ARISTOTLE’S CATEGORIES—A POLITICAL INTERPRETATION
In the two appendices that follow I invite you to join me on a “treasure hunt” for the political underpinnings, presuppositions, examples, and consequences of Aristotle’s and Kant’s categories. As we collect the textual evidence of politics traversing the entire field of cognition, the fences between theoretical and practical, pure and applied, philosophies will begin to crumble. Upon a close reading of the Greek and German texts themselves, we will spot the hopes and fears of their respective authors in the face of certain political possibilities that fed into the construction of the categorial banisters for thinking.
Even a cursory glance at the Aristotelian category ousia makes us realize how misplaced our negative reaction to “essentialism” actually is. The allegation that some essences are higher and more valuable than others is anathema to the argument of Categories. Medieval philosophy ascribed scala naturae—the ladder of nature, later on transformed into the Great Chain of Being—to Aristotle’s History of Animals, above all to the beginning of book 8 in that treatise. But in his category ousia absolute equality and peace are paramount. Aristotelian “essentialism” is a radical egalitarianism.
The equality of presence holds for its interspecies and intraspecies variations.1 First, sundry images-kinds (εἴδει) of beings are on the same footing, as far as their ousia is concerned: “none of the kinds is more of an ousia than the others [Τῶν εἰδῶν … οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἒτερον ἑτέρου οὐσία ἐστίν]” (Cat. 2b, 23–24). As ousia, humanness is not superior to horseness: “the description ‘human’ for this human is not more apt than the description ‘horse’ for this horse” (2b, 24–26). This is what I call “interspecies equality” within the category ousia. The relation of this (human, horse) to that-which-it-is (humanness, horseness) remains exactly the same regardless of whether the this in question is a human, a horse, an oak tree, or a door.
I can already imagine a Kantians riposte: such equality is the product of transcendental indifference to the content of equalized entities. Because Aristotle blinds himself to the empirical “filling” of each instance of this, he is able to extract and hypostatize the monotonous reiterations of its relation to that. From the formula this as that, he obtains the form of ousia, identical across its diverse contents. Thus, the equality of presences is merely formal. In my view, if transcendental formalism avant la lettre permits Aristotle to give equal ontological consideration to a human and a dog or to a cat and a marigold, so be it. Whatever the path he blazes to arrive at this point, he skirts the traps of anthropocentrism and equalizes the beingness of a human and a horse. And, contrary to the current strands of nonanthropocentric and ecological thought, he juggles difference and sameness, the singularity of the this, which here designates a kind of being, and the universality of the as-that, which here stands for being as such. Neither a hierarchical arrangement nor a nihilistic flattening of ontology and axiology is on the Aristotelian agenda.
Second, and just as cardinally, Aristotle cements intraspecies equality: “And the same is the case for first ousia: none is more of an ousia than the others [ὡσαύτως δὲ καὶ τῶν πρώτων οὐσιῶν οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἕτερον ἐτέρου οὐσία ἐστίν]” (2b, 26–27). Within the ousia of human, there is not a human more human than all the others; within the ousia of horse, there is not a horse more equine than other horses. This, this, and this human are in equal measure the specimens of the human as-that; the same is true for this, this, and this horse with regard to the as-that of horseness.
Intraspecies equality may nonetheless be more contrived than its interspecies variety. Seeing that the second ousia is implicit in the first, the this is intelligible solely as mediated by that which it is. Before a series of intraspecies singularities are scanned by an equalizing philosophical gaze, political decisions must have been made as to whether this this is a human that or not. Often injurious, inequalities precede the advent of equality within the sphere of presence; subtending the Aristotelian level playing field are the preselection of those who qualify as human and the dehumanization of those who do not. The irreducible link between the first and the second modes of presence, the “as” that articulates this and that, necessitates a complex political justification, which does not appear on Aristotle’s categorial display.
