife, and then he talks about slavery.
And then it's basically three chapters on the household, or a series of chapters using on the household property is really the household and household management in general that round out book one. So yeah, I think you're right. And then by book two is where he starts looking at various accounts of the best regime. And so yeah, I think that chapters one and two was a kind of introduction, both to the whole book, books one through eight, but also just to book one itself.
And I think it sets up, I mean, there's so many questions here that you'll see later that there were clear antecedents out, right? Like, okay, so it aims at some political meetings at some good, but then when he goes through the different regime types, you see that there are tendencies among different regime types, the aim and specific kinds of good. So the democracies by and large aim at the same kind of good. All of the hierarchies aim at the same type of good.
And so on and so forth. So we're actually aimed at freedom, for example, and oligarchy aims at sort of something else, maximization of wealth. And you see, you begin to see that we didn't talk about this at all, but Aristotle, in Aristotle's Natural Science, he talks about the poor causes. And I think here you can see one of the causes, the final cause, the telos, the gold, the good, that which aims is intimately bound up with the form of government that it takes.
And so if you believe in equality as the political good, then your, how your government looks is going to be different. Then if you believe that it's well or something like this. And so you begin to see that the formal and final cause are deeply bound up. And then you see how these other causes also play into it as well.
Like if you're a seafaring people, that's probably going to shape your goal and your form and your shape as well. Yeah, it's all there. Yeah. I'll bring out, this is, I'm borrowing a line from, again, my colleague Wayne Ambrose, a number of excellent articles on book one of the politics in general, but yeah, they were really good.
And one of the points he makes is, well, I'll put it this way. You can look at the beginning of the metaphysics, two chapters on the nature of wisdom. And then he goes into an account of his predecessor's account of causality. But for some reason, the account of the predecessors is pushed off to the second book.
Instead, you get, I think, 11 chapters on slavery and acquisition. And one of the things Wayne points out is that, if you're trying to talk about the naturalness of the city, slavery and acquisition seem to be often very unnatural things. And so maybe one way to think about this, I'm not sure this is Wayne's line. They seem to be much more compatible with the notion that the little community rests on force.
Yes, exactly. And so he spends so much time on the city because he's processing because he's, he's had pains to justify. He thinks the Aristotle of Doth protest too much. When he's pushing that, that might be a kind of key to it.
But what's interesting is then after book two, right, he goes into the city, what is the city? And there you get a, you move completely away from the household and all those relationships. And you're just relationship between citizen and regime, as you said, right, how this regime looks and how it determines your behavior and the goods that you see. That's a great question.
I think that's a good conclusion. We have a couple of questions here. I think we've provided what was on the relationship between the political art and the art of household management. That's from Henry Quillan, Christopher Otter asked about.