PREVIEW-Episode 60: Aristotle: What’s the Best Form of Government?

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 60 is what's the best form of government? And we read the Politics by aristotle from around 350 BC. You can join the discussion, get the text and read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to from the independent city state of

0:33 Seth: Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin wishing he lived in an oligarchy instead of a democracy in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan by nature Political in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:45 Unknown speaker: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:48 Seth: I really should have my slave perform this duty for me and be record these podcasts for me.

0:55 Wes: Ah yes, we're so dependent on our slaves.

0:58 Mark: I thought you were by nature a slave. Aren't some people that.

1:01 Seth: Yes, but how is it epistemically verifiable? You gotta look into my soul and figure out that I am one who by nature needs to be ruled. Which I think is what my girlfriend might tell you.

1:15 Mark: Partially Examined Life is listener supported. Please donate to us@PartiallyExaminedLife.com past big money donors are Janet Alvarado, Catherine Clisby, Jonathan Reed, Hebert Longhurst, Lee Braver, Michael Hunt, and W. Mark Poling. You know, I didn't tell the folks what parts of this book we were reading. We really just tried to cover a lot of it just to get a representative sample. But a lot of it is very boring and repetitious. So the parts we focused on were book one, chapters one and two, book three, book four, chapters one through three, book five, chapters one and two, book six, chapters one through six, and book seven, chapters one through three, and 13 through 15.

1:52 Wes: I did get bored, I have to admit.

1:54 Mark: Even with that.

1:55 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:55 Wes: And the later stuff. And then I read. Reading about the politics is great. You know, I feel guilty because I feel like I'm moving too quickly through it and I'm not thinking through everything as carefully as I should be. I try to do that with book one, chapters one and two, the idea of the state being natural and all that. But I didn't have time to do it with everything.

2:13 Seth: I'm going to unapologetically say that Aristotle is one of the few philosophers that I don't mind letting somebody else figure out. I would almost rather read a summary than read Aristotle himself. And it's not that it's tremendously complicated language like Kant or anything like that. It's just frickin hard to read. It's hard to piece everything together sometimes. And then sometimes you just sort of zone out. It's like the catalog of ships. It's a combination of like Homer and Kant. Sometimes you're like, what the hell is going on right now?

2:44 Wes: Yeah, if you really spend some time on a paragraph where it might seem like there are some disjointed, loosely related sentences, let's say you actually take time to figure out, you realize, oh, he's making a very tight argument here and he's actually quite economical. And it's also not nice for me to go to some secondary literature and be reminded of some things, kind of be sensitized and then go back to the text and be more sensitive to what's going on. But it is easy to go into zone out mode or to get bored.

3:12 Unknown speaker: I think the politics is a good example of the way in which boring is a perfectly fine word is he's just so analytical. He spends a lot of time breaking things down into pieces and parts and almost describing it. And if you want to get even more of a taste of that kind of thing, just go read some of his biological works.

3:32 Seth: You bring up a good point, Dylan. It's not so much the fact that he's analytical that makes it tough to stay focused. It's that he's analytical about things that are very specific to his time and place. So as soon as you're like, okay, he's going to go on like an in depth analysis of slavery. As soon as I'm kind of like tuned out to like, I don't have that as part of my cultural heritage, even the kind of slavery he's talking about is a particular brand of it, then I get tuned out. Or you know, if I don't know about some of the city states that he's analyzing and the politics, and I'm like, okay, make the point, move on. That's the part that's difficult.

4:06 Unknown speaker: It's a little bit like reading original pieces of research sometimes. I got interested in this new research about the genetic history of dogs. And when I went to go read the papers, I was reminded of the

way in which there's a kind of

exhaustive cataloging of things and going through different possibilities and lots of very particular analyses. And I really was just interested in the big picture. And so I wasn't in a position where I wanted to evaluate that information. I wanted to just see what their conclusions were and just get a sense of what that was. So there's A way in which you sort of want the review article and the list of the greatest hits out of the book, unless you are really going to try to do some kind of analysis of it.

4:55 Wes: One thing also is that Aristotle was very empirically minded, which is not something that people always realize. And in this case, he had his students go out and collect information about different constitutions for 158 different cities, and we only have one of those today, the Constitution of Athens. But part of his work here reflects a systematic analysis of that data from 158 different types of political organizations.

5:21 Unknown speaker: I think that if you're coming to Aristotle for the very, very first time, I think that the selections that we have are pretty reasonable for the politics, and I encourage anybody to just jump in. But if you really just get dismayed, there are other books by Aristotle to read that are a little easier going than the politics. If it's your first time reading it, it takes a little exercise to get used to it.

Yeah.

5:43 Mark: Related to this, I listened to somebody who made a podcast version of speeches that he had done on friendship. And it's just a little short thing of their three kinds of friendship. And it was nice. It was none of this exhaustive stuff.

5:55 Seth: It was short.

5:56 Wes: But he is interested in taxonomy. You did say the three different kinds?

6:00 Seth: Yes, yes.

6:01 Wes: He loves taxonomy.

6:02 Unknown speaker: He did invent the categories, right?

Right.

6:06 Wes: Yes.

6:06 Mark: I used a different approach for this one. I mean, I know I just did this for the more, but I listened to this entire book as a Librivox. So it's actually a lot of different people reading the different sections. So I just got through the whole book and sort of just let it go by. It's the equivalent. That's how I was able to choose what selections we would do. And then it was a fairly simple matter to go. Actually, it was just today then that I read through the actual sections and took notes on them and I felt that it was fine.

6:32 Wes: Usually I do a lot of most of the reading day of or the few days before, but this one I've been reading steadily for a few weeks, slowly.

6:39 Unknown speaker: What did you do when you were in seminar, Wes? Were you one of those people that felt you had to read all the reading the day of seminar in order to have it in your brain? Or did you read it three weeks ahead of time and then review it and review your notes the day before?

6:55 Wes: No, I was a terrible student. I often missed readings and if I did get a reading done, it was at the last minute. Usually I didn't get the whole reading done.

7:03 Unknown speaker: But you went to seminar. Even if you hadn't done it, it's better to skip.

7:06 Wes: Because if you haven't done it, it's such a painful experience to be in seminar when you haven't done the reading. I did sit through seminars where. And then I'm. I had to be silent. Sucks.

7:17 Unknown speaker: It's your penance. It's your just punishment.

7:20 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I realized at some point that I thought I really enjoyed seminars because I learned so much and I enjoyed hearing what other people had to say. And then my experiences of not doing the reading and not being able to talk, I realized what I enjoyed about seminar was listening to myself talk.

7:39 Mark: And yet now you hate listening to yourself.

7:41 Wes: Yes. Doing a podcast will teach you to hate listening to yourself. Yeah, definitely.

7:46 Mark: Since we're off topic already, let's give the ground rules for the new people. Although, new people, if you really want to hear what this is about, we have an episode zero where we kind of explain why we're joking around here and not jumping into the text right away. And we also did one. What? Episode 5 on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. So while that is not essential for what we'll talk about today, they're complementary, right? This text was the sequel to that one.

8:10 Wes: Or really, that text was the prequel to this one.

8:13 Seth: They're conceptually related.

8:14 Mark: Well, I thought they were actually written like. He refers to it as the previous treatise. Like they're actually.

8:18 Unknown speaker: Oh, you have to be careful about that, though, because that phrase, the previous works, it's not altogether clear what that refers to.

8:26 Mark: Well, the ground rules for our discussion include, number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Number two, don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you'd understand me if only you'd read Nietzsche's unpublished masterwork, Syphilitic. All Too Syphilitic. Number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would constitute a humdinger or a laugh riot. That would be an actual riot.

8:52 Wes: An actual virtual riot via podcast.

8:55 Mark: And on my notes here, I actually spelled that la F F, because that's how it is spelled in laugh riot.

9:01 Wes: Fascinating.

9:01 Mark: It's translated from the Greek. It has a hyphen in it. As an overview of this thing, he invented political science, correct? With this text. I thought I heard that somewhere.

9:14 Unknown speaker: Well, he sort of, when he talks about that man is fundamentally a political animal. And the idea of Analyzing the workings of a city and the activity of running a city, and the study of how people gather together as individuals to form a city. Yeah, that's politics, I guess.

9:32 Mark: But unlike some of his other sciences, this was explicitly normative. He's not just saying these are the types of governments. He's trying to get at what is the best kind of government by analyzing the types.

9:41 Wes: Right.