Aristotle further contends that ousia knows no more or less; unlike quality, it has no degrees (3b, 33–34). He returns to the figure of the human: “the same ousia ‘human’ cannot be more or less in this human, whether compared to himself or to another [οἶον εἰ ἔστιν αὒτη ἠ οὐσία ἄνθρωπος, οὐκ ἒσται μᾶλλον καὶ ἦττον ἄνθρωπος, οὒτε αὐτός ἑαυτοῦ οὔτε ἕτερος ἑτέρου]” (3b, 37–38). Equality governs not only the inter- and intraspecies relations, examined through the category of presence, but also the intraindividual relation, of each human to her- or himself. What does Aristotle mean here? His point is that one is not more or less human in certain periods of one’s life and that, therefore, an infant in whom speaking and reasoning are mere potentialities, capacities yet to develop, is as human as an adult. Presence equalizes the figurations of the first ousia in space and in time, disallowing the emergence of a hierarchy within oneself or between self and other. But it does not cancel out differences entirely, precisely insofar as it sustains the dual character of this and that, and prevents the first ousia from collapsing into the second. Hence, equality within presence—within as-what this thing is present or presents itself, consisting of this and that, the singular and the universal—is the equality of incommensurables.
Besides equality, the Aristotelian category ousia promises peace. “Ousiais never have contraries [῾Υπάρχει δὲ ταῖς οὐσίαις καὶ τὸ μηδέν αὐταῖς ἐναντίον εἶναι]” (3b, 25). There are no enemies “by nature,” let alone adversaries by virtue of what or who they are, mutually opposed as a result of their beingness. The ousia of a cat is not contrary to the ousia of a mouse, regardless of how feline creatures may, and do, hunt and kill rodents. Only not-cat is the contrary of cat. Interpreted in political terms, the statement seems to imply that everything and everyone outside the ousia cat is a potential enemy, negating cat’s ousia. Hobbes predicates the thesis of the war of all against all on a comparable unexamined presupposition involving the first ousia: this human that I am is under perpetual threat from all those other “thises” I am not (precisely because they are not-me, their very being is a potential cause for my physical negation, or annihilation). At the same time, not-cat is not an ousia but an abstract negation of catness, and not-I is not a positive determination of a distinct first ousia, which is why the threat emanating from the negation of the I is so vague. Mice may meet their demise at the hands (the paws) of cats, and I may be at war with the rest of humanity. Yet, these ontic possibilities do not interfere with the ontological reality of peace among the totally nonoppositional instantiations of presence that goes beyond the autistic this of first ousia.
Discrete quantities, too, guarantee peace, or at least the absence of war. By definition, their parts do not touch; having no “common limit,” κοινὸν ὅρον (4b, 30), they do not encroach on, nor as much as abut, other parts. Recall that Aristotle includes numbers and logos in the list of discrete quantities. Therefore, (1) a thoroughly quantified politics is depoliticizing, inconsistent with the possibility of war, but also with peace, with the creation of the “commons,” of res publica; and (2) engagement in logos materially and categorially dissolves tensions between parties by setting apart, disarticulating parts of speech, before rearticulating them in what is said. Meaningful peace, rather than a mere neutralization of tensions, flourishes at the same site where wars break out, namely, on the border, at the common limit, which one may respect or transgress. This is not to say that a bellicose or pacific conduct is to be expected solely between territorially contiguous states. Proximity can be physical and extensive (spatial) or it can be intensive (temporal) once the target of political intentionality falls into the sphere of our attention. In space and in time, a common limit betokens ontological nonindifference.
Both war and peace require continuous quantities: lines, space, time. Themselves discrete, the points comprising a line are the points of contact between the inside and the outside: “Here we discover that limit of which we have just now been speaking. This limit is a point [στιγμή]” (5a, 3). How any given encounter at the quantitative, political, and ontological borders will pan out is an open question. Will the stigmē be a wound, a puncture left in enemy flesh by my rapier? Or will it be a mark left by a quill in the course of writing a story of peace and reconciliation? The point lies on a line, but the line between graphically different futures passes through the point, which, in this way, becomes a limit.
Aristotle portrays the encounter continuous quantities occasion as “synaptic,” the parts touching—μόρια συνάπτει (5a, 14)—at the limit. We expect to be dealing with spatial contiguity and tensions at the territorial borders of states. But Aristotle is keenly interested in the synapses of time, χρόνος συνάπτει (5a, 8), in how what will happen touches the now, which, in turn, touches what has already happened at the limit of the limit where the line morphs from a spatial to a nonspatial continuous quantity, or, in a word, recoils from a where to a when. The contemporaneity of the now with the immediately adjacent “parts” of time is a political site, home to clashes between what is and what has been or what is and what is yet to come. Through memory and anticipation, we share or decline to share time at the nonterritorial borders between us, and what ensues from this primordial, immemorial decision is either peace or war. If portions of the past, the present, and the future are not in touch, if they do not touch one another, if forgetting prevails, then there is neither coexistence nor conflict. There is, in that case, nothing but indifference.
