THE POLITICAL ANIMAL
ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.) was a student of Plato’s, and he too makes his beginning from partisan politics. But taking a different tack from his teacher, he sets forth in his Politics a mixed regime as a more attainable standard than the best regime. He has a best regime of his own, less lofty than Plato’s because he staffs it with those excelling in moral virtue rather than philosophic virtue. And in keeping with this difference, he establishes his best regime by degrees (in Books 4 to 6 of the Politics), rejecting Plato’s drastic measures for going from the ordinary to the best (such as expelling everyone over age ten from the previous society).
The mixed regime is composed of democracy and oligarchy, of the many and the few: these are the two parties to be found, open or hidden, in all societies. Ordinarily, one of these parties dominates and suppresses the other. But Aristotle notices that each party makes a claim to justice, and this claim can be elicited from its implicit or imperfect expression in partisan speeches and brought out into broad daylight by political philosophy. This is what Plato had done to criticize the ordinary regimes against the standard of the best regime, and thereby to calm the spirits and lower the expectations of zealous youths, such as Socrates’ main interlocutors in the Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus. But Aristotle wanted to give such youths something wholesome, yet political, to do; he did not despise moderate improvements in a political situation even though such improvements could not establish the best regime. He compares the political philosopher to a gym teacher who betters the condition of average bodies as well as the best, and who, while leading the exercise of his pupils, also gets some for himself incidentally, as it were. For philosophers live in societies with non-philosophers and can benefit from their societies’ being put into sound condition. There is in Aristotle’s view something strange about the idea, apparently to be concluded from Plato’s beautiful painting of a utopian best regime, that normal life is radically insufficient. For how can what is normal be unhealthy?
A certain degree of political controversy is not only normal but natural to human beings, Aristotle supposes. He defines man as by nature a political animal. But what is a political animal? Other animals are gregarious, bees for example, but they are not political because they do not speak or reason about what is advantageous and harmful, just and unjust, good and bad; they are confined to feeling pain and pleasure. Human beings have to reason about these matters, as they are not perfectly clear. Nature may incline us to what is good, but it does not tell us unambiguously what that is, or move us toward it without hindrance or distraction, as it does with other animals. We humans are by nature political, but there is no single, programmed way of life as with bees. Human nature includes both the freedom and the necessity to construct a regime, for we could not have freedom if nature had done everything for us.
Accordingly, Aristotle says that despite the naturalness of politics, we are indebted to the one who first constituted a city or society. To constitute a city one must give it a certain principle or rule for its regime. That principle founds the city and by continually inspiring it, enables it to survive; the principle of rule is held by its current rulers as well as its past founders. One cannot make a city as one can a copper pot, and let it sit there complete, without further human intervention. A political constitution is neither entirely natural nor entirely artificial. If it were entirely natural, there would be only one regime corresponding with human nature: and we would have no freedom to choose the direction of our politics. If it were entirely artificial, we would have no guide for our choice: and the only freedom would be for the first maker, who gets to impose his creation until some other maker comes along.
One must distinguish between what is by nature, in which we have no choice, and what is according to nature, the standard by which we choose. If there is no single regime imposed on us by nature, what is the regime we should choose that is according to nature? The trouble, again, is that the choice is unclear, because nature seems to give support to both the typical regimes, democracy and oligarchy. Democracy is based on our natural equality, since there are many important respects in which human beings are equal; all have reason, for one. But oligarchy is based on human inequality, for which there is also ample evidence; for instance, the superiority in reason of a few over the many. Which is more important to human life, the fact that all humans have reason, or the fact that they have it very unequally? The answer is not obvious, and the debate continues today even within our democracy as we try to decide what inequalities to allow or encourage within our general principle that “all men are created equal.” The choice of a political principle can and will be defended with reasons, but it cannot be secured with a proof sufficiently conclusive to end political debate.
What we choose is what seems best, or is in the interest of those choosing, namely, the rulers—who of course may be the many, that is, the “people” in a democracy. You might ask, why does a choice have to be a principle of rule? Why cannot each person choose for himself without elevating his choice into a principle of rule over others—and thus imposing his will on them? Aristotle’s answer is a challenge to our liberal practice of toleration. A choice is not a choice without a reason, he says, but when you give a reason, you say why something is good for you—and for others like yourself. Reason transforms a personal “I” into a more general “we.” So Aristotle’s dictum that man is a rational animal leads to his definition of man as a political animal who rules himself and others, not one who merely decides for himself only on a whim.
A principle of rule is part rational, part conventional; what is natural has to be completed by what is conventional, and what is conventional has to be guided by the natural. This twofold character of political rule is responsible for the manyness of regimes, and for what Aristotle calls the changeableness of justice. Aristotle is no relativist, but he is also no dogmatist. He is willing to allow that though the justice of the best regime is everywhere the same, justice in the actual regimes we live in varies according to circumstance and convention. One can see that American justice, say, is more democratic than justice in most places elsewhere, and if this is not the justice of the best regime, it is justice in America at present. Every actual political regime has a principle of rule and a way of life that mix nature and convention, reason and unreason. Regimes can be ranked in a hierarchy of good to bad, but in general one cannot ignore the regime and judge matters by a standard of bare or pure morality outside of the context of rule. In sum, if you want to understand politics—anywhere and at any time—you need to know what Aristotle says about the regime.