9:42 Mark: That's a lot of what this is. The taxonomy is, here are the different types of government. Here's the problems that you can have with them. Here's how each of them can become corrupted. Here's how to prevent revolutions in any of them. He does spend some time talking about his kind of ideal government. The last chapter that we didn't read, book eight, is all about in the best kind of state, how people will be educated. So he does have some definite things to say about ideals. But he's also very practical. This text is largely a reaction to Plato's Republic, which we also have an episode on.

And his criticisms of Plato are a lot. It's not very practical how you really are gonna just reach out and redistribute all the property. You're really just gonna reach out and take these guardians from their parents and put them in public. Isn't that strange? Wouldn't you cause revolution immediately? Like so. Even what he considers the best kind of government, which is government by the best, he realizes that different peoples are in different circumstances. In fact, different peoples in different regions may have different natures. So there's really not one best government for every type of person, every type of region.

But he can come up with some guidelines. And by knowing this taxonomy and the pitfalls of the various types, that you can start with the state that you've got and try to make it better.

10:53 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

10:53 Wes: Although there is this ideal state that he describes in the last two books, there is one ideal state for good human beings or for human beings who are perfected. So it's impractical in a way, but it's a sort of ideal limit.

11:07 Unknown speaker: Yeah, It's a little bit like the idea of the flourishing human being, which for Aristotle, is going to require particular circumstances, physical circumstances and mental and a certain kind of fortune as well as ability. It isn't just going to happen. And you can't even necessarily aspire to it without having the groundwork available to you.

11:29 Mark: You mean the individual happiness or the perfect state?

11:31 Unknown speaker: Both, because he thinks that the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the state are coincidental. They're the same sorts of things.

11:38 Seth: The purpose of the human being is to be happy. And the purpose of the state is to create the conditions under which human beings can be happiness. Right.

11:48 Unknown speaker: Book seven, chapter two. The happiness in the city is equal to the happiness of the individual. Whether happiness must be asserted to be the same both for a single individual human being and for a city, and not the same, however, remains to be spoken of. But this too is evident. All would agree that it is the same for those who ascribe living well to the wealth. In the case of a single person also call the city as a whole blessed if it is wealthy. Those who honor the tyrannical way of life above all would also assert that the city is happiest which rules the greatest number of persons.

12:17 Wes: So forth.

12:18 Unknown speaker: And if anyone accepts that the individual is happy on account of virtue, he will also assert that the more excellent city is the one that is happier.

12:26 Wes: Yeah, again, when we say happiness, and we're translating eudaimonia, or flourishing, we're translating, yeah, eudaimonia. Think of, well, functioning. Ultimately, what we think of as happiness, the subjective state will accompany that, all things being equal. But eudaimonia is actually something broader. The good functioning of an individual, which can happen over a long period of time in a way that you wouldn't think of a subjective state. As if someone said they were happy, for the last 10 years, I've been happy. You wouldn't think that for the last 10 years they've had nothing but highs. Their happiness is not simply that subjective state. But you could think, yes, they've been functioning well, they've been flourishing, they've been good and achieving good things.

13:07 Unknown speaker: That's good.

To keep in mind for Aristotle in general that he's constantly focused on the notion of what the activity of the entity or the thing or the person or the city is.

13:19 Wes: Yeah, he's going to say in the first two chapters of book one, he's going to argue for the city being natural. And when we think of nature in Aristotle, so, for instance, the acorn naturally grows into the oak tree as opposed to a table, which is made by artifice. That would be the opposition.

13:36 Unknown speaker: And the fact that a given acorn might not grow into an oak tree does not mean that acorns don't naturally grow into oak trees.

13:44 Wes: Right. It has the potential. And there's this innate tendency. The innate tendency can be thwarted, but there's an innate ruling principle which sort of pushes it towards perfection. You know, he uses this word, perfection, which is related to telos, or the end the perfection is just reaching the end, which is the good of the organism in this case. So the good of the acorn is its development into its end of being a fully developed oak tree. So the idea here is that when he's arguing for a state being natural as opposed to artificial, that's a significant claim. Because later on he'll talk about the role of the statesman in crafting or creating the city. So it might seem that the city is, in fact, the product of human artifice. So it is an interesting and not uncontroversial claim to say the city is actually something natural.

14:37 Mark: Two formulations of that. One is, this man is a rational animal. So I've got a quote here. This is from book three, chapter six. Man is an animal naturally formed for society. And therefore, when he does not want any foreign assistance, he will, of his own accord, desire to live with others. So there's just a motivational thing. But then he also says from book one, chapter two. Every city must be allowed to be the work of nature. If we admit that the original society between male and female is for to this as their end, all subordinate societies tend.

And the end of everything is the nature of it. So that's part of a little longer section where he's talking about. And it sounds very much like what I remember from Rousseau here. One of the theories of society that he puts forward is it's just a form of the family. And so, just like other people have argued, Aristotle says that just like the father is the natural leader of the family, so their monarchy is the natural form. And he doesn't agree with that, but he does think that it grows directly out of the fact that we've got the sex drive. And that leads to the family structure.

And then the family is next as a genetic account. That does explain. So you might say the efficient cause of society is the family, or the growth of the family beyond the core to extended family.

15:50 Wes: Yeah, I think the efficient cause will ultimately end up being the statesman for the state itself. But here he's making an argument for the naturalness of the state by looking at this natural development. Again, it's kind of analogous to the development of an organism. And he wants to show that there's a development out of these natural things. And so the first natural thing is this codependency between husband and wife or master and slave. And we might ask ourselves, well, what makes that inherently natural? Well, I think it's the necessity. In other words, because husband and wife depend upon each other for their existence. They can't exist without each other. And that necessity makes the union itself a natural thing. They would perish without it. Therefore, it's natural. Then you get the building of households out of this mutual need, the building of families.

16:39 Seth: Quick clarification question on that. Would they perish without each other, or would the human race perish?

16:45 Wes: Sorry, you're right. It's two different things. In the husband and wife case, he emphasizes reproduction production. Right. So you're right. It would be the species that would perish. And then in the master slave, it's actually the individuals who depend on each other.

16:57 Seth: I think he sees the husband wife dynamic as similar to the master slave, but with also the added consequence to the human race.

17:06 Mark: Well, we brought it up. Let's deal with the slavery thing, since it's right here in the first couple chapters. That.

17:11 Seth: That's because I've tweeted about it like five times already.

17:14 Wes: Oh, have you?

17:15 Seth: Yeah, I just find it amusing. I'm sorry.

17:18 Wes: Right.

17:19 Mark: Well, that's the big hole, the obvious hole in the theory or the thing that you have to deal with to decide whether you're just gonna throw them away or not. We already talked about this in terms of the ethics, that ethics is not for everybody. The perfections, virtue is just. Some people are just not suited to pursue virtue at all. Well, this thing about slavery is the extreme end of that same doctrine that there are some people that are just naturally slaves.

17:43 Wes: We didn't read the part where he gives an extended argument.

17:46 Unknown speaker: He considers the question of whether people are natural slaves, and it has to do with the possibility of someone being naturally servile. And it's complicated for him. And I think it's depending on how you read it, you can come up with a conclusion whether he thinks that, oh, that such a person exists but is really, really rare, or that it's conceivable in concept, but not actually.

18:07 Mark: We can at least say that he does acknowledge he's not just affirming the status quo here. Just because you conquer somebody in war, for instance, and take them as slaves doesn't make them natural slaves. Anybody that is a slave right now might not naturally be a slave. But in any case, he's leaving that open as part of his account of human nature. And I guess we could just acknowledge that and move on. Unless you have other specific things to say.

18:31 Seth: Yeah, no, no, I think we acknowledge it and move on. I think the important point is that later on, when he's talking about citizenship and he talks about what makes a citizen in different kinds of states. It's important to understand that. And he says explicitly in numerous cases, people who do manual labor can't be fully functioning citizens because they don't have time to read philosophy and study politics and engage in political discourse, that there's this substrata, if you will, of society that's required to support the people who can be citizens and who can participate.

And so it's not so much about what his particular view of human nature and natural slavery is, so much as Aristotle's view as expressed in the politics requires slavery. The way he lays it out. It requires that there is slavery in the society. It requires that there are women who stay at home and do womanly work. So the hard part is trying to extricate the generalizable views from the fact that all of these things are required in his structure.

19:39 Wes: And there's the interesting background question, which we have to ask ourselves today, of whether we can have the kind of society that we have and live the kinds of. For people who are middle class or upper middle class in the United States to live that kind of lifestyle without depending on what is essentially slave labor elsewhere. Right. So most of us can't avoid or don't buying clothes which have been made by people earning a very small wage and living in very poor conditions.