Aristotle subtly politicizes quantities when he argues that they “have an order,” τάξιν … ἔχειν (5a, 29). Some of their arrangements, particularly in the continuous subcategory, depend on the relative positions of parts: before and after in time, adjacent in space (5a, 15–30). An additional category—positionality—mediates the order inherent in these quanta. Further, arithmetic entities and parts of speech may be ordered without their parts inexorably assuming positions vis-à-vis one another (5a, 30–35). Although in a series of natural numbers the position of 2 is after 1 and before 3 (5a, 31–32), comparing an aleatory string of numbers or parts of speech with a random line or stretch of time, we discern a necessary positional ordering of the relations (right and left, above and below, before and after) among parts in spatial and temporal realities, not among those of mathematics and logos as such. What is political, then, is not so much the objective order of quantities as the sense of “having” an order: immanent or foisted, self-given or imposed from above. How an order is arrived at is what matters the most. Because today’s overwhelming quantification of politics operates with numbers, with discrete variables, and more and more with “big data,” it submits the quantified object to the exigencies that are external to that object. And where positional articulations are lacking, they are likely to be introduced from the outside, the otherwise nonpositional quanta and parts of logos manipulated into oppositional formations.
In a transition to the category of relation, it would be unforgivable to neglect the highly political nature of the part-whole interactions. Philosophically considered, totalitarianism is a system where the whole subordinates the parts to itself, as opposed to freedom that grants a degree of autonomy to parts, from each other and from the whole they participate in. If so, then discrete quantities, such as numbers, signal our liberation from the totality that space and spatialized (linear) time epitomize.
But the contrast between freedom and totalitarianism I have hinted at is caricaturesque, and it has been systematically exploited by political liberalism. Fragmentation and the mutual indifference of parts imprison them in themselves, prohibiting the solidarity of having-with or holding-with (sunechē), of touching-with (sunaptei), and of being- or standing-with (sunestēke: con-sisting) at the common limit (4b, 22): all features of continuous quantities. As for these quantities, their continuity is not expressed in an undifferentiated flux. On the contrary, consigning being-with to a common limit, Aristotle intersperses the flow of lines, surfaces, places, and time with valve-like breaks. On the two sides of the partition, parts remain parts. The continuity of continuous quantities is discontinuous, akin to neuronal synapses, the touching-with without the emitter and the receiver really touching, the neurons firing across a gap that keeps them apart. Koinon horon, a common limit, enables a ruptured connectivity that, beyond fragmentation and totalization, gives place to the place of politics.
Among the examples Aristotle supplies in Categories, none is more revealing than that of the master and the slave highlighted in the discussion of relationality. The master-slave relation is more than an example: in Hegel, it is how self-consciousness forms out of mere consciousness; in Aristotle, it is how the what to of relationality works. The reversibility of the relating and the related, whereby each may occupy a passive or an active position with regard to the other, is a mutuality grounded in opposition, in the antagonism of the against, anti-. Right before he cites master-slave dynamics, Aristotle postulates that “all relations imply their correlatives [Πάντα δὲ τὰ πρός ἀντιστρέφοντα λέγεται]” (6b, 29), a phrase I have translated as “all instances of what to are said against that toward which they are.” Antistrephonta, conventionally rendered as correlations, contain an element of opposition: their mutuality begins in mutual exclusivity. That is why the with-against or the against-with of the master-slave is so apropos: “Slave means the slave of a master, and master implies the master of a slave [ὁ δοῦλος δεσπότου δοῦλος λέγεται καὶ ὁ δεσπότης δούλου δεσπότης]” (6b, 30–31).
In spite of the fact that one pole in a relation, notably the active stretching toward that to which the relating relates, is posited as predominant, it is actually determined by the relatum. So—and Hegel will also take note of this in his dialectics—the master is of the slave in two senses: as someone who counts the slave among his possessions and as someone relationally defined through this prized possession, deriving a “masterly” identity from it. The master is as contingent on the slave as the slave is on the master when interpreted through the categorial lens of pros ti. To experience the efficaciousness of these constitutive mutual reversals according to the Hegelian scheme of things, we must await the birth of slave self-consciousness from the depths of abjection and objectification. In Aristotle’s text, the inversion has to do with the volatility and ineradicable ambiguity of the possessive form, itself pointing to a deeper grammar of being, the language of the categories. That is, the semantic instability of the genitive case, substituting the dative expression of relationality, is not limited to a “language game” but reaches over into the sphere of ontology, of raw existence: “If the master is, then the slave also is; and if the slave is, then the master is too [καὶ δεσπότου ὄντος δοῦλός ἐστι, καὶ δούλου ὄντος δεσπότης ἐστίν]” (7b, 19).
