Aristotle's Politics 3.4

Welcome back to the new thingery. My name is David Barr and with me as always is my good friend Alex Preyoh, how are you doing? I'm doing fine. How are you doing?

I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right. How's the Jiu Jitsu? I broke my pinky toe where somebody broke it for me.

I just stepped incorrectly. I don't know, but it's going well. I'm feeling my age. How's your pinky toe, Greg McBray?

Former college former college wrestler and Greg, didn't you rush colleges? Didn't you find a scheme, Greg, where you somehow wrestled in graduate school? Also, when you were a professor at Gettysburg, I was an assistant wrestling coach at Gettysburg College when I was a professor there. Oh, I thought you had been registered for a year as a young professor.

You could wrestle. And gradually, I did wrestle briefly for the club team, which got kind of big for a little while, because a lot of schools in the South don't have college wrestling. I wrestled one match and I was like, wait, I'm not doing that. This is stupid.

Wait, so you wrestled at Amory at Georgia for, I wrestled as an emerald stuff at Amory. And then this thing at Georgia was like, you could be against other schools. I think we wrestled in Georgia Tech. Could you think you could have stepped up to the college team?

I wrestled at Case Western in college for D3. That's what I was saying. No, yeah. So I got to call David out on something.

David had recently understood and followed me on Instagram. And I'm like, Oh, David's here. I'm like, Oh, my name on there. Oh, you did.

Okay. And then I looked at who David's following. It's all shirtless men. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's your defense.

Yeah, I guess we move on then. All right. I just use my Instagram to follow, you know, like wrestlers up shirt fighters. Yeah.

Yeah. I think my own professional wrestlers, you know, my wife and my power bottoms. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, speaking of power bottoms, we're reading Aristotle tonight. And I, you know, I make that kind of joke, you guys think. But later on, when we have our episode on Diogenes, layers, yes, you will, you will hear many tales about Aristotle. Oh, yeah.

A little bit of stuff. He was up to a lot. But tonight, we're talking about the politics, book three, chapter four. Yeah, we've done a few times where we did chapters one and two of book one, right?

Right. We did slavery. We did slavery. We enslaved bar that right.

Right. It felt good for a while. So tonight, what are we talking about mixed regimes, some other snooze fest? We're gonna talk about book three chapter four, it's whether the good man is also the excellent or serious citizen, right?

Whether these two people, the person you admire as a citizen is also the simply good or best person. Now, this is a fun, this is a fun portion of the politics. When you guys teach this at a curiosity, to kids glum on to it, do they understand the disjunction between the good man and the good citizen for potential differences? I mean, do they get excited about it?

Or I think it's an easy kind of top of the teach. I mean, it's maybe difficult to get to the what is he got really up to, but at a simple level, I think it's kind of easy for kids to grab what's going on. And yeah, I mean, I think it's really easy to teach. I just sort of you ask some sort of easy questions.

He sort of begins with, well, you know, so and so a good citizen, a George Washington good citizen. Yes. Okay. Is he a good man?

Yes. Okay. So let me just kind of keep problemizing things. By the way, it's not entirely clear.

George Washington was a good citizen by the way that air cells working through what a citizen is looking at that just moment. Well, King George didn't appreciate him. Well, there's that right. But then also like the first citizen is almost by definition, like what does it mean to be a citizen?

And it was certain sense, it means your parents are citizens. And so the first citizen can't really be a citizen in that regard. But you're right. Also, he was a trader to Great Britain in these kinds of things.

And then you ask about some like Martin Luther King Jr. Was he a good man? Yes, of course. Was he a good citizen?

Yes, of course. Well, he broke the laws. Is that good citizenship? And then students generally get very confused and immediately defensive.

Are you saying Martin Luther King wasn't a good citizen? And then you start to sort of get them to see that in America, I think in your 2023, part of what we think it means to be a citizen of some who challenges on just laws that's partly thanks to Martin Luther King Jr. I would say in fact. But so what would he be a citizen somewhere else?

Right? And it's very easy, right? And every day German in under the Nazi regime, if you were an excellent citizen, you think that person would be a good human being? No, of course not.

Right? But they might have been bad beings. Is it possible to be a good human being under the Nazi regime? No, it's not possible.

So you're telling me there were no simply good human beings there? What about this guy? Bonhoeffer. Your kids never, the kids never just say, well, Professor McBrayer, earlier in the semester, you told us that we're never going to get to the definition of justice or the good.

So, you know, what are you talking me about the good citizen versus the good man? So like, they just reject the what? The question, so that there's, we don't know what the good what it even means to be good. So why are you bothering me with the second level question?

That's a good question. I mean, there's no, is there a mention of justice in this chapter, actually? I don't think so either. Yeah.

I was just thinking, I don't remember it coming up as a question, like a good citizen zone who I mean, you're right is just obviously, but I don't think that's the consideration. Yeah. Right. So then that's the question.

What is your is your justice? Does justice mean at the religious regime or allegiance to some higher principle or something like this? That's right. Yeah.

I mean, I think I think this one's in a way really fruitful. This is why I thought it would be a good idea for an episode because both Plato and Aristotle really focus on the regime as the sort of concept idea, whatever you want to call it, the sort of thing that determines your conception of the good, right? And then, but they also advance a kind of a notion of human goodness or human excellence that's simply based on human nature. And that's not regime dependent, right?