20:07 Mark: The society does require artisans, according to Aristotle. He doesn't consistently say that those have to be slaves. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about these out groups. He does object to the fact that Plato in the Republic really seems to entirely neglect them and just talks about the guardians and their education and. But what about all these other people? Like, if you entirely exclude the mass of the populace from any power in the government, you're going to get a lot of enemies. You're going to get a lot of unrest. So Aristotle is concerned about them insofar as at least they could be troublesome.

It's not clear to me the different gradations of people who are not or should not be full citizens. And he definitely distinguishes those. A lot of the concern in here is there are a lot of different societies that have different requirements for citizenship. So maybe only 10% of the people are actually citizens. That doesn't mean the rest are slaves.

20:56 Wes: Right. In fact, Aristotle wrote this at a time when he was a resident alien in Athens. Yeah, he was not a citizen of Athens.

21:04 Unknown speaker: I'm brought back to the beginning, where we're talking about the analytical taxonomic turn of Aristotle, is that you have to be very careful about when he goes through and entertains one side of a discussion and then he goes and takes another side of the discussion. And it can often be very difficult to figure out what exactly he might advocate himself as opposed to take apart. So for instance, he'll talk about oligarchies and tyrannies and democracies and he will classify the kinds of justice in those cases. And you have to be careful not to understand that as him saying, well, justice is whatever he says it is.

In the case of the oligarchy, he is articulating the way justice is being decided in those circumstances. And it's a slightly different case about what he would consider to be the best of all regimes and the circumstances in which you could have the best of all regimes, which is again, not all circumstances.

22:05 Wes: Right. Overall, an oligarchy is one of the perverted regimes, not for the sake of the citizens of that regime. So it's not one of the best forms of government. But once you take that form and you analyze it, you can establish what the good for that form is, you can analyze its end, you can analyze its appropriate structure, and so on and so forth, which is what he does. But maybe can we return to the argument in chapter two, because that's where we touched on slavery, which really the point of his brief mention there of slavery is that it's an example of one of these mutually dependent unions which are therefore natural.

And then we get the village and then we get the polis or the state. And that's built up out of these natural associations. And that's also not just built up out of those natural associations, but it's their end. So the state is actually the end or the thing towards which these other associations tend. And that's why the state is also natural, because the end of the thing is its nature.

23:04 Mark: Right. Just to clarify for folks. So it's like their target, not their end, like that's where they cease, but it's what they're aiming at.

23:10 Wes: Yeah, right.

23:11 Unknown speaker: To be a little more particular in book one, chapter two, in moving from the household and the villages, he says in part eight is the partnership arising from the union of several villages. That is complete, is the city. It reaches a level of self sufficiency, so to speak. And while coming into being for the sake of living, it exists for the sake of living. Well, every city therefore exists by nature. If such also are the first partnerships, the city is their end and nature is an end. What each thing is, for example, a human being, a horse, or a household, when it's coming into being, is complete Is we assert the nature of that thing. Again, that for the sake of which a thing exists or the end is what is best, and self sufficiency is an end and what is best. So in the case of the city, this self sufficiency and its end is living well for the sake of the constituents of the city.

24:08 Wes: Yeah. So there he's saying, if you objected and you said, well, how why is the polis or the state the end or the target of all these more basic natural human associations? And you would say, well, it's the one that allows for self sufficiency. In fact, later we'll get more of that. We can't be self sufficient without the state. So that's a reason for saying that it's the good of the and therefore the end.

24:31 Unknown speaker: And the reason that we have cities in a way that other animals don't is because of speech. And because of speech we are able to have discussions of the just and the unjust.

24:43 Wes: That's another argument for the idea that humans are political by nature.

24:47 Unknown speaker: It's the next paragraph.

24:48 Wes: Yeah. The first argument that human beings are political by nature, at least it's the implication, it's unclear, is that because the polis is a natural thing, humans are political by nature. And then we also get this argue that it's not just that they have that speech, but that speech is inherently normative. The speech allows us to communicate about concepts like justice.

25:04 Unknown speaker: Yeah. It reveals the advantageous and the harmful.

25:06 Wes: And because there's nothing in vain in nature, there has to be a reason for that. And that's our political nature is the reason for us having speech.

25:16 Unknown speaker: And we can even pedal it back from something as inflammatory as justice and injustice. But just advantage and harm speech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. So the just and the unjust are subsets of the advantageous and the harmful. Everything just should be advantageous, but not everything advantageous is necessarily just.

25:38 Wes: Right.

25:38 Unknown speaker: Okay, so he probably would write a whole chapter on whether that's true or not.

25:43 Wes: The other thing we get in this chapter is this idea that the city state is prior to individuals.

25:48 Seth: What do you mean prior?

25:49 Wes: I think it's related to this argument about self sufficiency. So the proof that the state is prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self sufficing and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who's unable to live in a society or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself. Must be either a beast or a God. He is no part of a state. And then we get this idea that social instinct is implanted in all men by nature.

26:16 Mark: You're saying the God thing is mentioned in chapter two as well?

26:19 Wes: Yeah, book one. Chapter two is where he mentions the beast or God thing.

26:22 Unknown speaker: Yeah, in my translation, it's the second to last paragraph of chapter two, book one.

26:27 Mark: Well, I noticed that that particular bit about the God is repeated in book three, chapter 13. At that point, he's kind of giving advice on statecraft, and he's saying, to have a stable society, you, need a community of equals. And so if you have somebody who is too virtuous, who is too awesome, who is a God among men.

26:49 Wes: Oh, right.

26:50 Mark: Then you need to exile them. That's at least one of the ways you can deal with them.

26:55 Unknown speaker: That's one of the ways that historical greek societies had dealt with them.

26:59 Mark: Yes. And I think that that was the part where he actually introduced this famous quote. Maybe it's from elsewhere as well. But the striking off those ears of corn, which were higher than the rest, Reducing the whole crop to a level.

27:11 Wes: Yeah. And his argument there is that such great men, There can be no laws for such men. Right. They are themselves the law.

27:18 Mark: Yeah. As you can see. Nietzsche.

27:20 Wes: Yeah, I was reminded of nietzsche.

27:24 Mark: And also with the master and slave stuff in the first place, I didn't realize that hegel was reacting so directly to that section here.

27:32 Wes: Yeah, exactly. The mutual dependence. Yeah.

27:34 Mark: This being a primary feature, Sort of where society starts in the first place.

27:40 Wes: Right. We're all satisfied that the state is natural and human beings are by nature political.

27:46 Seth: I think it makes sense the way he talks about partnerships and says. I'm reminded, of course, when we read this, where he says, oh, first there's a union of the man and the woman, and then you have the family, which has a certain sort of structure to it. Then those multiple families come together, and that forms a village. And he makes a point of saying that his point that dylan made about the city is required not just to live, but to live well, is that as these pairings, these partnerships expand and they tend to cluster. So the partnership that is the husband and wife becomes the partnership of the family.

The partnership of multiple families becomes the village, the partnership of multiple villages, et cetera, et cetera, it increases the opportunities for each of the individual members of these groups to flourish. So if it's just you trying to survive on your own, and he makes the point that, you know, you really couldn't. It's impossible to be self sufficient. But when you're one family trying to survive, it's a lot different if there are five families grouped together. Because then you can start partitioning tasks and there are additional skills and various sorts of things that come into play.

So his idea of the city as this kind of organic outgrowth of the partnering of individuals, individuals for the purpose of not just surviving, but getting to the point where you can do things like have art and philosophy and politics of a meaningful sort and all that. That's a compelling story, but it also echoes, or I guess the other way around, these social contract theorists that we read for the last couple of years talking about how people come into partnerships with each other and for the purposes of creating contracts. This to me is a much more appealing view than the social contract theory stuff.

If you're going to talk about some sort of hypothetical organic notion of how individuals come together to form communities, I

29:43 Wes: think that's a great point. Because these human associations start out as a matter of need at the level of family, for instance. And then with villages, he says something like the village can be for more than mere necessity and survival. But he doesn't really specify how. But then at the level of the city, it's clear that it's not just for the sake of life and exists for the sake of the good life. So we go from mere life to the good life. And at this point, I think self sufficiency doesn't just mean meeting our basic means. It means self sufficiency in the sense of the good life in general.

30:17 Unknown speaker: That's exactly right. And it's in, I think, significant contradistinction to someone like Hobbes.

30:24 Wes: I think I might have been putting it wrong. I think I was suggesting that human beings could be self sufficient through the state. But actually he's saying the state is the only self sufficient thing, right?

30:33 Mark: Yes.

30:33 Wes: It's not like we achieve self sufficiency through the state, which sounds kind of

30:36 Mark: contradictory anyway, or Hegelian, that we achieve actual selfhood. And I think you could read that into Aristotle, that Hegel's notion that we talked about, that it's only in the state that you achieve something like selfhood.

