The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  When he wrote his Politics, which is more a collection of essays than a single treatise, that real world was the Greek city-state. The original Politics was accompanied by something like 158 constitutions from actual Greek cities, of which only the Athenian example survives. These constitutions were for Aristotle the biological specimens for his political laboratory. As he had done with the fish and mollusks he had collected, he intended to probe inside to find out how they worked, in order to arrive at a general picture of how all political societies worked, or should work.

  Political science on Aristotle’s terms is about observation and analysis, or induction: very much what goes on in political science departments in universities today. Aristotle knew that a political science on Plato’s terms, based on an exact knowledge of how to create the perfect laws, might be a worthy goal. Plato’s writings, Aristotle says, “show ingenuity, novelty of view, and a spirit of inquiry.”

  But perfect laws cannot stand up to the lessons of experience in actual cities and societies, “in which these things [advocated by Plato] would not have gone unnoticed if they had really been good.” As with ethics, in Aristotle’s politics it is the practice, not the vision, that counts.23

  Like Plato, Aristotle accepts that the goal of politics is to make the members of the community good. “The end of political science is the highest good; and the chief concern of this science is to endow the citizens with … virtue and the readiness to do fine deeds.”24 However, the way to get there is not from the top down, as in Plato’s Republic and the Laws, but from the bottom up.

  Aristotle reveals that the essential building block of every political community must be the individual household, consisting of the citizen and his family (including household slaves). From the household springs every other type of human association, starting with the clan or tribe. The final realization of all these associations is the self-governing city-state, the polis.

  But that community still exists, Aristotle argues, in order to make the householder happy, rather than the other way around. This is why Aristotle describes man, in his most famous phrase, as a “political animal.” We are zoon politikon by nature, but we join together to realize our own ends as individuals, not to serve the ends of others. In order to do this, men require some freedom from government interference, and in a democracy like Athens, they require equality before the law. In his Politics Aristotle set out the essential prerequisites of democratic liberty pretty much as they remain today.25

  This is why Aristotle becomes so impatient when he turns to the Republic. Plato’s goal is unity, a laudable one. But Aristotle says that this kind of unity equals the death of the polis and freedom. Plato’s authoritarian, even arbitrary, rules reduce the community to the outlook of a single household or family, whereas a truly free society requires an aggregate of families and, as he says, “different kinds of men.”

  For Aristotle, diversity is the keynote of the free society, and free exchange lies at its heart. In the true (as opposed to the ideal) political community there must be a diversity of social roles, like the differing arts and crafts and social types we find along the street, from pot makers and carpenters to sea captains and merchants and wealthy landowners. This also entails a diversity of individual talents and abilities and a growing diversity of individual interests. A free society “necessarily requires a difference of capacities among its members,” Aristotle writes in Book II, “which enables them to serve as complements to one another, and to attain a higher and better life by the mutual exchange of their different services.”26

  The political character of the citizenry must reflect that same diversity. Instead of one group monopolizing political power—even if that monopoly, as in the case of the Republic, is for everyone’s good—“the natural equality of all the citizens” in a free state requires human beings to share power and to experience ruling and being ruled in turn. Aristotle’s free society is one in which the citizens participate in their government rather than submit to it. All will be rulers in one way or another, at one time or another. “This means some rule, and others are ruled, in turn, as if they had become, for the time being, different persons.”27

  Some citizens will run for office, like the magistrates, or archons, chosen annually in Athens. Others will sit in the councils elected by the tribal districts, or demes; still others will vote by a simple show of hands in the assembly. All need some role to play, and the job of a constitution is to devise a system for doing that. Because if some lose their turn at ruling and being ruled or are systematically excluded, Aristotle concludes, we all lose out, “which again proves that difference of kinds is essential to the constitution of a polis.”28

  The same is true with the economic life of the polis. The diversity of crafts and exchanges is what gives it its energy and dynamism; it is what makes the self-governing community self-sufficient. Plato’s ban on certain crafts, like statue making or writing poetry, and restrictions on others seemed absurd to Aristotle. However, Aristotle recognized that some will do better at their jobs and professions than others. Diversity of interests means inequality of results, even a division between rich and poor.

  That division, and the resulting class conflict that infected all the Greek city-states, is the sign of a free society. It is one reason Aristotle stands so opposed to Plato’s communism. Enforcing economic equality is not just a violation of common sense. It also flies in the face of why the polis exists at all.29

  For Aristotle, class conflict is inevitable. He spends nearly half the Politics talking about it. But this conflict is not a source of despair, as it was for Plato. Nor is it a sign that political disaster is looming. Instead, Aristotle’s science of politics is about learning how to build a harmony out of these competing existing parts through balance and moderation, rather than trying to impose order and harmony through rational legislation, as Plato tried to do in his Republic.

  So the basis of Aristotle’s secure and stable order is not the Philosopher Ruler, but the good citizen who participates actively in the political, social, and economic life of his community. He takes his turn in office and in voting; he leads his own life with his family; and he pursues his own interests at work every day. In his values and orientation, Aristotle’s citizen is a true “political animal.” To borrow a word that will be freighted with other meanings later on, he is bourgeois.