And so, in this chapter, I think you really get in a way a kind of two, three pages distilled meditation on the notion of regime dependence, right? And the consequences of that. And I think it's important also to emphasize that this is a deep implication about whether or not you can be happy as a citizen, right? Because if being a good person is what makes you happy for Plato and for Aristotle, then being an excellent citizen in a bad regime, you know, or a subideal regime or just being serviceable in the regime in a lower way might mean you can't be happy.

And that's a pretty tough pill to swallow. So it's a very, I think, weight each chapter that way. I was just going to say in response to David's question, David helped spark this thought on my head. I'll have to look back through and see if justice occurs or doesn't occur.

But I wonder if Aristotle isn't asking this question without raising the fundamental question that's even at a deeper level. So the question he asks, which is Alex already laid out, is can the good man also be an excellent citizen? But what does it mean to be an excellent citizen? Is your right?

It means sort of to be just in some conventional sense or something like that. So a different way of framing this question, which is not the way Aristotle raises it, is can one be a good man and a just man at the same time? Which is a little as a lot thornier, and you start sounding a little more like someone like Protagoras or some of us, if you raise it that indelkably, not that I was raising that indelkably. It's someone else's word.

Someone else's way of someone like David was. And I think and this is I mean, as you move along, there are implications to the argument that are very frightening for the perspective of justice. Yeah. Should I jump into some context within the?

Yeah, I was going to ask you. So we talked about the first two. Who was Aristotle? Aristotle.

Let me go back to the beginning. In the beginning, all was welter and waste and the life was over the date by this. So book one chapter two, we get this kind of naturalistic account of the city of its development, as the telos, the end, the completion of human relations. And that culminates in this claim that you, the citizen should be fully integrated into the city like a hand to a larger body.

In a way, by arguing that the rational animal is also a political animal and that the city is the full completeness of these relations, he's saying or arguing at least initially that you can be fully at home in the city. Even the philosopher, if this claim is that you're like a hand in a body. Now, I think it's important to be clear, this is the operating assumption of the text and he's in effect testing it dialectically as he delves into his analysis of politics. So after that, he goes into slavery and acquisition, still hoping we do an episode of acquisition, but slavery and acquisition, which seem to be two essential but non-natural sort of features of the city.

He tries to overcome that book two, he goes into prior accounts of the regime. And then in book three, he finally turns to his accounts of politics and the regime. And he says, the first step is to look at the city and specifically the part of the city, which is the citizen. And in chapter four, which is what we're talking about today, he asked this question, are the good man and the excellent or serious citizen one and the same?

And I think here, because he's asking this question, he's asking effectively, I'm not sure you ever mentioned happiness, but it's certainly necessary to the argument. If they are not one and the same, then it turns out you cannot be happy in the city. You're not your existence is not to the city as a hand to a full human body, but there's a kind of tension there. Yeah, that's a tough one.

He tells us at the very beginning that we kind of need the city to flourish. And now he's saying, in an imperfect city, you'll find yourself unhappy. And maybe even in the best city, because he quickly gets there. And just to underscore that, I think this whole line of argument is present in the, we're using the Bartlett translation.

I'm just going to speak about the first paragraph. No, it's Lord. Sorry. Every time I see a Coney Lorde, every time I see a Chicago air soldier, I just assume it's Robert Bartlett.

That seems like a safe assumption. Well, it's my point, by the way, you're going to get a point. But in Greek, all these words are etymologically linked city, citizen and regime. And so he's talking about the regime, the Platea.

And we're talking about now the city, the Polis and Book One. And now we're talking about the Politend, the citizen here. So it's all, I mean, it doesn't, the interrelated of all this is not as op. I mean, maybe it is, of course, apparently, but like the words being related shows how related all these ideas are.

Absolutely. Yeah. So at the end of the first paragraph, at the end of the first paragraph in this chapter, she makes the arguments that the good man and the serious citizen are excellent citizen are not necessarily in all cases the same, right? It's not always the case that they're the same.

And that I think makes clear that the default view until he makes this argument is that they are, right? That the whole book is not happening on the social and that they are. And that is to say, I like to use this phrase that the human being can be fully integrated into the city. That's the naturalistic account is called it, right?

So I think now for the first time, he begins to investigate the limits of that account. But I think it's important to emphasize on a lower level, right? That's their way back in Book One Chapter Two, right? I mean, it's subtle, but the notion that, okay, I mean, it's totally naturalistic, but actually kind of made dependent upon violence.

And they're these, our ancient ancestors are actually more like cyclopses who beat their wives into submission. That's the real origin. That's the real origin. Maybe the way to put it is that the subject is now becoming the text.

Okay. Yeah. So like, I was beneath the surface. Write that down.

The text as we come to text. That's actually a phrase in my colleague, Paul DeDuke used former, former guest on the show. He's used with the gorgeous about things going from subtext to surface. Anyway, so I think that's where we are.

I think now you're seeing it most explicitly for the first time, but on a very elementary level, right? He moves towards the ruler, but he doesn't really get into the philosopher. That comes up much, much later towards the end of the whole politics. Right here, it's operating on a more elementary level citizen seeking his own good, asking whether he could be fully happy as he can as committed to this regime.

Right. So I'll exaggerate. And so the beginning, and this is kind of in response to something David's getting me going tonight with all this questions. So beginning, there seems to be this harmony of exaggerating between the human being and the citizen man can only reach his fulfillment in the city.