30:49 Unknown speaker: It's.

30:50 Mark: That's not going to be Aristotle's word for it, but that you achieve your own eudaimonia, which is essentially the same thing. It's our ultimate end, our fulfillment.

31:01 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think Aristotle would completely agree with that.

31:03 Mark: I think you would even read the part, what seems like new in Hegel's version is that it's this reflectivity, it's this having this picture of yourself. But I think from what you said, likewise, you don't get reflection, you don't get philosophy until you have a well functioning state. Otherwise everybody's scraping around for subsistence and don't have time for that deep self knowledge. So yeah, you could say it's self knowledge certainly in the Socratic sense. You just aren't going to get until you've got this. And again, I would think that would include for the ancient Greek, having slaves, having people that are taking care of all the stuff that needs taken care of. So you can sit around and argue about philosophy.

31:47 Unknown speaker: I want to bring up the end of the book where he talks about the virtue of the agrarian polis. In this respect he reminded me of Thomas Jefferson in this respect. This idea that the best democracy is one full of farmers. They have the self sufficiency, broadly speaking, to run their own affairs and are working, but are also not sort of corrupted by the petty nature of city living.

32:14 Mark: I read that purely in a snarky way.

32:16 Unknown speaker: No, I didn't read it snarky at all.

32:18 Mark: At that point when he's talking about democracy, what makes a bad democracy is that what makes it turn into essentially a tyranny of the majority is that people just go and vote on everything just to fulfill their interests. Right. They don't want to do any work, they just want to take all the money. This seems to be his primary concern with what's wrong with democracies is that the poor are going to get together and just divide up the rich's loot. So the more active they are in the democracy, the more they vote on stuff, the worse the democracy is going to be. So what's great about having farmers is that they're all farming. They can't just hang around and vote all the time.

32:52 Wes: Yeah, that's really. That's what he says. Yeah.

32:54 Mark: Right. And he also says shepherds are good, they're off. That's sort of the second best kind. Likewise any time where most people live far from the city. And he's explicitly saying I want democracy to be as non participatory as possible.

33:09 Wes: Yeah, he's seeking out a middle path there. Right. Because the problem with having the wealthy rule is because they're, as Dylan pointed out, corrupted by their idleness. And then the problem with having the poor rule is that they'll wreck the state by demanding redistributions of wealth and so on and so forth. So you need people who are well off enough. He Makes a remark about farmers, can actually be quite wealthy, but they're also active, they're busy. So that they're not simply going to devote all their time to petty political squabbling.

33:38 Mark: This sounds like we're jumping to what are the different kinds of government and how do they all go bad? And we do have book three where he starts it off talking about what is a citizen. And I think we can get to that. But let's at least sketch out the overview. I guess one of the ways I heard this broken down was he wants to talk about the matter of society and the form of society. So the matter is going to be made of what's the citizens? Do you let everybody. Is it just the people's property? Is it everybody in a certain residential area is a citizen? How does it work? And then the form is, how are the offices set up? How many rulers do you have?

34:09 Wes: Which is what he calls the constitution. Yes, yeah, the arrangement of offices.

34:14 Mark: So we got the six kinds of government. The good kinds are monarchy, aristocracy, and the state. I believe he just calls it.

34:23 Wes: Well, in different translations, sometimes it's called a constitution or a. Sorry, Dylan, what is it in your translation?

34:30 Unknown speaker: Polis.

34:31 Wes: The polis is just the state in general.

34:33 Unknown speaker: That's what he just said.

34:35 Mark: Exactly.

34:36 Wes: Oh, he does. He reverts to polis for that. Okay, right.

34:38 Mark: Maybe he doesn't feel the need to give that a name because it's entirely rare, because all of these inevitably seem to fall to their bad versions. So the bad version of the monarchy is the tyranny. Right. So even if you have a good monarch, if he passes on power to his son, it's probably going to turn out to be a tyranny. Like, you're not going to keep a good monarchy going. And then an aristocracy ruled by the best, the few, is going to turn to an oligarchy, where you still have a few people running things, but those are not the best people anymore.

And then if you try to set up the state which is really ruled by everybody, it's going to inevitably turn to democracy, which is this tyranny majority at its worst. Right. So those are the six forms. He can deal with them in pairs. So he doesn't give separate advice about monarchies and tyrannies, but he gives advice about monarchies and how to make it less likely to become a tyranny. And, you know, if you're going to have a tyranny, at least, how do you make that stable? Things like that. And then when he gets to democracy, which was in book six, we read about his thoughts about democracy.

He doesn't deal with the state, the polis, this pure form of democracy at all, because he just takes it for granted that of course if you have rule by the many, they're going to be not virtuous. That's just the way he thinks virtue is distributed, that it is a property that only the few have. So it's not even really an issue.

35:54 Wes: Although there is the possibility that you take the sum of the virtue of many people, right. And you have more virtue there than those of the fewer, more virtuous. Right. There's an argument to be made that the many will make better decisions, for instance, than the few.

36:08 Mark: He uses the same thing for saying why an oligarchy is in general better than a single ruler system. Just one person is not going to be able to be objective at all times, you know, is not going to be able to judge things well in their own instance, for instance, it's going to be driven to anger in some cases. But if you have a number of people, then they're going to have a moderating influence on each other, unless it's the rabble. And then they're not going to have a moderating influence on each other because they're going to be whipped up by demagogues to do all sorts of horrible things. At least is Aristotle's fear, right?

36:36 Wes: When he gives his ordering of the ranking of the regimes from best to worst, monarchy comes out on top. But that assumes that you can have a superman as monarch, right? Someone who's super virtuous for practical purposes, that falls apart. Is that the.

36:51 Mark: That wasn't as clear to me. I thought actually that he thought that the best kind of government was going to be an aristocracy, not a monarchy, for the reasons just given.

36:59 Wes: Well, let's look at where he gives that ranking. Where does he give the. He gives us a nice little ranking of best to worst types. I think it's book four, chapter three,

37:08 Unknown speaker: the types of Regime.

37:09 Seth: Book three, chapter seven.

37:11 Wes: He sets out six. Seth, you're right, book three, chapter seven. Of forms of government in which one rules. We call that which regards the common interest, kingship, that in which more than one but not many rule. Aristocracy.

37:23 Unknown speaker: And when the multitude governs with a view to the common advantage, it's called by the term common to all regimes, polity.

37:29 Mark: That's not saying monarchy is better than aristocracy there. That's just laying them out.

37:34 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

And then with the deviations he.

37:35 Wes: Does you give that ranking though? Am I?

37:37 Mark: I thought he just gives him in order?

37:39 Wes: No, I thought he ranked them from best to worst at some point.

37:42 Seth: Yeah, he does.

37:44 Wes: Seth, do you know where he does this? I'm not crazy.

37:47 Seth: Hold on a second.

37:47 Mark: All right, so here the main question of the book is what's the best form of government? And we interpreted that fundamental thing differently.

37:54 Seth: This is 1289 A38. The order is monarchy, aristocracy, polity, democracy, oligarchy, then tyranny. Monarchy, aristocracy and polity are your three forms of good. Because they're all rule for the common good. Rule of one man, rule of few, rule of many. For the common. And the flawed forms are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. The difference between monarchy and tyranny is whether or not the ruler is ruling in his own interest or for the common good. Common good here being the common good of the citizens, those who are participating in the political and social life in the appropriate way, which could mean that it's not for the common good of everybody.

38:40 Wes: Yeah, the three perversions are not for the common good, right?

38:43 Seth: No, because they're acting in their own interest.

38:46 Wes: Yeah. But the three true forms, the monarchy, my translation is called kingly rule. But monarchy, aristocracy, and then the polis, or the constitutional government, at least in principle, those can all be for the common good.

38:58 Seth: I mean, basically what he's saying is if your rulers, whether it's one or many, rule in self interest, you have a bad state. If they act in the interest of the common good, then you're going to have a good state.

39:12 Unknown speaker: And that's nicely coincident with his notion of the natural end of a city. Right. So you are contributing to the natural progression of the city that it is for the good of its constituents by ruling it that way. And if you rule a city for your own good, you are essentially going contrary to nature. You're doing something against the natural order of the city. You're subverting the natural flourishing of the city.

39:37 Mark: Right, And I think he also echoes Plato's language in that whole discussion in the Republic of Is being a ruler like being a doctor, where you're trying. The main purpose is to take care of your patients and it only incidentally helps you because you get paid for it? Or is it like being a shepherd where your main purpose is to help you because you're going to eat the sheep and only incidentally are you taking care of the sheep in the meantime? All right, so we got the types out there. Maybe we should talk more about what is a citizen.