  In his daily interactions, he practices that peculiar mixture of prudence and virtue that enables him to hit the mean and keeps his family and his polis on an even keel even as it complements the same virtues of his neighbors. He is no visionary or crusader. Aristotle would have little patience with those we call political activists. The good citizen’s life is not about achieving one single goal, however laudable, or doing one thing perfectly. It is about doing all things well enough to be a happy man—and be an integral part of a happy free society.

  Still, Aristotle holds out for certain principles that were traditional to the Greek polis. He still believes that the goal of self-government must be cultivating the good life as defined by our nature, not just self-defense or the protection of property (that will occur to other Aristotelians later).30 He also believes that justice within the city must be based on what we deserve by our contributions; in other words it must be distributive, meaning the wealthy get more and women and slaves have no political identity.

  But in Book III, Aristotle confronts the weightiest issue of all. Plato had raised it in the Republic: “Who should rule?” In modern political parlance, this is the issue of sovereignty. In the end, after examining the best constitutions and the conditions on the ground, Aristotle concludes that power belongs best with the people. This may be difficult to achieve, he points out. It may fly in the face of Plato’s claim that laws should be made by those who know best.

  But “there is this to be said about the Many,” Aristotle remarks. “Each of them by himself may not be of [much] quality; but when they all come together it is possible they may surpass—collective
ly and as a body, not individually—the quality of the few best.”31 Those who argue that only experts know best are wrong. In politics, as in house building, the best judge of what works is the user, not the maker. Aristotle’s support for the rule of the people, backed by “rightly constitutional laws” that must be ultimately sovereign, becomes a crucial legacy for the future of the West. Democracy on the Athenian model may not be ideal, Aristotle says, but it may be the best we can hope for.32

  By the time we close the last pages of the Politics, we realize we are standing on the brink of two different ways of thinking about governing human beings. Politics on Plato’s terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle’s terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.

  Ironically, that point was rammed home by Aristotle’s own experience with real-life politics when he became tutor to Philip of Macedon’s son Alexander.

  Plato was sixty when he took his stab at high politics. Aristotle was about forty. He was not yet famous, and his own views were still developing. Despite his urban bias, Aristotle was not indifferent to the heroic, even Homeric, virtues this headstrong virile athletic youth seemed to represent. He may even have hoped that he could turn the sixteen-year-old Alexander into a real-life version of his “great-souled man” outlined in the Ethics.

  Alexander and Aristotle were together for four years. When they parted company, it was as if they had never met. “Men who are utterly superior” to others, Aristotle says at one point in the Politics, are “a law unto themselves.”33 Perhaps the one thing Alexander got out of his lessons with Aristotle was the sense of natural Greek superiority to other barbarian races, and that if Greeks ever truly unified, they could crush anyone, even the Persian Empire. Alexander, of course, proceeded to do just that. But this was a chauvinist view he could have learned from almost any Greek writer in the mid–fourth century BCE, even Plato.

  As for Aristotle, his links to Alexander and the royal family certainly did not hurt his career. He and the regent Alexander left behind in Greece, Antipater, seem to have been on fairly intimate terms.34 Aristotle’s nephew and disciple, Callisthenes, actually went with Alexander on his conquests. But in the end, Alexander remained the same ruthless barbarian his father had been. Teaching him had been like petting a lion in the zoo, Aristotle learned. It is better to take your hand out of the bars too soon rather than too late. Alexander eventually turned on Callisthenes and had him executed on trumped-up treason charges. Faced with the decision to defend his nephew against Alexander’s unjust attacks, Aristotle thought it wiser to do and say nothing.

  It is an instructive story. Since World War II, political theorists have been all too aware of the dangers of Plato’s approach to politics, of reaching too high and too fast to make our utopian hopes a reality.‡ The Philosopher Ruler can turn out to be Cambodia’s Pol Pot or the Ayatollah Khomeini.

  But there are dangers inherent in Aristotle’s approach as well. They involve an acceptance of the status quo that can shade into timidity, and rationalizing injustices with a casual shrug of “that’s the way things are.” Aristotle’s philosophy emphasizes the necessity of change, even progress. Yet paradoxically, his insistence on being the detached observer, on analyzing rather than influencing events, winds up providing the excuse for institutional inertia and apathy. This is what happened when his influence grew too strong in the universities of medieval Europe and when scholars turned to Aristotle to justify appalling episodes like the slave trade and the conquest of the New World.§

  The necessary antidote to Aristotelian indifference appears, appropriately enough, in Plato’s Republic. There he lists the qualities he most esteems in the Guardians of his imaginary state, one of which is thymos. It is not an easy word to translate. Most commentators describe it as spirit or courage. For Plato, it is the natural ally of reason rather than the appetites.35

  We can also translate thymos as righteous anger, the burning indignation we feel at the sight of a parent abusing a helpless child, or any wrongdoing and injustice. Thymos is the fire that burns in the heart of the activist, the reformer, the revolutionary, and the intellectual rebel. All the truly great reformers had it: Mohandas Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, William Wilberforce, Bishop Desmond Tutu. It’s what distinguishes a Martin Luther from an Erasmus; a Rousseau from a Voltaire; a Martin Luther King from a Booker T. Washington; and a Lenin from a Kerensky. It’s a quality that can land us all in trouble; but sometimes it also springs us out of servitude.