Here we start to see in a more clear way that there is actually some tension or a split between the good of the human being and the good of the citizen. But in response to something that David said, I'm thinking to myself, so on the one hand, there's this longing in us for this perfectly good regime. So where there is not this tension between my personal good and the good of this city. And so like, there is this, like it is good to be a citizen and it is good for me to be a citizen.

But even if the regime is defective, I still think that aerosol is leaving some room for the possibility that a human being could benefit greatly from and does benefit greatly from being in a city, even if that city is not necessarily the best city. Right. And so there's a way in which perhaps this is what this, the worst thing I can on it, I mean, one could live as a parasite off of that city on its more on its fringes, I mean, like just literally having like access to food and goods and services, but also like the way that it takes care of the necessities such that one could actually try to live a higher life, a philosophical life or whatever, the life of an artist's priest, something like this. And so there is some way in which this, even if it's not a perfect harmony, there's some way in which human flourishing still seems to depend in large part upon the political community.

It would seem. Yeah, you need the necessary things to these provide that. This is, I think the question here is whether once flourishing comes through commitment to the regime, it might be helpful here to think about the fact that a group poll is very different from a modern state like we don't think of our florist. No, it's different.

Certainly smells different. A lot more olive oil and garlic, garlic, just garlic eating Mediterranean. That was from a brand. What?

Didn't she be that quote? No, no, we were wonderful. The garlic eaters. She had that in one of her books.

That must be an illusion. Is that right? Yeah. So anyway, you were saying how a modern state is different than each other.

Yeah. So like if you were, if you were in a position to be an excellent citizen, you were free, right? Then you might do media, I'll pass any kind of pushes those guys aside pretty readily, right? This is not what we mean.

I mean, the education of an excellent citizen or ruler. But if you were free and you had free time, you had some leisure, right? You were expected to be engaged in politics, right? To be out there debating, weighing in, serving in offices, right?

That's what you do time or in study or something like that, right? But that was, you know, if it took up too much, your time was kind of frowned upon, right? So this is like, this is much more, if you were in a position to be asking yourself this question, this was a much more live possibility of holding office. Like if any of us were hold off, we'd be like, city dog catcher, like, you know, you know, bathhouse janitor or something like that.

I was thinking morality police. I think you sued it for that. We have to live in a different part of the world. Are you looking at me?

Because of my Iranian background? No, what is this? Another morality police, the ones who like, this is not funny. They have that in the UAE, where my dad lives, they have morality police.

I was like, man, that sounds like a gig for me. Really fluid, you know, you can work dynamic hours and just have people arrested. I don't think that's how it works. But in my mind, in my polis, I rest all.

Let's get back to it. Jake just cut that part out. No, no, no, great. I don't know.

When David and I were students at St. John's, I think I've told us on August, but it was a long time ago, we were reading Plutar's Life of Lycurgis, right? And I think I told us when we did Lycurgis, we did it, I don't even remember it anymore. But there's this one student class, we were getting very worked up because like a Plutar dearest to call the Spartans the most free.

And she's like, they have no choice. How can you be free? Like freedom, you know, in volstoise, bubble. She was just harping on this.

And nobody had to answer her questions. So she was right to be dissatisfied, but maybe not right for bringing up 50 dance times. And then the old tutor in the classroom, who didn't speak much, spoke maybe twice a seminar, woke up, something woke up with his aristocrat, what's the goes? How are they not free?

They're free to be wise, free to be courageous, free to be temperate. And she just shut up. And all jokes is like I'll try to bring back the text. I mean, I think the idea, I mean, Sparta is the place, right, where you're trying to have this perfect overlap between good man and good citizen.

I mean, it's I think ultimately it's flawed because it's not a view of what's actually good human beings. You're joke about you're free to be wise, you're not free to be wise, it's part actually. Yeah. Yeah.

So so now the question that comes up, this is early on is why are they not the same, right? So I mentioned this before, but he's trying to show first off that they're not always the same. Okay. He says, why?

Well, virtue is relative to the regime, right? And there are several regimes. So what it means to be an excellent citizen, doesn't necessarily have complete virtue, right? Because it's because I, you know, like an Iranian citizen, what it takes to be a good Iranian citizen is not the same as it takes to be a good Persian citizen or a good American or good Frenchman or something like this, right?

Is it different? They're different. Yeah. Like back at since cigarettes versus, you know, I don't know, issuing fatwap wise.

I don't know. Yeah. So thank you after I got us back on track for immediately. So what Aristotle's trying to do.

I was wondering why you have an issue of fatwap on pale anyway. So Aristotle's pointing out basically in so many words that your virtue is in many cases regime dependent, right? And this is, I think one of the aspects, I love emphasizing this while teaching, the way the aspects of ancient political thought that I think is so helpful is this idea of regime dependency. Like every regime needs to educate its citizens so that they fit in.

So they're serviceable to the regime, right? So that they're committed to its understanding of the good, its opinions. And that commitment might make you good. It might make you happy, but not necessarily is what Aristotle's saying, right?

And so there's, I think this is so important emphasized like, you know, you go, if you're an undergrad, if you're a young person, listen to his podcast, you should be over 18. And hopefully not in the Middle East for that last joke. But if you're a young person, listen, you get curious about a subject, right? You might have actual sort of free open curiosity.