40:05 Seth: Yeah, what do we have? We have the state is Natural. We have the different types. The citizen discussion is kind of what not everyone is a citizen. And what makes a good citizen will depend on the type of state. Right.

40:17 Wes: Well, what is a citizen? Let's say that.

40:20 Unknown speaker: Well, he says in chapter one, the citizen in an unqualified sense is defined by no other thing so much as by sharing and decision in office. So they're a decision sharer, an office sharer. Then he has what I think of as sort of a practical definition at the beginning of chapter two. A citizen is defined as a person from parents who are both citizens and not just one, whether the mother or the father. And some go even further back. So here he's just sort of saying, well, this is what cities generally define their citizens as. They define it by heredity as opposed to by function.

40:53 Wes: Yeah, he'll reject that, right?

40:55 Unknown speaker: Yes, he'll reject that as the proper definition of citizens.

40:59 Mark: I have a quote here, book three, chapter one. So that we must consider whom we ought to call citizens and who is one. For this is often doubtful, for everyone will not allow that this character is applicable to the same person. But a man who would be a citizen in republic would very often not be one in an oligarchy. And then here's his view. We do not include in this inquiry many of those who acquire this appellation out of the ordinary way as honorary persons, for instance, but those only who have a natural right to it. So this is again going back to the issue of natural slaves.

41:30 Unknown speaker: Why does it go back to that?

41:31 Mark: Because those people do not have a natural right to being a citizen. This is going into the point that we made in the last podcast, that a society, for him, a well functioning state, has to ultimately be founded on the friendship of equals. There are a lot of out groups, then it is slaves, but then it's also women who he says are not slaves. It could be artisans, sojourners that are not going to be included in that. What's tricky here is that sometimes he's talking descriptively of what various societies think, and sometimes he's talking about normatively of what in this kind of society should happen or.

Or normatively, like ideally, what in the best possible state who should be a citizen. It's hard stepping between those things. I'm finding myself fumbling a little bit. But clearly he thinks that in any good state you're going to have sharp distinctions and really nobody should have political power who doesn't deserve it. And the problem with that is just that. How do we actually determine that and how do we enforce that in particular situations?

42:29 Wes: Which is to say that they have to have the ability to take part in judicial administration? Basically the idea is that the slave or whoever is not a citizen just doesn't have that ability to engage in the judicial administration of the state.

42:41 Unknown speaker: Yeah, being a citizen means that you can share in making decisions and in offices. And if you can't do that, you aren't a citizen.

42:48 Wes: They take an uncontroversial case. So an infant is not a full fledged citizen in that sense.

42:54 Unknown speaker: Later on in book three, in chapter four, he has this interesting discussion of the good person or excellent person and the excellent citizen. Essentially the excellent citizen is not necessarily the same as the excellent person. And there's a kind of underlying thread through here of the notion of people who try to make themselves as excellent as they can and become kind of monk like and separate themselves off from the city. And you might even read into it a kind of criticism of a certain kind of philosophy or a certain kind of philosopher in there. One who is completely disengaged from the activity of others as being maybe an excellent human being, but certainly not an excellent citizen. And maybe for Aristotle, an open question of whether they are actually an excellent

43:42 Wes: human being in the ideal state. Those two things do coincide. But in this case he points out, his part of his argument is that different types of government will have different types of citizens with a different good. And so, you know, the good of human beings is one thing, but you can have different goods for different types of citizens in different states. And so clearly they don't simply coincide.

44:03 Mark: Right. It's not even just citizens, it's the non citizens as well. They're still going to have a telos that they should. Right? The efficient slave is going to be very good at his slave work, that is his fulfillment. He even says that just like we were saying at the beginning that the master and slave need each other. It's like the slave is. Is essentially a child that's just helpless, that he needs to be channeled into doing his slavey things. And even though he wouldn't admit necessarily that being a slave was to his good, we can see that it actually is.

44:34 Unknown speaker: I don't want to be an apologist for Aristotle in this respect because I think that he is wrong probably in the end about it. But I think that it's a kind of potshotting about it that involves us not being able to be on the same page to talk about slavery. And at every moment we're coming to up with examples of Things that we haven't even read about it. And maybe the fact is we just should have read those things to use those as examples.

45:00 Mark: All right. So I realize that I can't seem to stop picking at this particular scab. And just as a way of addressing it and putting it aside, I don't think that the point I'm trying to make actually relies on any of the details that he has for whether people are naturally slaves or what kind of slavery is okay, or what are the conditions for somebody to be a slave. None of that matters, because the point is that he's just playing a fundamentally different kind of game in determining what's the best kind of government than we would be in doing this now.

Because we would be concerned with how people in a given geographic region could get along. Whereas he acts like maybe it's just because the city state is so small that he can pick and choose who's going to be in the state and who's not. That's the xenophobic fear in this country that says if we could just get rid of all the immigrants or something and make it just this community. That's actually a very Aristotelian kind of take. As long as you have some sort of ultimate moral division between people that we have to care about when we're figuring out what kind of government and people that we ultimately don't.

He does think we have to make sure that the slaves and the other people like that don't rebel. So there is some little concern with that, but it's not much.

46:05 Unknown speaker: So I think you're right that Aristotle has a fundamentally different point of view than what we would consider as liberal Democrats and not liberal Democrats in sort of the political party sense, but in this tradition that we are part of from Hobbes and Locke, and essentially our own form of government, in which the main concern that we have is we have all these people together and we're going to figure out how to balance all of their interests and develop structures so that we don't kill each other. And it's true that Aristotle's concern is more of what constitutes the different forms of government, where he assumes different characters or different pieces of combination in each of those communities.

And also what kind of mix is going to be the best, and what kind of possibilities are there going to be given constitutions of certain sorts? And this is right in line with his whole notion of different people have different virtues and excellences based upon their constitutions. So there's a way in which this makes sense for him for trying to think about what is the best form of government, given who is in there. And this is different than the idea of saying, how are we going to have a government at all in which everybody gets to do essentially what they want to do, which is basically a liberal democratic government.

So I think you're right that the question of slavery for Aristotle is just looming, coming up in a different way than we would consider it coming up in our way. We would just reject outright the possibility of people being slaves in a natural way. And in that discussion that Aristotle has, he has a section where he engages the question of natural slavery. And then the very next section he says, well, on the other hand, people don't necessarily all agree that there's a possibility of being natural slaves. And then he goes and considers the other side of the case.

And I find it actually a little challenging to figure out exactly where Aristotle himself comes down on it. But the fact that he's engaging in that conversation just goes to this roughly teleological way that he approaches everything that we are not so used to, where he would be considered the virtue of the excellence of anything. And in his case, clearly partly about his time, is that there's the open question of whether people are naturally slavish, or there are certain people that could be naturally slavish, as opposed to it being fundamentally a corruption of a kind of servitude or doing things for other people, which is, I think, what we would think of it as.

48:35 Mark: Yeah, so this just comes to what are we doing with this book? Are we just studying it for historical purposes? I mean, if you were going to take it at face value and try to look at his reflections on what's the best kind of government and try to apply him now, would it be best for us to have a monarchy and aristocracy? I think it would be very hard to take his considerations seriously, to take them at face value without sharing that assumption that he has, that whether it be some people are naturally slavish or just some people can be successfully excluded from the occasion. Maybe you're just exiling them. None of them are naturally slavish. But you can let in who you want and keep out who you want.

49:10 Wes: Now, obviously we didn't read the full section on slavery. And so we can't give it its due. That's true. I mean, a lot of this, we can't really give it its due. It's useful to point out the ways in which it's jarring to our sensibilities. It's probably less useful to Simply say, oh, it's stupid because it differs from our current sensibilities. There's this deeper point at issue which I take to be something about slavish natures and the nature of a master, and so on and so forth.

49:37 Mark: All right, Anything else to say about citizens? I mean, like you said, the city is composed of dissimilar parts. This is a quote from chapter four. As an animal is of life and body, the soul of reason and appetite, the family of man and wife, property of a master and a slave. In the same manner as a city is composed of all these and many other very different parts, it necessarily follows that the virtue of all citizens cannot be the same as the business of him who leads a band is different from the other dancers. And then later he gives this example.

The temperance and courage of a man and a woman are different from each other. For a man would appear a coward who had that courage which would be graceful in a woman. And a woman would be thought a talker who should take as large a part in the conversation as would become a man of consequence. Am I allowed to snicker at that? Because he really did. There's no missing section on that. That's him expressing what was going on there.