  More than once in history, Aristotle’s writings will offer a pretext around which brutal practices like slavery and imperialism, and narrow-minded and rigid orthodoxies, will be justified or built. And more than once in history, it will take a renegade Platonist to knock them down.

  From politics and ethics to theories of knowledge and nature, then, the battle lines between Plato and Aristotle were drawn. They would strengthen and intensify, as disciples and admirers took over the struggle. The best would borrow from both, but none could evade the fact that Greek, and then Western, thought was now set on a double, rather than a single, track. And it would move in directions and toward places neither Plato nor Aristotle could ever have imagined.

  In 335–34, Aristotle returned to Athens. He was now the foremost living philosopher in Greece. He had not seen the city since Plato’s death. As he walked the streets, however, he would have wandered past the Academy, where he had spent most of his young adulthood. The man who had squeezed him out as director, Plato’s nephew Speusippus, was dead. But the members had chosen as his successor a man who was just as opposed to Aristotle’s theories as Speusippus had been. So Aristotle decided it was time to found his own school.

  The place he found for it was on the eastern side of town, in some rented buildings close to a grove sacred to the god Apollo Lykeius. Later, when he had some buildings of his own constructed on the site, the name stuck. The Lyceum was Aristotle’s answer to the Academy and its mirror image. There was a large garden and a temple dedicated to the Nine Muses, or museum, just as there was in the Academy. There were also lecture rooms, large billboards on which were mounted maps of Greece and the world, and a room set aside for a growing collection of books and scrolls (as far as we know, the first formal library in the ancient world).

  There were also rooms with tables for collecting and dissecting biological specimens. As we would expect, Aristotle made sure his Lyceum students had a thorough training in the natural sciences. His student Theophrastus’s History of Plants and Aristotle’s own History of Animals were the fruits of the Lyceum laboratory. Aristotle also created the first real medical school, which became famous all across Greece. Aristotle deserves the title of father of medicine as least as much as Hippocrates does.

  Aristotle lectured regularly just as his teacher Plato had, usually on the more difficult philosophical topics in the mornings and on rhetoric and dialectic in the afternoons. Most of what survive as Aristotle’s writings were probably lecture notes preserved by his listeners. And since Aristotle liked to walk as he talked, with his pupils following behind and on either side of him, the students of the Lyceum became known as the “wanderers,” or peripatetikoi—the Peripatetics.

  The productive routine of the Lyceum and Aristotle’s last years was shattered by a single event: the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Overnight, it turned the Greek world upside down. Those who had been out of favor as opponents of Macedonian rule were in; those who had collaborated or benefited from the Alexandrian order found themselves in danger. Aristotle himself fled Athens for Chalcis in Euboea, where his mother had owned property and where in his last years he was able to find some shelter from the storms around him.

  One of his last pieces of writing that survives is his will. It mentions which sister will take custody of his son and daughter and w
hich gets the house and garden. He names which slaves are to be set free and asks that money be set aside for a modest memorial statue to Zeus. He never mentions the Lyceum or his old students and friends. It is, as his biographer Werner Jaeger pointed out, the will of a lonely man.36

  He passed on in his sixty-second year, in 322, a year after Alexander, his most famous pupil. Aristotle died alone and isolated, almost in disgrace. Even Delphi had stripped him of the honors it had heaped on him during his lifetime. Although his portrait bust remained in the museum of the school he had founded, his own writings sat in the Lyceum’s library for nearly a century, largely forgotten.

  All the same, under his former pupil Theophrastus the Lyceum was about to take on a life of its own. Its work and the patient inquiries of its Peripatetics would spread far beyond the interests of its founder, even as Plato’s Academy did. In fact, the clash between Plato and Aristotle’s legacies was just beginning.

  * * *

  * See chapter 25.

  † It is said that, after the Koran, Plato’s Republic was the favorite book of the founder of Iran’s Islamic republic, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

  ‡ The centerpiece of this critique is Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which was first published in 1945 but which Popper began writing the day Nazi Germany occupied Austria in the Anschluss of 1938. For more on this, see chapter 29.

  § See chapter 25.

  Diogenes (412?–323 BCE)

  Six

  THE INHERITORS: PHILOSOPHY IN THE HELLENISTIC AGE

  It is vain to ask of the gods what a man is capable of supplying for himself.

  —Epicurus (341–270 BCE)

  Aristotle’s greatest pupil died in 323 BCE, convinced he had conquered the world. He had come back from his campaigns beyond the Indus River to die in Babylon. Someone asked Alexander on his deathbed what he wanted for his funeral. He whispered, “I see great games.”