The master and the slave are coemergent entities and they also evanesce together, as Aristotle acknowledges: “to cancel the one cancels the other” (7b, 20). Alternately receptive to and influencing the opposite term, the master and the slave are ontologically evened out, despite remaining politically unequal. It follows that the categories relation and ousia are intermediated: relation captures real effects from ousia in the phenomena of coemergence and codecline; ousia materializes through division into and relational reconciliation of the first and second ousiais, this and/as that.
Aristotle procures an illustration of relationality from the economic sphere, the private abode where despótēs is the master of the household. In the capacity of political subjects, citizens precisely cannot be slaves. Given the permeability of the membrane between infra- and intrapolitics, nonetheless, the word despot has been politicized by the ancient Romans. Despotism transfers mastery and unrestrained control over slaves onto the political arena, making the population at large dependent on the ruler’s unpredictable whims. In this context, the relational reversibility of Aristotle’s correlations holds an emancipatory potential. On its basis, we can finger the despot as the cause of political subjugation and open a window of opportunity for liberation by disclosing his dependence on his subjects.
In Aristotle’s work, extensive references to the master-slave case culminate with the affirmation of the coeval and codetermined existence of the two terms in the relation. Prior to that, readers are asked to imagine a wrong correlation, not between a master and a slave but between a slave and a human. “Let a slave be defined as ‘of a human’ [ὁ δοῦλος ἁνθρώπου],” writes Aristotle. “Take the attribute ‘master’ from ‘human’; then, indeed, the correlation subsisting between ‘human’ and ‘slave’ will have vanished” (7b, 4–7). Dispensable from the vantage point of human ousia, the attribute master is necessary in a relation that binds it to slave. The substratum of a relation is not fixed being; it is the fit of the relating and the related. The entire objective order of genera, species, and individuals pales in significance before relational categorization. Of course, the designation human is more encompassing and fundamental than any role a human may play. Take away master, though, and the word slave lapses into incoherence. An understanding of political, economic, and other kinds of relations might at times be more illuminating, Aristotle indicates to us, than the sweeping claims of theoretical ontology. In this sense, the powerful overture of Rousseau’s Social Contract—“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”2—retroactively falls prey to Aristotelian criticism. Experienced by humans, enslavement is not the correlate of man but of the enslaved in the category’s “tautological” rendition and of mastery with reference to its antistrephon.
Rarely (if ever) taken into account, the qualitative dimension of freedom is connected to the kind of quality Aristotle associates with capacity or power, dunamis, and incapacity or powerlessness, adunamia. One’s being good or bad at something “will be according to what is said to be a natural capacity or incapacity [κατά δύναμιν φυσικὴν ἢ ἀδυναμίαν]” (9a, 16). The dispositions, to which such capacities belong, involve potency and potentiality wherein modernity situates its idea of freedom. Gathering possibility and power, “dynamic” quality is saturated with political phenomena.
Modern freedom is admittedly denatured, purposefully exercised contra natura, while Aristotle invokes a “natural capacity.” But what Aristotle indicates with the locution kata dunamin phusikēn is an inherent potentiality developed “according to a power proper to the kind of being that has it.” Powerlessness or impotentiality signifies a mismatch between a being and the capacity that should have been its own. As a result, freedom is not tantamount to an indeterminate possibility to become just about anything; it blossoms out of a persistent exercise of one’s potentialities in a practice that would permit one to become qualitatively “good” at something, including, for us, at being-human. Beyond a mere potentiality, beyond a free-floating disposition uncommitted to an activity, Aristotelian freedom is an actuality, the patient actualization of capacities in habits. And powerlessness connotes either the (prepolitical) nonactualization of one’s inherent potentialities or their (postpolitical) absorption, without remainder, into actual being.
Between the extremes of powerlessness as pure potentiality and actuality, the political aspect of quality is “having power”: “When we speak of the healthy, we mean that such people have powers [δύναμιν ἔχειν] of resistance, ready, innate, constitutional, against all the commoner ills” (9a, 20–25). Toward the end of the text, Aristotle will problematize the very category of “having.” But what does the word say in conjunction with potentiality or potency? To have dunamis is to take charge of and employ one’s capacities, guiding them from potentiality to actuality, from dispositions to habits. The having in question is a passage between the two varieties of powerlessness, a middle passage where qualities come into focus and politics happens.