50:25 Unknown speaker: What's interesting about comments like that is on the one hand, that observation of the way in which people would be considered is true.

50:34 Wes: Right.

50:34 Mark: In his time.

50:35 Unknown speaker: Not even in his time, even right now. Right. I mean, not that that ought to be the case, but that women of power often are, or you know, in the workplace, if they talk up too much, you know, the strong woman's the bitch rather than being the powerful one. Right. That still happens.

50:51 Wes: You mean she's perceived as a bitch?

50:53 Unknown speaker: Exactly.

50:54 Mark: The point of this somewhat is frustration with the issue that McIntyre in our last discussion was dealing with in Aristotle that Aristotle is coming from, even though he's a lot more pluralistic in this book than I would have thought from reading MacIntyre, maybe like he's considering all these different types and he really actually seems to be pretty open minded and not only just considering a lot of different views, but not categorically dismissing a lot of different views, that there really might be multiple, pretty good kinds of government and multiple customs that are perfectly workable.

There's not as much work for MacIntyre, somebody like who's trying to modernize Aristotle's the point to do to accommodate our current pluralism. But on the other hand, the frustration that we had with MacIntyre last time was what is objectively right for Someone in this circumstance is to somehow follow the dictates of their culture. And that's hard for us to take in the same way that any cultural relativism is hard for us to take, because then we consider this guy back then talking about slaves or women, and we just don't want to say, well, that was right for him.

That was objectively right for the citizen in this land to act like that and to call a woman who acts too manly a nasty name. That was great that they did that. But from our, you know, in our time, we've. It's just there's something psychologically untenable about cultural relativism of that sort, and it's hard to avoid. That's the big thing that I guess MacIntyre had to deal with in trying to modernize this. I'm not sure after actually reading the politics, I feel any better about the problem.

52:29 Unknown speaker: Well, and you're also presented with the problem that you talked about earlier of understanding where he's being analytical and being normative.

52:38 Mark: Right.

52:38 Unknown speaker: Going back to the citizen, it's clear that he has the notion of a citizen as being someone who could participate in office and participate in decision making, which is something, I think, that clashes a bit with the way we implement our democratic republic in that by birth, anybody's a citizen and has rights to decision making in the sense of voting. He would clearly reject that.

53:03 Seth: Yep.

53:04 Wes: Yeah. It's book three, chapter five, where we get. He's excluding certain people from being citizens. Right. Even those who are necessary to the existence of the state. Children are not citizens equally with grown up men who are citizens. Absolutely. Yeah.

53:17 Unknown speaker: And where he says things like, it is impossible to preserve the things of virtue when one lives the life of a vulgar person or a laborer. So this goes to what Mark was saying earlier about how he understood the later stuff about farming and shepherding as being snickering on his part that, well, let's figure out a way. These are hardly as good as they ought to be. Here in chapter five, he's clear that a citizen has to have a kind of leisure in order to do the decision making that's necessary.

53:45 Wes: One of the key things we take from book three is his conclusion that governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice and are therefore true forms. Those which regard only the interests of rulers are defective in perverted forms. So they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.

54:03 Unknown speaker: I think we could move from the question of the citizen to well, chapter

54:07 Wes: 10 on the supreme power.

54:10 Unknown speaker: Yeah. And then the question of the rule of law versus the rule of men,

54:13 Wes: chapter 10, we get this. What is to be the supreme power in the state, the multitude, the wealthy, the good one, best men. Towards the end of that chapter, he focuses on whether the good should rule. And then we get this idea that the law itself should be, in a sense, the ruler. Right. Because men are subject to passions. And then he quickly brings up a problem with that idea, which is that the law itself could be democratic or oligarchical. And then later on we'll see we have to have men who make decisions and implement that law. The law itself can't do anything. So we don't simply get rid of the problem of the interference of human passions by appealing to rule of law,

54:51 Unknown speaker: but we preserve the idea of the rule of law where the laws are understood to be for the good of the regime, that is, the good of the citizens. You're right that it becomes complicated because you could have, of course, a regime that generates laws that are not for the good of the citizens or the regime, but are for the good of the tyrants. And those aren't going to be good laws. But then you appeal to the rule of law as being the thing to do.

55:17 Wes: But ultimately the laws don't help us if we don't have the right sorts of characters in our state with the right sorts of education and customs and proclivities. To take an example today, the fourth Amendment of our Constitution prohibits search and seizure for the most part. That really in the way the precedents of our legal system have gone. That's really loosened up, right? You can be frisked on the street. A police officer almost always has probable cause to open your trunk of your car. What a law will mean will change with society's customs and whether people are willing to execute it.

We could pass a law tomorrow which required everyone to wear red caps or something, but as a matter of custom, it wouldn't be enforceable. What police officer would enforce that? Unless it's enough of a tyranny where they really fear for their lives. They're willing to enforce whatever some crazy dictator says must be enforced. So the law itself is not enough. Education becomes supremely important for Aristotle.

56:15 Mark: I want to connect this to something he says elsewhere in here. I think we take it as a point taken for granted that of course the law cannot cover all possible circumstances, because we think of the law as very restricted. That not only is it just a matter of the laws not specific enough so you can't always tell whether something is legal or illegal, but that there are just whole areas like our personal lives, that we just assume law is not going to encroach on. And there are plenty of places in here, right? He says that laws need to be put for the good of the people.

But what the good of the people is is making them great human beings. So there really is no limit to the scope, the potential encroachment of government on your lives, not only education. Even though he's more realistic about it than, say, Plato or if we're gonna take you from your parents at birth and raise you communally, it's still anything that you practically could get away with is okay to get away with, Even though he's clearly aware of how governments can be abusive. But if you had a good government, there's really no limit to what you should give them the power to do.

57:19 Unknown speaker: So.

57:20 Mark: Therefore, it would actually be a live issue for him that, oh, law can't cover all possible situations. Because if you're a really good governor for him, you would want the law to cover every single aspect of your lives and behaviors. And submitting to that as a free person, knowing how to obey would be part of your virtue.

57:38 Wes: I'm not sure how comprehensive he wants the laws to be because he repeatedly emphasizes this role of human interpreters, judges. So, for instance, in chapter 15 at 1286 a, we get talk of. So hence it is clear that a government acting according to written laws is plainly not the best. Yet surely the ruler cannot dispense with the general principle which exists in law, and that is a better ruler which is free from passion than that in which it is innate. Whereas the law is passionless. Passion must always be at the heart of man. Yes, it may be replied.

But then, on the other hand, an individual will be better able to deliberate in particular circumstances. So for particular circumstances, we want individuals deliberating. And in the next paragraph, when the law cannot determine a point at all or not, well, we need to figure out who's going to be the decider, let's say, who's going to decide in those circumstances. And we need the best men to do that, where the best man may not be a single man. At the end of that paragraph, a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual.

58:39 Unknown speaker: In chapter 16, part of the problem with rule of law is the problem that laws don't judge at all. Judging is a function of human beings. So at the end of the day, you need to have human beings running the polity because they're the ones that are capable of doing the judging. And then it would go along with that that you need to have people who are good at judging to be the ones that are running the polity in order to do it.

59:10 Wes: Well, yeah, that's a 1287 B20. But some things can and others cannot be comprehended under the law. And this is the origin of the vexed question. Whether the best law of the best man should rule for matters of detail about which men deliberate cannot be included in legislation. Nor does anyone deny that the decision of such matters must be left to men. But it does argue that there should be many judges and not only one.

59:34 Unknown speaker: So there's an interesting thing about the way in which we want to have an education and we want to develop habits that are true for the regime as well as for the individual. For Aristotle, and that you want to have laws and a kind of prescription up to a certain amount, but you need to constantly be having judgment about whether they're appropriate or not. And there is this disjunction between the people who are going to be the decision makers about whether they are good or not and the people who are going to be following those rules. So he clearly thinks that some people are better at making these judgments and that the people who are best at making these judgments ought to be the ones that do that. He doesn't seem to say a lot about how you figure out who those people are.

1:00:21 Wes: Right.

1:00:22 Unknown speaker: This might go a little bit towards the problem that Mark was pointing to that infects Plato, which is you have this argument that, well, if we have people who are great at making judgments and let's grant that those people exist, then it's clear that those people ought to be the ones that are the ones who rule things, because they're great at making judgments about what's for the benefit of themselves individually and for us as a community. And so therefore they ought to be the ones who rule.

But the problem is always the case

that we can't figure out who those people are. Again, Plato, it's the gold souled people, right. So if you say, well, some people are gold sold, some people aren't, then we want to have the gold souled people rule because they're the ones that are good at that. And sort of by definition, the way it works out, the whole problem is knowing who those people are.

