Void House Book Club: Politics

English critic Martin Seymour-Smith said that, except for religious leaders, “Aristotle’s influence on the world must have been greater than that of any other singular individual.” In my ultimate guilty pleasure book, Michael Hart’s The 100, Hart ranks Aristotle as the thirteenth most important person of all time, with only seven non-religious figures ahead of him. Most people with a passing knowledge of history, and western history in particular, would be inclined to agree. Until fairly recently, the ultimate authority in the western world (and thus, much of the rest of the world) was the Bible, and for many people it still is. However, the Bible left too much unsaid to satisfy even its most fervent supporters, who still questioned why objects fell to the Earth or how the celestial bodies moved. Enter Aristotle, who purported to have answers for all (at least, most) of these questions. Aristotle informed our understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology for more than a millennium. It wasn’t until the scientific revolution that Aristotle met serious resistance to his ideas, and even then some held for much longer. Many of his claims on zoology have been confirmed.

Today, of course, Aristotle does not enjoy the same position that he once held in the natural sciences. Instead, we think of him primarily as a philosopher, where his influence certainly hasn’t diminished. It’s difficult to define Aristotelian thought (also called the Peripatetic School) because he discussed such a wide range of subjects, but there are certainly commonalities across his arguments. If all of Aristotle’s philosophy draws from any one position, it’s that the best method for finding truth is to draw conclusions from observable reality. In this way, Aristotle anticipated modern empiricism. He also codified logic, which is what drew me to him. Logic is wonderful because it leaves no ambiguity; if you can demonstrate using logic that something is true, then you know it with certainty, and if we know with certainty, we can always make the most informed decision. If we all just used logic, we could solve every problem on Earth!

Naïvete like that is Aristotle’s great trap. The problem is not just that most (all?) people are illogical, although that certainly doesn’t help — the problem is that there are many issues which logic alone cannot solve. In my last book club, I discussed the problem of the criterion, which holds that we cannot know any axiom is true unless we prove it, but we can only prove it using other axioms which themselves must be proven, and the proofs for those axioms must be proven, and onwards to infinity. You can see how this makes it difficult to know anything with certainty. Aristotle must have known this as well, because even though he invented these rules for using logic, he did not always employ them. He certainly didn’t in the subject of today’s book club, Politics.

Politics is not a book in the traditional sense. It is probably a compendium of speeches by Aristotle recorded by one of his students, and it is almost certainly incomplete. It is divided into eight books which progress from one to the next as a series of lectures. There is no singular argument which permeates the work; in fact, the work hardly reads persuasively at all. I would describe it as instructive or expository. Some people do not know what politics is, and Aristotle is here to explain it to them. His personal opinion is largely immaterial; even when included, it reads more as a matter of fact. It is not merely Aristotle’s belief that Sparta is a failed state, it is a plain fact obvious to anyone paying attention. For this reason, it’s difficult to parse Aristotle’s philosophical arguments from the contextualization he gives them. Politics has many arguments within it, but most are subtly folded into long, technical dissertations on every possible component of the state. In some sense, Aristotle was quite considerate in doing this. The way that he spends upwards of five entire books defining terms reminds me of the famous Abraham Lincoln quote that, if he had six hours to fell a tree, he would “spend the first four sharpening the axe.” He aspired to make it quite clear what he meant by every term, which of course reduces misunderstanding. Yet I fear that I failed to retain much of Politics, because the book is so, so tediously dry that it made my brain glaze over. Is this my fault, or Aristotle’s (or perhaps the translator’s)? I guess I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide.

The two most scrutinized arguments in Politics are also the two clearest, which come through in Books I and Books III. The first is a defense of what Aristotle calls “natural slavery,” and the second is the definition of states in terms of the number of powerful people. According to Aristotle, there are six basic forms of government, which you can imagine as sitting on a table where the x-axis is the number of people who hold power and the y-axis is the moral quality of the government. A government can have either one person, few people, or many people in power, and it can be either good or bad. These governments, shown in the table below, are monarchy, aristocracy, polity, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.