Immediately, what are your teachers, your parents, everybody around you do this, say, you should do this with it. You should pursue that. Like this is a career track. You should mean, and your curiosity is exploited, molded into something that's going to fit the economy and these demands.

And maybe if you're lucky, it'll all work out for you. But more likely than not, you're, you're going to feel like you're halfway and halfway out, right? So when Aristotle's discussion here addresses that feeling like that, very real feeling that, well, you know, while I like reading Plato and talking about Plato with others, maybe this class, I don't like the students and maybe like, I have to attend a bunch of meetings. And like, obviously, there's a tension between how where my curiosity is done and how it's going to fit into this institution that's around me that I need to I'm dependent on to exist and survive.

Yeah. Are you a communist? Are you asking that? You were talking about how capitalism's bad man is trying to keep us down.

I didn't mention capitalism. Yeah, I hear what you said. Is that what you heard of it? That's what you were communist?

Hey, better read than dead, my friend. Wait, no, the other way, it's the opposite. Oh, yeah, whatever. You heard me.

But in all seriousness, of course, the communist is probably the one clear example in our time, my time, or your time, I suppose, about it being regime dependent. What's a good citizen? Right. What does it mean to be a good Soviet?

What does it mean to be a good American? There's radically different things. You know, by the way, just when we can cut this, if we want this section of the politics, when people talk about the power of subversion in philosophy, I think that this section in the politics is a nice example. Once you start thinking along the line, these lines, and say, you know, just with the simple disjunction between the good man and the good citizen, you can go down various paths that are increasingly less, you're increasingly becoming a poor citizen, whichever regime you inhabit.

Right. Exactly. Because it is kind of a very subversive, because as soon as you become aware of it, what's the first thing you can't unsee it also. And so what does the thoughtful person think?

Well, why should I actually become a good human being? Right. Right. Yeah, I think that's right.

Everything can suffer from it, too. Right? Patriotism, the very things that prop up a regime, it can it can innovate people's desire to be helpful and certainly to come to the defense of the whole. You mentioned a Patriotism on our minds that I came across that line that I texted you guys about that the word Patris Fatherland apparently does not occur in politics.

I saw that in that piece by Penguin. Which would mean that there is something like patriotism that's discussed, actually, I think, but the idea that there's no room for that is sort of curious. And Pangle actually notes, I think this is the piece I got this from, that when she says it's kind of obvious, but Patriotism is not one of the moral virtues that Aristotle is the reading that you did tonight, actually, David and the ethics. But it's not one of the virtues, which is sort of curious.

I mean, my thought on that, I was thinking about that because that's such a curious thing is that, I mean, I think we talked about this when we did the episode in the first two chapters of the politics, but my sense is that Aristotle, by justifying the polis as natural and political life in terms of nature, on the one hand, just seems to be engaged in a scientific study of politics. But I think by a slight of hand, by saying that the city is natural, he's put the understanding of the city as institutions and legislation in the hands of philosophers, political philosophers. And so in a way, it's a very artful defense of philosophy as very useful to the city. And he proves that through his analysis.

What's actually grounding the city is not the fatherland, or what we would now say is like the nation, which forms the state and the government on top of it. It's something deeper than that, which is the nature of political things as articulated or shown by the political philosopher. And so that may be one possible reason why you don't see fatherland. Yeah.

Can I just read a little bit from the beginning, especially, I'm going to read maybe the whole first paragraph, I'm not sure. But one of the things that you noted earlier was that the distinction he's making between a good man and not a good citizen, but an excellent citizen, or a serious citizen, maybe, the Greek is the spudaeos. And so I won't read the whole thing, but I'll read a little bit and then I'll just point out a few things that occurred to me. This is the beginning of chapter four.

Connected with what has been said is the investigation of whether the virtue of the good man and the excellent citizen is to be regarded as the same or is not the same. If we are indeed to examine this, however, the virtue of the citizen must first be grasped in some sort of outline. Pause. This is one of these disclaimers that are not disclaimer, but these ways that Aristotle qualifies what he's saying.

He's not simply going to tell us what a good citizen is he's going to give us an outline of what the virtue of a citizen is. I'll continue. Now, just as a sailor is one of the number of shearers, so we assert, we assert is the citizen. Although sailors are dissimilar in their capacities, one's a row or another pilot, another lookout, and others have similar sorts of designations, some swabbed a deck, it is clear that the most precise account of the virtue will be that peculiar to each sort individually, but that a common account will in a similar way for all for the safety of the ship and its voyages, the task of all of them in each of the sailors strives for this.

Now, a couple of things, and then I'm going to reconvene to reading. One is that his first example is of sailors. And if the city is natural, it's curious that the first example is a non-natural example. The ship, the purpose of the ship is apparently safety, but that's not true, right?

People don't get on ships to be safe. The safety might be a goal, but it's subordinated to some other goal. They're going somewhere where they're picking up goods or something like this. And so the goal of the ship is not safety, in fact, because the most safe thing would be to stay on shore, not to go out into the ocean or something like this.

So that's one thing. But then that leads me to the other examples he gives. I want to continue reading the paragraph, but the analogies he gives are always, I think, meant to shed some serious light on what's going on here. So the first example is sailors.