1:01:08 Wes: Yep.

1:01:09 Mark: And this is why I picked this book for us in the first place. So I was in light of the MacIntyre researching Aristotle and picked De Anima as our next one, which we'll do some time, but then started listening to this and felt like this really touched on a pretty central issue in at least my own. And I think generally the American thinking about government, which is, damn, it would sure be nice to have an aristocracy. And what I mean by that is Aristotle's meaning government by the best. The only problem is we've already resigned ourselves that in a pluralistic society we can't come to an agreement on what that means. So as a result, we have these imperfect systems of primaries and elections which tend to put in office people who are not the best by most people's standards.

1:02:03 Wes: Yeah. When we say the best, we mean the best as human beings and the best at what they do. Particularly because I think he talks of, you know, some people will be the best at different things and you put them into those different offices. You know, you want to line people up with what they're suited to. So, yeah, the best legislators, let's say.

1:02:20 Mark: Right.

1:02:20 Wes: Because we do have an aristocracy in the sense of wealthy people generally end up in our offices. Right.

1:02:25 Mark: Well, that would be an oligarchy. That would not be an aristocracy.

1:02:28 Wes: Yes. The perverted form of an aristocracy where you measure best by wealth. So.

1:02:32 Mark: But yeah, I was listening to some lectures by. I had referred to this on the Republic, one Stephen B. Smith, he's from Yale, and he talks about the Republic and then he talks about this. And one of the challenges he made to his students is that you students, you all, I know you're having this gut reaction against his aristocratic tendencies, but look at what you are. You're at Yale here. You think anybody can just get into Yale. And you know what Yale means, that people from this and other Ivy League institutions, the purpose of it is to put you in high positions of power and influence. And so you, too, are an aristocrat.

1:03:07 Wes: Yeah. And so there is a mechanism, Right, for trying to put the best and the brightest into these positions of power. But it often coincides. Right. With who has the money and who has the connections.

1:03:17 Unknown speaker: So in that way, the whole problem is that aristocracy often just descends into oligarchy. His notion of aristocracy is not going to be one that's purely hereditary. Right. And the problems of families keeping money together or stratification of society that leads to certain groups of people being the rulers by birth is going to be problematic from the standpoint of understanding what an aristocracy ought to be. That is the rule of the best.

1:03:47 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if you took Obama's administration or any presidential administration, you looked at the staff, you would find lots of really well educated people who are excellent at the various things that they do. So when I think about American society, I think about a lot of different conflicting elements of each system. There's an aristocratic element at work, there's a democratic element at work, but of course not in the Aristotelian sense, where true democracy, where you get everyone involved in the administration of the state and far more representative.

Of course, ideally, I think Americans would like to think of the United States as this constitutional democracy republic. So it's something akin to Aristotle's polis or his constitutional government. But could we say, well, it's entirely just a perverted form of that it's a democracy in the pejorative sense, or do we say, well, it actually has elements of the good and the bad kind of mixed up together.

1:04:40 Mark: It certainly shows the exact kind of conflicts that he is depicting here. The biggest problem with an aristocracy when it turns to an oligarchy is that they just start abusing their power. And primarily he equates this. He really makes it very explicit that this is a class matter. It would be different if there were more rich people than poor people, but that's never the way it actually is. So oligarchy is always not just government by the few, but it's a plutocracy. It's government by the rich. And they come into it with the idea that what quality of a person is a matter of your wealth and your family standing.

And if you're unequal in one respect, namely this wealth, then you're unequal in all respects. So he thinks that's what the oligarchs always tend to think, that they write, write off everybody else who's not rich as being inferior. Now, I'm not sure that that sentiment persists that way. I'm really unclear about that not communing among the very rich in this country enough to see how much that lasts. But it's certainly we see that as the rich abusing power as oligarchs in the way that he's worried about. And then even more directly, what every plutocrat seems to worry about, the Democrats trying to do is, you know, the taxation.

It's going to be a slippery slope we're going to get so that we have a maximum income, and then we just take every rich person and just fleece them and divide up their stuff among the rest of us. Which of course is absolutely ridiculous, given the current political climate, that we can't even make the tiniest baby steps toward that kind of system. But there's such a. Just an ironclad. It's like those people are worried about the same thing Aristotle was about democracy.

1:06:16 Wes: Yeah. And actually, Mark, where you're talking about the problem with aristocracy degenerating into oligarchy being the. Not just that they're wealthier than everyone else, but that they are better than. So better than in this moral sense. Nietzsche actually has a nice little formulation. And listeners can look at our Genealogy of Morals episode, which is where he says this. But political superiority always resolves itself into psychological superiority. And that's where Nietzsche is explaining the origins of moral concepts in general. For Nietzsche, the origins of those concepts will have to do with power, with people's actual political power, including wealth. It's kind of an echo of this Aristotelian idea that the wealthy will see themselves as superior.

1:06:56 Mark: I just feel like this is part of the cultural legacy that we're struggling with. That even though we have this ostensive.

1:07:03 Wes: Ostensible.

1:07:04 Mark: You're right, this ostensible.

1:07:06 Wes: You trained yourself to say the opposite because of the Wittgenstein episode.

1:07:11 Mark: Even though we have this supposed commitment to equality. Although even saying that like that makes you think of the French Revolution or something. Something. But that's what really democracy is supposed to come down to is everybody's at the same level that there are no classes. You know, we all vote. We still. It's not just this leftover class system and the rich thinking that the poor are inferior. Certainly as a sort of a guilty semi wealthy liberal, I'm sensitive about. Oh no, I'm not superior to those poor people. Look, I live very modestly.

Like it's embarrassing. There's a huge liberal culture of being ashamed of wealth in some ways. So that even if you do make a lot of money, you don't get go buy a mansion in 12 different cars and stuff. You live in a controlled and sensible way that actually maybe Aristotle would approve of that you sort of restrict your desires and use your money in some other ways. But still beyond that we have these strong notions. Maybe the way that the sense of class has translated in liberal culture here is from wealth to education. That there's still. It's really hard to not be snobby on some level.

As somebody who's gone through the grad school experience, you can't think that PhDs are superior than other people because most of them that you have met are so fucked up that there's just no way that you would actually really hold that. But I find I still have these prejudices. Like, I just wish that people who don't know anything about government would not vote unless they vote for who I want them to vote for, of course. But we all kind of have this resentment. I think this is shared across the political spectrum that we kind of resent democracy because we think that a lot of the people, some of them are on our side, some of them are on their side, are just a bunch of fucking idiots and shouldn't be voting at all.

And we need to have people who are actually qualified. And so on the plutocratic end, this turns out as we need somebody like a CEO who has shown that they can make things happen. They can produce gold from lead, so to speak. And that's the only kind of person these, these, you know, we've got These institutions, these PhD programs that people might slink through and using their up standards, approve of each other and put a stamp on each other, but that doesn't actually prove that they have any real virtue. What is virtuous is going out and making something of yourself.

Right. So we have these different standards, and so we're all aristocrats in different ways. That's my hypothesis, anyway. It's a toxic environment.

1:09:35 Wes: Yeah. And this actually goes towards. When Aristotle is discussing the criteria for who rules, he seems to suggest that the rationale for making the many the rulers of the state is that they collectively have more power than the few. Let's say there's not a conception of, oh, it's a basic right, or something like that.

1:09:55 Unknown speaker: Could I summarize Aristotle's point of view a little bit like this? That the city and political association is a natural consequence of our humanity, and that the best form and most flourishing form of that is a city that is structured for the good of its citizens. And we could have a regime in which we have some sort of excellent human being individual or some sort of excellent group of people who are particularly good at practical judgment, making judgments about how people ought to interact with one another. And in that case we ought to have them rule.

But we also have the sort of practical problem that it's hard to sort out who those people are. He doesn't really get into the question of how you constitute a set of rulers in the circumstance where you have no idea how to judge who's a good ruler. He doesn't go into that kind of practicality, but he does go into the question of, well, if we're going to have good rulers, any hope of having good rulers, we're going to have to have a good education. So he doesn't give us one thing that we would want, which is how we constitute a regime in the absence of actually knowing who are going to make good rulers.

But there is that notion that persists in the American democracy that we have to have a certain kind of uniformity of most of the citizens in their ability to be citizens, which amounts to their education. And in a practical matter, in the United States, this persists as a kind of civic education. And. And if you go through Tocqueville, the notion that, on average, people have a kind of basic uniformity in their understanding of what the responsibilities of individual members of the community are, and that is part of their education, both formally and in sort of a common law way, sort of the psyche of the society.