Aristotle claims that, in a good state, it is better to have fewer people in power and best to have only one. In a bad state, the opposite is true. If he ever justified this position, I missed it. My own interpretation of the argument was that maintaining a just state is a painful responsibility, and that it is therefore best if only one person must bear it; but in a corrupt state, it is easier for a single person to abuse than a large number of people, so it is best for many people to share power. This is probably not what Aristotle meant, though, so I suppose I’m just putting words in his mouth. This categorization of states into six forms is probably what Politics is most remembered for, which is quite germane in my opinion. It’s not really a political position so much as a definition of a term, which is more or less what the entirety of Politics is.

Natural slavery, on the other hand, is in fact an argument, and quite a striking one at that. Aristotle claimed that, although it is possible for someone to be legally a slave but still have the qualities of a free man, there exist some people whose slavery is informed by their very personhood. To be a slave is better for society as a whole as well as the slaves themselves, although they might not recognize it. This argument is odious to modern sensibilities, but must have seemed just as milquetoast as the rest of Politics at the time of Aristotle’s lectures, when slavery was a widespread and largely unquestioned element of daily life. Is that less true today, though? After all, slaves still do exist in modern times, even if we don’t call them slaves. The vast majority of people consume goods produced by slaves constantly, slaves who sew their clothes and pick their coffee beans and open their cacao pods. Many people are aware they do this, but refuse any responsibility for it — there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, after all, so buying M&Ms and thereby incentivizing the use of slave labor in their production is a-okay. It’s not even true that we ignore slavery because it only exists outside of our borders; an enormous portion of the American population, perhaps even the majority, demand that we open our borders to import millions of people from places like Latin America and India to do the work “no one else wants to do,” i.e., slave labor. This is even more damning to those critical of Aristotle, because immigrants willingly cross over the border to become slaves, apparently believing that slavery in the US is preferable to freedom elsewhere in the world. One could even make the case that those people I’ve excluded, the supposedly “free” men of the first world, are themselves still slaves in an intellectual sense, that they still demand to be controlled by some entity like the state or the market — but that is too difficult a position to get into here. Suffice to say that slavery does exist in modern times, and that we don’t question it as much as we ought to, so is it really that strange to argue some people are slaves naturally? I personally think slavery shouldn’t be practiced, or at least that if it is practiced, it should not involve abuses to the slaves. But that seems to be the minority position.

Aristotle conceptualized politics differently than we do today, which might explain some of the disconnect between his thought and ours. Today, the definition of a government is generally agreed as a “monopoly on violence,” a term first used by Max Weber. The logic is that, for a state to get its people to do what it wants, it must be able to coerce them through the use of violence, and they can’t have the capacity to fight back, or they might disobey. A state that can’t force obedience isn’t truly a state because it doesn’t have the power to enforce any laws it sets. Aristotle had a rosier picture; a state was merely the confluence of people working towards the common good. This makes it easy to understand how his Politics grew out of Nicomachaean Ethics, in that the latter is about the virtue of a singular person, and the former about the virtue of many people working in tandem. In this state, there is no need for violence, because those who hold power are competent, virtuous, and invested in the well-being of the state. They don’t need to coerce people to follow the laws, as they only care for the betterment of the community. Interestingly, although Aristotle claimed that monarchy is the best form of government, this view of government seems to lend itself to aristocracy, in that all sufficiently virtuous people hold power (although Aristotle would have called this democracy). This is about the only part of Politics which affirmed something I already believed.

That, however, is not the reason Politics was my least favorite of the books I read in my first “phase” of this reading project. Nor is the reason that I found Politics boring, although that is also true. Technical works often read like a car manual for me. More importantly, though, the book just didn’t do what I expected it to. Aristotle, history’s greatest logician, should have used logic to demonstrate how best a state should operate. I expected that Politics would enlighten me. Instead, I left it more confused than before. At least in respect to political philosophy, Aristotle did not outshine his teacher.