So being a good citizen is somehow like being a good sailor, but then he speaks about the excellences of other things. And he says the city is like there's different kinds of people in the city, just like there are different parts of an animal or different parts of a soul or different parts of a household. And then at the end of the book, he gives the example of the flute maker and the flute player. So I think that some going through of those examples, sailors, animals, soul, household, flutes, might shed some more light on what's going on here.

I'll return to reading in the maybe if you guys have any thoughts. We can return to that section three. I don't know. Do you think before I move on?

Sure. You can take it here somewhere. Well, I'm not entirely sure I was just taking some notes before. And I mean, the first example, like, what seemed to cast some doubt on the naturalness of the city, the city would seem to be there more like a ship, in which case, that's something that we humans made, because it would be natural in one sense, I suppose, but the conventional or manmade character of it is more clear in the first example.

Like, we made a ship for a purpose to do something. And yes, we all are committed to the safety of the crew and one another. But that goal of safety is subordinated to something else, just like the city way back in book one, shek or two, he told us, mere safety or mere survival is not the goal of the city. So it's curious that here in the case of the ship, he says that is the goal of the ship, which is obviously false.

And then the other example, he gives an animal's comprised of two parts, the soul and the body. Okay, fine. Although that bifurcation is probably that problematic elsewhere. But then he says the soul itself is divided into the rational part of the siring part.

Well, that's not true of all animals, at least if we take what he says superficially elsewhere, only the human has this rational faculty, although potentially there are others. And then the household, similar part, the household is comprised of four parts, not one or two. And then the last example is who's more important for the flute making enterprise, the flute maker or the flute player. And the interesting thing there is he says the flute player is the one who should be commanding the maker flute because he knows what the end of it's for.

And so then it's just a curious sort of, I mean, we talk about ruling here, so I'm not sure how that fits in entirely. But I don't know, do you have anything on the house? I mean, does that seem, I just feel like the examples are different. I mean, I think the first example of the sale is the one job that I think really sells your point is the lookout.

Look out, serve two purposes, right? Yeah. Like one, there's an iceberg or whatever. Right.

That's safety. Right. Two, land, how we can tell our stuff, opportunity, our goal, right, whatever you want to do if you're emerging, that's all right. So I think that's one place.

And then you wonder who's the lookout, right? Is the ruler the prudent ruler just trying to avoid catastrophe and maybe try to optimize a little bit, or is the lookout the philosopher and nobody listens to it. Yeah, isn't it funny, Alex? Just just spoiled the first act one scene, one of the tempest, right?

Isn't there a forgetting this? Well, it's there in the middle of a mousstrom. And the ruler isn't the captain of the ship. It's a boat swain, I think, if I remember correctly, which is pronounced bosom, actually.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, because I played that part in the, right? It's not a joke.

Yeah, I'm not a joke. It's bosom. Bosom. Bosom.

Yeah. Right. And then the captain of the ship, I have like noises. Yeah, it just shows the difference between the ruler and akin to the citizen of the good man.

There's another bifurcation between the, what is it like, just like a rule by convention and then the natural rule? I don't know. I apologize. No, that's wrong.

Do you think David that, like, for the tempest, I mean, it's called the tempest, right? Why would you refer to it as a mousstrom? That was the first word that just popped in my head. My tempest?

Why you just used to wear a tempest? What? Or I'm just saying, mousstrom's kind of a fancy word. I mean, I said in the tempest, and I didn't want to use the word twice, but the tempest begins with the tempest.

Bella's, Bella's, Bella's, Bella's, she's the lead. I'm just a regular old shaker. You know what? I'm certain I think there's an excellent go-host and an excellent human being.

That's true. That's a good, obviously, example, as one that we all fail, but especially as an excellent go-host, don't sleep with my wife, Greg. Hey, one time. It's not even a dirty laundry.

One time. Tell any tales out of school here. Okay, Greg, keep reading. Keep reading.

We got to talk. Sure. So I was reading in the first paragraph and check your number three. Right.

Similarly, all those citizens are dissimilar. Preservation of the community is their task, and the regime is this community. Hence, the virtue of the citizen must necessarily be with a view to the regime. If then there are indeed several forms of regime, it is clear that it's not possible for the virtue of the excellent citizen to be single or complete virtue.

But the good man we assert is so in accordance with a single kind, complete virtue, that it is possible for a citizen to be excellent, yet not possess the virtue in accordance with which he is an excellent man, therefore is evident. And one small minor point that I think might be significant is at the end of that, what I just mentioned is reading, he said, excellent man. So at the very beginning, it's good man, excellent citizen. At the end of the paragraph, he raises the possibility of an excellent man.

So now we have three different categories. And I like serious a little better than excellent force work. So you have good man, serious citizen, and then you have serious man. And I wonder if that's to try and I wonder if therefore it's pointing to what he's doing in the chapters, muting the difference between the good man and the excellent citizen by speaking of an excellent man, because that brings them closer together.

Because the serious man almost seemed, whereas you say the good human being might not necessarily be a good citizen, the serious man almost seems to be a necessity, a good citizen. Because the fairs of the city are serious. So at the end of the paragraph, at the beginning, he opens the tension at the end, does he kind of minimizing it or no? So let me say something about what I think, how I think Greeks generally, but especially the aerosol in this chapter uses spudile serious.

Tell me about spudile. We should be clear that by serious, he doesn't mean a guy who's like, just walk around like, he doesn't laugh right? I tend to think of it as serious a sense of someone who's taken seriously. I always associate with someone who's a morally serious human being.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it goes go hand in hand. Right?

