This chapter contains a number of related practical criticisms of Plato’s proposals for community of wives and children. Aristotle’s central point is, as far as it goes, perfectly fair: the scheme of the Republic would dilute strong emotional, sexual and family ties to a point at which no one would feel any attachment to or responsibility for anything or anyone; and such a state of affairs, besides being hardly ‘unity’, is harmful.
Has Aristotle missed the point? Or has he, at least, been unwilling to make Plato’s assumptions? Plato was as conscious as Aristotle was of the weakness and selfishness of mankind; yet he apparently judged there to be no reason in principle why men and women should not all regard other members of their community with the same degree of affection that they now lavish on their own wives or husbands exclusively, nor why the same should not apply to attitudes to children and property. What Aristotle does is to bring some sensible and powerful practical objections, and claim that Plato’s proposal is simply not ‘on’. Very probably; but Plato thinks the effort worth making. Two connected points seem fair: (a) Plato may be, and probably is, unrealistic or even misguided in his aims; but in the absence of experiment, Utopian ideals can hardly be invalidated by even the strongest doubts about their practicability, (b) Aristotle seems to assume that to divide affection among several persons is necessarily to dilute it, as if one had a sort of finite ‘fund’ of affection that has (as it were) to be shared round – that if I have (say) four brothers I must regard each with only half the affection I would lavish on each of two. But to regard all men as brothers has been the aim of more than one religion (to say nothing of secular movements), and a certain success seems possible. In the long run it may be achieved by education and habituation; meanwhile, Plato’s utopianism no doubt needs to be balanced by Aristotle’s sober scepticism.
1261b16 Again, even if it is best to have maximum unity within the association, the suggested criteria of its achievement do not seem cogent. Socrates thinks1 that if all unanimously say ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’, this is an indication of the state’s complete unity. But the word ‘all’ is used in two senses: ‘all separately’ and ‘all together’. Used in the former sense this might better bring about what Socrates wants; for each man will always refer to the same boy as his son, the same woman as his wife, and will speak in the same way of his possessions and whatever else comes within his purview. But that is not at all how people will speak who hold wives and children in common. They may do so all together, but not each separately; and the same with regard to possessions. Thus there is a clear fallacy in the use of the word ‘all’; for words such as ‘all’ and ‘both’, and ‘odd’ and ‘even’, owing to their double senses, lead to highly disputable conclusions even2 in reasoning. So, while in one sense3 of the word it may be an admirable state of affairs where ‘all’ say the same thing, it is nevertheless impossible; whereas in the other sense4 it is not conducive to a feeling of solidarity. 1261b32 There is further harm in the doctrine: the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected. Other reasons apart, the thought that someone else is looking after it tends to make them careless of it. (This is rather like what happens in domestic service: a greater number of servants sometimes does less work than a smaller.) Each citizen acquires a thousand sons, but these are not one man’s sons; any one of them is equally the son of any person, and as a result will be equally neglected by everyone.
1262a1 Moreover, when a man uses ‘my’ in this way with reference to a fellow-citizen, he is speaking only as a small fraction of a large number. In saying ‘my son’ or ‘X’s son’ is ‘doing well’ or ‘not doing well’, he is referring to each one of a thousand fathers (or whatever the number of the citizens may be), and even then with some dubiety, since it is uncertain whether any particular citizen is in fact the father of a son, and of one that has survived. Is not our ordinary use of the word ‘my’, in states as they are now, better than this use of it by two thousand or ten thousand individuals, all with reference to the same thing? In the ordinary way one man calls his own son the same person whom another calls his own brother, and whom a third calls cousin, or some other term of blood-relationship or of connection by marriage, his own in the first place, or of his own relatives; and yet another speaks of him as a member of his brotherhood5 or tribe. Anybody would rather be a cousin who really was someone’s own personal cousin, than a son in the manner described.
1262a14 Again, one could not prevent people from making assumptions about their own brothers, sons, fathers, or mothers. For the likenesses which exist between parents and their offspring would inevitably be regarded as sure signs of connection. And this is what actually occurs, according to reports of certain writers of travels round the world, who tell us that some of the peoples of Upper Libya have community of wives, but they can always tell whose children are whose by their resemblances. And there are some females, both human and non-human (like mares and cows), which have a remarkable natural power of producing offspring resembling their sires, like the one they called the ‘just mare’ of Pharsalus.6