The ontological range of the category quality makes its political implications relevant to nonhuman entities, from animals to inanimate materials. For instance, hardness and softness are defined as “that which has the power to resist ready disintegration” and “that which has the powerlessness to do the same [τῶ ἀδυναμίαν ἔχειν τοῦ αὐτοῦ τούτου]” (9a, 27). Curiously, in qualities embroiled with potentiality, the contrast is not between having and not-having but between having power and, literally, having powerlessness. The reasons behind the somewhat cumbersome expression are clear: adunamia is not passivity but, at the prepolitical level, the refusal to exercise a power, and, at the postpolitical level, plenitude in excess of the active-passive opposition. The dividing line cuts through the so-called physical qualities, sifting those that “have powerlessness” from their purely passive counterparts, “passive qualities [ποιοτήτων πάθους]” (9b, 7), such as sweetness and sourness, heat and cold. The pathos of these qualities is on the hither side of taking charge of powers-potentialities and refraining from taking charge of them. While in the physical universe Aristotle sees a mix of passive and potential qualities, human reality—and, above all, ethics and politics—invariably entails having dunamis or adunamia (for example, goodness as “having virtue,” ἀρετὴν ἔχειν [10b, 8]).
That said, Aristotle deems what is ownmost (ἲδιον) in a quality to be likeness and unlikeness (ὅμοια καὶ ἀνόμοια), grouping things together or keeping them apart (11a, 15–17). Ideation and politics are inconceivable without the qualitative contribution so understood. The friend-enemy distinction relies on the markers of likeness and unlikeness that, eliciting existential interpretations, momentarily gain salience on the public arena. Solidarity, a common struggle for a cause, forges a feeling, however provisional, of being alike in those it unites. In parliamentary democracy, conversely, there is no likeness but only a quantitatively mediated numeric homogeneity of the electorate a posteriori differentiated into party preferences. Spurning the category quality cannot help but depoliticize the population within the confines of a legitimate political procedure.
Aristotle spends the rest of his study clarifying the multiple senses of words that, not formally included in the list of categories, are vital for their comprehension. Many of these are charged with a political meaning. Take “opposite.” Aristotle isolates four possible interpretations of this word: relational-qua-correlational terms (τὰ πρός τι), contraries (τὰ ἐναντία), privatives with regard to positives, and negations of the affirmative (11b, 17–20). One needn’t subscribe to the Schmittian perspective on politics to come to the conclusion that the difference between war and peace insinuates itself into the semantic variations of opposition. A shift from the view of others as our contraries to the view of them as standing over and against us in a correlation allows the parties to commence a peace process. The inverse movement from peace to a potential war is nourished by the sentiment that a determinate group of others is contrary to us, incompatible to the point of being mutually exclusive with our “way of life” and, finally, with our shared existence. A minimal gesture of establishing common grounds puts an accent on the relational, correlational nature of the friend-enemy opposition, for instance, by using “the genitive case or some other grammatical construction” (11b, 25–27). The enemy of … conducts the parties in a conflict to a shared terrain that is missing from the bellicose experience of the other. My enemy cancels out the absolute opposition of contrariety. As correlatives, political opposites are shown to be dependent on one another (11b, 35–36) even if the hostilities are still flaring.
Some of the other words Aristotle endeavors to regulate, logically and semantically, are priority (πρότερον), simultaneity (ἃμα), motion (κίνησις), and to have (ἔχειν). Exposing the polysemy of having, the Greek philosopher attends to its various objects, from qualities (habits, dispositions) to quantitative measures (height, weight), body parts, contents of vessels, and property. In a protofeminist mode, he reserves an especially harsh condemnation for one use of the word: “when it is said that a man has a wife [γυναῖκα ἔχειν]” (15b, 29–30). Judging the meaning “far-fetched,” Aristotle shows how, applied to a wife, having is a category mistake: in reality, it “means cohabiting [συνοικεῖ]” (15b, 30–31). People who employ the term incorrectly misconstrue a mode of coexistence, sharing-a-home-with, as what is to be appropriated in the course of one’s “economic” life. Like the husband, the wife is not only that which is known through the categories, but a knower, a coknower. At this point, which is also a limit, Categories ends.