So like somebody who's very serious about the issues of the city. But in a way, that's also like people look up to, right? Because it does mean excellent, right? It's not just somebody who's serious about more virtue, but if you're a bumbler, nobody would take you in a call up person, spudile.

So it has to be somebody who's a musus a bumbler. He was a stutter, right? Is that the same difference? Yeah.

People took him seriously. You're already there. You're already halfway toward like taking citizenship seriously. If you're serious.

I think I'm just like, I think the way that you've just described serious, I think I agree with it. It seems like if you accept that you all want ought to be serious, it seems like you're halfway to therefore you should be a good citizen. Let me try this. I'll go one step forward.

I understand. Okay. All right. A person, a person who's serious who takes things seriously is somebody who's going to be like, Oh, people are concerned about this.

So it's going to be integrated. You got it. Yeah. I suppose it's, yeah, that's right.

I guess it's one thing. Should we jump to paragraph two? Do it. Right.

So paragraph one, again, this is like three seven in the decker numbers. But you know, just get the console or translation. You can find out why. After having shown that they're not always the same, he turns immediately to the best regime.

And so the question you might want to ask is, well, why does he make such a radical shift? Suddenly? I don't think he's talked about the best regime at all. Yeah.

But he brings it up here. And obviously he hasn't talked about the defective regimes. I thought that was true. Yeah.

He talks about the rivals of the best regime, right? Plato's. Yeah. He hasn't talked about his consumption of the best.

I see. Yeah. Yeah. So he's he's jumps immediately to the best regime.

I think there's an obvious reason, right? It's like, if you're going to expect them to overlap anywhere, it's got to be there, right? Like where if it's the best possible, everybody should be, right? Who's a good citizen?

Serious citizen should be a good being. Except not everybody has the same role, even in the best regime. But yeah, fine. Go ahead.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the argument that emerged. That's what you would expect, right? Right.

Right. Which is an interesting thought, because if you think about that, that means that all of the regimes are defective, right? So the best regime would achieve the natural perfection of human relations, that is the city to the best degree possible, which means that all sub optimal regimes are like three, like dogs, right? Or like, you know, great stocks, right?

Where there reminds me of a you guys know that I actually had three like a pig growing up. I'm not in the mood for this kind of joking. I'm not going to pick up for something nasty, right? I'm not going to pull up, you know, I can't take this.

It's just constant. You got such potential to be a really good episode. And it's good. Sorry.

You guys don't want to hear about some ****. Okay, fine. Keep going. The punch line is like 50% of our episodes Greg's told this picture.

The punch line is you don't need to pick like that all at once. I don't know if Dave was laughing. Anyway, go ahead. You're talking about three like dogs.

I'm trying to pick it through. Your eyes lit up like a child on Christmas. You know, half a list of half a list of certain pieces are laughing and half are like, what's this joke going to have to Google it? Anyway, go ahead.

Google three. Yeah. But there's a pretty great implication, right? If he's jumping to the best regime and the implicit assumption here that, you know, I think there's a reason why that's the case where you would expect above all, it means that all the lesser cases are kind of on the defensive now, right?

And if he can't work it out for the best regime, then certainly in lesser regimes, it's even less positive, right? And he struggles with the best regime. Another point that I think is worth mentioning is that, I mean, he starts to the best regime. He then moves to the ruler in the best regime.

And so he keeps moving to the best, into the best education, things like that. These are all the questions he's raising. And I think it's a point of emphasize that for the ancients generally, but for Aristotle, pretty clearly here, they always turn to the ideal to the best, which we would think or Machiavelli would say, right? Is imaginary, right?

Why are you talking about the best possible? But I think one way you could say, and I think this comes evident in this chapter is if it doesn't work out in the best, then you better, you have no chance at how in your regime, right? Because you don't live in the best regime. It's actually quite common since it's not imaginary at all.

Yeah. In a way, I mean, well, what he poses, he has kind of two best regimes operating here, but yeah, I mean, he's proposing something in a way sensible. But if you have any sense that your regime is suboptimal, you should at this point in the argument be feeling like, oh, I guess we're just leaving democracy behind or my oligarchy, I live in. Like, how do I live well in an olegris?

It's not even a question for him right now. Right? And so I think, another way to put this is if you only treat suboptimal regimes, people will say, well, yeah, that's a crappy regime. Like, what about a better one?

We could fix this maybe. If the problem exists, even in the best case, right? Like in the absolute ideal case, then it's an essential problem, right? It can't be dismissed as a contingent problem.

I'm just trying to have to keep the devil here. Why could it be the case that the best regime doesn't necessarily look to the good of most citizens? In other words, why can it be that actually the place where there's the best overlap is in the subpar regime? Does that question make any sense?

Like, it makes sense that certain subpar regimes, if you can't live the best life in any regime, then you might want to ask which subpar regime is most friendly and that might be like democracy. But if you're asking whether they ever coincide completely, I think then if it doesn't obtain in the best case, they would not coincide in any lesser cases. Is that makes sense? I might be wrong here.

I, you know, I could have a blind spot here, but that's my suspicion. No. Okay. Now that's fair.

I'm just trying to think of it. Could there be a regime? Let's just stipulate that say that the philosopher is the best human being. Is there any other subpar regime in which he could still be a good citizen?

