Abstract
In this paper, I perform an analysis of Aristotle’s organic analogy when discussing the different “organs” of the Greek polis. I argue that this analysis demonstrates that the proper functioning of the polis depends upon the generation of different forms of life that will incline towards tension with one another, due to the fact that some members will be prevented by their form of life from enjoying the chief virtue of political life, namely, the accomplishment of human virtue and the good life. I argue that, at least within the context of the polis, there remains the possibility that those disenfranchised people experience sensuous recognition that they are contributing to human thriving. I contrast this with the modern city, in which what existed as a natural and visible tension in the polis becomes a concealed tension, with the result that no such recognition is possible, leaving modern city-dwellers alienated from the conditions that generate their forms of life.
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Notes
This means that the polis by its very purpose is invested in the character it generates in its citizens. See Coby (1986), p. 489.
Note that my concern with resolving the tension between those who benefit from the cohesion of the (healthy, properly functioning) polis is not Aristotle’s concern. Though he regards the polis as essential for living well, he is not concerned with the fact—that he openly acknowledges—that not all who keep the polis “alive” live well. Despite this, and operating out of a broadly construed modern democratic sensibility, I wish to take the insights that come from Aristotle’s organic analogy, and to apply them to moral concern about the relative well-being of those under-benefitted members of the political community. See Morrison (1999), pp. 153–154, for a discussion of the very different concerns we contemporary democrats bring to Aristotle’s Politics.
For a discussion of how faction is made manifest in such diverse regimes, see Coby (1988).
See Mayhew (1997) in particular. Nichols (1992), pp. 90–92 claims that the animal to which the polis must be compared is the human animal, due to the fact that it alone possesses the capacity to deliberate and to judge. This, it seems to me, confuses the purpose of the analogy, as the parts of animals (i.e. its psychic capacities) and the parts of a city are being compared insofar as each is a whole made of parts, not insofar as they share things in common. See also Garver (2006), p. 112, who claims that the analogy to animal life does not work due to the fact that animals reproduce, whereas political regimes such as democracies surely do not. This, again, is in my view an over-extension of an analogy beyond its purpose, which was rhetorical, i.e. to encourage us to consider the organs of the polis to be necessary for its “life” in much the same way that an animal’s organs maintain its life.
For an account of Aristotle's Politics that argues that Aristotle's claims about what is natural in politics should not be reduced to a claim about what is necessary, see Frank (2004).
This is well stated by Johnson (1990): “[T]he essential nature of the state [i.e. the polis] is dependent upon what Aristotle regarded as a universal human impulse to achieve self-sufficiency and goodness, or, in a word, self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment requires life—sheer existence—as a precondition for any further development, but once given life, it demands more. There is an ethical striving within the human soul, or so Aristotle believes” (49).
See Simpson (1998), p. 21.
See Bradley (1991), p. 27 for a discussion of this relationship between family, village and polis.
On the Soul, II. 3–4 Aristotle (1995b).
Simpson (1998), p. 300 notes that while Aristotle mentions only farmers, they are surely meant to represent all of those who provide food, including hunters and fishermen.
Note that Aristotle’s further division of this second class into two suggests that only part of this class belongs to the lowest register of the life of the polis, i.e. that which provides the needs of bare life.
See Nichols (1992), p. 92.
As I mentioned above, Aristotle suggests this by inference, rather than directly, insofar as he characterizes the subsequent organs as constituting the soul of the polis (IV. 4 1291a24–29).
See also VII. 9 1328b37–1329a2.
See, Coby (1986), p. 485.
Coby draws the conclusion from the passages in III. 5 discussed above that “there is a principle of diminishing returns which necessitates the disfranchisement of a segment of the population” (486). See also, Newman (1973), pp. 286–287, who suggests that though Aristotle’s account of the polis might have been understood as seeking to elevate the characters of all citizens, he does not indicate this as an aim of the polis.
Aristotle more generally regards the life in accordance with virtue to be the best life. In Book VII of the Politics, he presents the dispute between those who regard the best life as the one that is most engaged in politics and the life of contemplation. He does so while not himself committing to regarding these two kinds of life—broadly that of phronēsis and that of theoria—as mutually exclusive. See Nichols (1992), pp. 126–136. By contrast, in the Nicomachean Ethics X. 7–8, Aristotle’s discussion of the best life presents the political life as the one productive of the most good, and the contemplative life as the one that provides the purest and the most human pleasure, Aristotle (1995a) with the original Greek from Aristotle (1894). For our purposes, it remains the case that neither the life of political expression of human virtue nor the life of contemplation is made available without great inhibition for the laborer. For a full discussion of this issue, see Kraut (1991). See also Bartlett (1999).
Compare Nicomachean Ethics, X. 6 1176ab32–1177a1.
Nicomachean Ethics, X. 7.
Marx (2000), p. 276.
In the passage immediately prior to this, Aristotle claims that the free man should not cultivate the virtues of the handicraftsman and the laborer, lest the distinction between master and slave be dissolved (III. 4 1277a33). This has the strong rhetorical effect of suggesting that, for Aristotle, the virtues of citizenship in democracy—ruling and being ruled well—is simply not something available to a laborer. See Simpson (1998), p. 144 for a detailed discussion of in what specific context ruling and being ruled well is something Aristotle regards as the virtue of citizenship. Aristotle would therefore not consider the kind of argument that I am making here. My argument rests on the sense that the telos of the polis—to provide the proper context for the good life—introduces an obligation to seek a means of securing the possibility of a good life for all members of all organs of the polis, in however qualified a sense that might be.
In our time, of course, at least with respect to labor, the nation is itself part of a larger whole which is commonly called the “global economy.”
All in-text references to this essay are from Wirth (1938).
Blakely (2006) presents a compelling account of the development of the gated community.
Young (1990), p. 237.
Mumford (2004).
See Rofel (2001), pp. 160–166 for a discussion of a description of an authoritarian version of this strategy in China during the Cultural Revolution. Workers “continuously moved on and off the shop floor, one moment weaving some cloth or spinning thread, the next moment participating in a political meeting. When not engaged in political struggle, workers’ work regime still involved political discussion meetings with other workers” (161). Workers were thus encouraged to experience themselves “as laboring in collective groups” (162). In this context, the state mandated that laborers develop a political sensibility. The advantages of such a method of dissolving political tension between organs of political life must be measured, at least, against the coercion that it relies upon.
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Kirk, G. Natural Tensions in Aristotle’s Polis and Their Contemporary Manifestations. Topoi 40, 423–433 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9603-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9603-z