I don't see why not. I mean, there could still be detentions that we're talking about, but then I know that we like to belabor the sort of radical questioning character of it philosophy that is. But I mean, you know, couldn't one be a philosopher and pay one's taxes and abide by the laws more or less. And so maybe even advocates and most fellow citizens that they should have made laws and you should love this country and that sort of thing.

Wouldn't that be couldn't that be a very model citizen do public service announcements, go on TV and say, so this is where I think this is where I think it's interesting, right? So if you go to the play, this is far field, I think it's really relevant. So this is the depression. But if you go to like the apology, right, dopperties, you know, has military service, all the stuff, you know, shows that he's a good citizen.

The place he runs into trouble is when he serves in the assembly, right? And particularly when they're trying the generals from Arjunusi. Arjunusi. Yeah.

What he says, we need to follow the laws here. Or when the oligarch says go murder Leon, right? Yeah. I think what just to the first example, the democracy has laws, but the democracy also demands that you get pissed off of the things that's pissed off about right now and that you cool off when the democracy cools off, right?

And though it has laws, it also makes the secondary demand. And Socrates can follow the laws. I don't think he can get himself into that passionate place, right, where he just wants to, and he senses that here, there's a conflict, right? He can go along with the passion.

What if there's a back blow? He's now in violation of laws, right? But if he implies, why isn't he a serious citizen? Well, okay, fine.

So does that prevent him from being a serious citizen? And the democracy? Maybe. Yeah.

Okay, I guess that's my questions. Why can't we just say, okay, fine, but I don't know. All right, fair enough. I'm just trying to push back to see if I can make sense of that.

So let me put it this way. Yeah. So you need to take this more seriously. We need to kill these guys.

Like this is urgent. What they did was so long, you know, etc. Like you're you're being a, you know, a petty father, like this is not what we're talking about. We're getting down to the penny.

Okay. Good. That's three legged one. Your false ethics.

All right, why does it work out in the best regime? I just lay out the argument, right? Not all citizens are similar, right? So not all can be good men unless he has a caveat here, unless all citizens in the best regime are necessarily good men.

That leads to the second argument, the caveat does, right? Which is dissimilar citizens means that virtue is not single in each but multiple, right? So there's a division of labor to be a good citizen might mean that you need to be a good carpenter, right? That's a narrowing of your virtue, right?

In this particular way. Just like on the ship. Yeah. And so therefore goodness in any city is going to necessarily be qualified, right?

Even in the best city, right? But perhaps not in the town case, which is that of the ruler, who has a wholly different education, right? So you might be educated towards a menial, servile role in the city as a carpenter, whatever. And that's very narrow.

But there are some people who have a completely different education. And here he quotes this line, this quote from Jason, right? And this is at the very end, he says, for the virtue of ruler and citizen is not the same. And it's perhaps for this reason that Jason said he was hungry except when he was tyrant, as one who did not know how to be a private individual.

So at this moment that he makes this rule that perhaps complete virtue is only found in the ruler, even in the best city that that's the person, he signals we're dancing with tyranny. Because if there's only one person who has this virtue, why is anybody else ruling over him, right? So why are you even a citizen, right? And this is even mentioned a little earlier, this is easy to mess just a line before this, he says, if the virtue of the good ruler and the good man is the same, and if the one who ruled is also a citizen, the virtue who is world is also a citizen, the virtue of citizen man would not be the same uncalled widely.

Forget the logic, just notice that caveat. If this coincides, good will or good man, and the one who is ruled is also a citizen, why should that person be a citizen? If you have this, so the end of politics three goes into this discussion of kingship and aerosol is about to go into a smaller version of this, but the whole issue is politics is about taking turns of ruling, right? You rule over me, I'm younger, many years ago than Greg, and I get the education and I learn, oh, this is Greg's doing this and look how we achieved this thing, I understand, and now I'm in a position of leadership and I understand and I can do a good job.

We take turns and then, you know, on and off again, and that's, but if there's only one good person, good ruler, who's also a good man, why shouldn't that person be giving complete rule? Aerosol struggles with this, he moves back and forth, kind of dialectically, he ultimately comes out on the side of perfect kingship. If you really have a person like this, yeah, but this is a difficult question, right? If they don't overlap, if they don't overlap, you've got like a philosopher in the city, if they do overlap, you might just have a tyrant in subjects, right, or king in subjects, right?

You could call this in a way the tyranny of the best, right? If you have once a pro-latively good person, should they be given an entire rule, and then shouldn't you be denied any say, and then aren't you in a way losing your political and human nature? This is a serious problem at the heart of politics, I think. Yeah, so there would be no good citizens.

I mean, the best case explodes it. Yeah, it shows all other citizens to be fixed, you know, falsely so, yeah. Yeah, very good. Where else, sorry, what's the conclusion, your Alex?

I mean, one small point is that I think this is the same Jason that's mentioned in the Hellenica, and is Zenithin who called him a tyrant, but he also assumes himself a Targos, is that the word? There's a Greek word, he establishes a new office for himself because he doesn't want to be thought of as a tyrant. I can't remember what the word is. Tago is the thing, it is actually.

Yeah, it's an interesting question about politics, like, you see this even today, where people talk about being on the right and wrong side of history and stuff. Yeah. And there's always this assumption that it's clear how the sort of oppressive features of a regime are going to manifest, right? As though they don't put on a smiley face, right?

And you look at like, you know, the ubiquity of cameras and screens and everything being online and these apps that demand children's attention and the way that it has a distorted effect of people like this is making our like great, they have no idea that these like these structures that are trying to improve your life are actually going to get quite terrible. It's like just changing the name of tyrant, right? Like, no, this is dominating your soul, like this is really destroying it. And this is this is the regime.

I mean, this is the regime having that effect. But God, that's depressing. It's true. I mean, I mean, I don't want to get into contemporary politics too much, but like, do it.

I mean, the way in, look, if your virtue is regime dependent and you are enjoying the regime, there's every chance that you're being made service of all and being manipulated, right? And that you're you're good and other people's good and you're in some way, complicit in this is being, you know, is being undermined or what's the word? Sub, was that sure? Sure.

Sure. Yeah. I automated. I'm not sublimated.

Underminded in some way, right? It's being subversive, right? In that way, right? It's getting underneath it.

Clearly, there are differences. I mean, like, I mean, it's not just, I mean, on the one hand, we can read this and be like, this is route, all regimes basically are sort of doing this to all human beings, basically. But there's also a continuum, right? I mean, like, just on a common sense level, there's probably more overlap between goodness as a human being a goodness as a citizen in the United States than there is in North Korea, for example, right?

So like, okay, fine. All the regimes to some degree are trying to condition us and exploit us and use us for the good of the community. That's just kind of what, I mean, there's a dark cynical reading of that, but there's also like, well, of course, like, if we're on a ship together, like think about the ship metaphor as the ship of state, like if we are actually all on a ship, the first ship is going to use me a little bit, but it does result into my benefit. And here's where I like Socrates's response to Protagoras in the Protagoras, this to me, there is a philosophic defense of why one should be a relatively good citizen.

If one's regime is relatively tolerable and decent, then it produced like the ship is going to keep the sailor on, like you get to live. Like, you're, okay, fine, you have a job as a lookout, but you still are taken care of in this vast ocean and all these things. So one of the things I think the trap that the softest falls into is sort of cynically rejecting the city, therefore, not recognizing his dependence upon the goodness of the city, even in the case of the suboptimal regimes. And so there are better and worse regimes.

And there are regimes where people can provide greater leisure and therefore greater freedom to actually pursue some of the things that are more conducive to human flourishing, not necessarily citizen flourishing. So, right? I mean, that's, I think obviously, I don't want to remember this to be taken in a, in a sort of, like, some kind of regime relativism or something like that. I don't think that's right.

That said, one time my advisor, I don't know if it was in this one in the politics, I think it was in the Republic rather, of course, that she taught it. She made the point that like, in a way, it's actually easier living in North Korea to see that the regime is nonsense. But in the United States, like the fiction of liberation, like the liberation is built into the the shadows of the wall. Just for what it's worth, I'm not sure that's true.

I've actually met a couple of North Korean defectors, people who fled. And one of the amazing stories they tell about, they were completely brainwashed. And when they got to the west or when they got south for even, just the mind blowing this of the entire thing, like, the world is not how this regime told us it was. Yeah.

So, I'm not so sure it's easy to see in these other regimes. You need it. Yeah. The other point, sorry, Alex, did you want to respond?

I mean, the other point I was thinking about is a lot of this assumes that the regime is in total control of its fabrications and not itself a part of the larger phenomenon of like, like, delusion. I'm not sure that there's anyone in control. Well, that's the end of the pop of the mass society, right? Everything is like, large structures and you just kind of hope it'll, I mean, this is, I always go back to that Churchill.

We did an episode on this, but mass life is really about that. Maybe to wrap it up, let me make the case for two sort of lacunae, like two gaps in the argument that I think are were that I think informed the rest of the politics, but I think are worthy to keep in mind. Yes, spread the gaps. I like it.

I like to see that. Open up the gaps and show you what's in there. So, right, naturalistic account that starts with, full integration according to the conclusion is extremely limited, right? You are not going to feel complete in most regimes and most jobs in any regime, right?

Only at the top is there some chance of the best regime, but I don't think actually Aristotle ever considers the peak the very best. And my case for that is that he brings these two examples, right? He already kingship that looks like he already Jason's situation and then political rule, ruling a big rule is in turn, right? And then he focuses much more on ruling and ruling in turn.

So he doesn't actually take up kinship. That question comes up at the end of book three. And I would love to do an episode on that because I think that's such a difficult question of whether you want to see complete control to this person. Do you rob human beings that they're autonomy even when they're ill-equipped, unequipped, right?

To rule or just accept the negative consequences or do you have the place be governed well by you kind of dehumanize people? It's an interesting difficult question. The second question, which I think he doesn't raise is the question of the education of the good ruler, right? And that only comes up at the end of the politics of book seven and eight, right?

And so the question I think that you're left here asking is, okay, you've talked about the education of meno, you know, serve all people who learn one thing. The education of a citizen in a polity who is ruled and learns that way and then rules and it through his rule educates others. And this is kind of cyclical rejuvenation and looks all very lovely and everything like that. Not a ruler in that citizen.

Is that a good person, right? And simply right in the fullest sense, what is the education of the simply good man with full virtue look like, right? He's laid out what virtue is in the ethics, which right comes just before the politics in this. It's only at the end of the politics that he finally gets to the education and the sort of laws that are necessary to educate this person.