1:11:52 Wes: Yeah, it's a little bit confusing because what makes a good ruler and a good citizen is going to be somewhat different. I mean, in book three, chapter four, he seems to suggest that while the good citizen is not necessarily the same thing as the good person, the good ruler is a good and wise man, but the citizen need not be. So. He seems to suggest that in the ruler, you do get this coincidence of the good person and good ruler. But for citizens in general, much of the question of book three is the criterion of who rules is always going to come down to superiority.

It's just a matter of what kind of superiority. You could say the majority should rule because there's more of them. They're stronger than the many. But if there were one man who were so great that his greatness sort of outshone that of the many, then he would be the natural ruler. So he sort of rejects all these different criteria and he gives us an idea of some sort of superiority being involved. But it's not simply going to be excellence as a person. This just goes towards the vagueness of how we determine who the best people are to rule in some office.

It's not simply the people who are morally virtuous in the Aristotelian sense. And it's not wealth and it's not any of these other criteria. But what the criteria are is unclear. They should be good at whatever their office is. That's clear.

1:13:10 Unknown speaker: And he has this notion of rule in accordance in which everybody is basically of the same sort. And this is in chapter four of book three. There's also a sort of rule in accordance with which one rules those who are similar in stock and free. For this is what we speak of as political rule. And the ruler learns it by being ruled just as the Cavalry commander learns by being commanded, the general by being led. And similarly in the case of the leader of a regiment in a company. Hence this too has been rightly said that it is not possible to rule well without having been ruled.

Virtue in each of these cases is different. But the good citizen should know and have the capacity both to be ruled and to rule. And this very thing is the virtue of a citizen. Knowledge of rule over free persons from both points of view. So I take that to be something like the best possible situation in which you have people of equivalent abilities and most people of generally excellent characters that they know how. And their virtue as being citizens is both being able to rule, that is to make good judgments about what the polity ought to be doing as well as know how to be ruled, that is, know how to participate in that polity and adhering to the judgments of those who are in power.

It's a kind of grandly cooperative environment which is probably far too utopian to be realized.

1:14:43 Wes: Well, I think the criterion you mentioned, they should know what's good for others and for the community. That's the. Yes, that's our basic criterion. And that knowledge that know how isn't necessarily the same thing as being a good person. That's what I.

1:14:56 Unknown speaker: No, it's not.

1:14:57 Wes: I mean, it seems like they would have to be related.

1:15:01 Mark: Are we finally done with book three? Finally, my book three notes ran out a long time ago. My notes for chapter 14, 15, 16 and 17 are all about one line long, like, yep, 16. He talks about absolute monarchs. Move on. So you guys are obviously getting much more out of this than I was. Some of these selections, I just chose to get a flavor of how he gives advice to these various types. I like the laws versus individual and some of the other points you've talked about in his discussion of monarchies, which is this chapter 14 through 17 of book three here.

And then we read a little bit of book four and five, which I have a few notes on. And then we get to the chunks of book six we did, which was just his advice for democracy. And we've already touched on most of the points in there that I felt like needed to be made. I guess the things that I was noticing were obviously you said he looked at a lot of different actual governments. And I think somewhere in here he even says like, pretty much all the conceivable types that would work have already been tried. There's been a lot of history. So he really thinks that he's got a pretty comprehensive.

He doesn't Say there could be radical changes in the future, say with technology or something, that would make none of this advice useful. And then his advice on how to prevent revolutions and how to make these things just all seem to follow pretty straightforwardly from how he set up the types in the first place. Like you said. I mean, how do we keep a monarch from becoming a tyrant? Well, have a strong set of laws, have a strong set of traditions, have things that will constrain the monarch. And so it's the same thing with democracy. If you don't want the poor people just carving up the rich people stuff, then maybe have a divided government where it's not like, like everybody gets to do everything.

Maybe everybody is citizens, but they don't actually get to vote, they get to maybe do jury duty. And that's chosen by lot. So he has a lot of these things to sort of make as far as democracy is concerned, to make it less problematic. Right. So I had a list of little recommendations he made to choose magistrates by lot. Don't put property restrictions on office holders, in other words, anybody could hold office, but don't let anybody have the same employment twice. All appointments should be short. Start a fund to pay the magistrate salaries so that even poor people can be in them, and the whole community is considered qualified to judge in all causes whatsoever.

So if you're going to have a democracy, just make it all the way, but try to give everybody their due so they don't complain. So it's a real democracy, but then whittle down the pernicious effects of their all too predictable actions. See there, I just jumped us forward 70 pages. Are you okay with that or have I glossed over important things that need to be slowed down and talked about?

1:17:41 Unknown speaker: So this puts us for book seven to the question of education. And also considering what the best regime is requires us to understand and think about what the best way of life is.

1:17:52 Mark: Yes, right. Education is dealt with more directly in book eight, but book seven is sort of providing the foundation for that. And that really brings us full circle back to where we started today and back to our discussion of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is to get at what the best society is, we have to understand what is the best for the individual. And so here's where he goes into. You know, we've already covered some of this. He asks, is it better to be a political person than a philosopher? He asks what is the purpose of philosophy at all?

1:18:20 Unknown speaker: He says at the end of chapter one in book seven, after going through this question of saying well, discuss the best regime at all. We must first discuss what the most choice worthy way of life is. And he kind of concludes, after going through a couple different versions of that and thinking about that a little bit, he says, for the present, let us presuppose this much that the best way of life, both separately for each individual and in common for cities, is that accompanied by virtue. Virtue that is equipped to such an extent as to allow them to share in the actions that accord with virtue.

So this is the way in which the city and the individual come together. For Aristotle, that the best regime will be the one that allows each individual to fulfill their own virtue. The best regime will be the most virtuous regime, that is the most excellent one, if you just use the Greek. And that most excellent regime will be the one in which the individuals are able to be their most excellent. And that is kind of wishy washy on the face of it. It's abstract, so it seems like it's saying something particular, but it's absent all the particular features of how you actually structure a polity to make it actually achieve such a thing.

Did any of you think about this question in the second chapter, book seven, about the conflict between the political life as being the best life and the philosophical life life being the best life?

1:19:50 Wes: I didn't contemplate about it, but I.

1:19:53 Mark: Well, I did find his actual quote here, which is in chapter three, that he finally resolves this. To prefer doing nothing to virtuous activity is also wrong. For happiness consists in action and many noble ends are produced by the actions of the just and wise. There you go. Being a detached do nothing philosopher is actually not the best life.

1:20:12 Wes: No,

1:20:14 Mark: that's a fucking quote.

1:20:16 Wes: But he goes on to say that being a philosopher isn't doing nothing. So look at 1325b15.

1:20:23 Mark: I mean all philosophies doing nothing. I'm saying that that kind of philosopher

1:20:28 Wes: so not that a life of action must necessarily have relation to others, as some persons think, nor those ideas only to be regarded as practical, which are pursued for the sake of practical results, but much more the thoughts and contemplations which are independent and complete in themselves, since acting well and therefore a certain kind of action is an end. And even in the case of external actions, the directing mind is most truly said to act. It's the mind that acts. Neither again is it necessary that states which are cut off from others and choose to live alone should be inactive for activity as well as other things may take place.

By sections there are as Many ways in which the section of a state may act upon one another. The same thing is equally true of every individual. So you can be active, you can be living a life of activity in accordance with virtue. Contemplation is an activity. Now, it's unclear to me whether he's coming down on the side of a political life or the philosophical life. The general impression I got was that there should be a mix of political and contemplative, but I certainly didn't see him as coming down on the side of the purely political life as opposed to the philosophical life.

1:21:39 Mark: No, but a part of eudaimonia is going to be peace. And philosophy is what our excellence is in a state of peace.

1:21:49 Wes: Right, yeah. And he's also making the argument here that contemplation is action, and so the prejudice that you're somehow being idle or inactive by being philosophers is not warranted.

1:21:58 Mark: Well, is it really the same thing as Plato's take on this, which is that contemplation is necessary for recognizing virtue, and so that is going to itself be necessary for actually being virtuous and doing the actions.

1:22:13 Wes: So it's a step, but it's an end in itself. It's not just a means to an end. And obviously for Plato, it's the highest.

1:22:19 Mark: Sure. Well, for Plato, you're arguably connecting with what his version of God is. So that's why it is an end in itself for Plato, for Aristotle, can't really resort to that. But it still just has to be built into our eudaimonia that that state is a matter. Since we are the reasoning animal, if we are exercising our reasoning in the fullest way, that is being human, the fullest possible way.

1:22:43 Wes: Yeah. In the metaphysics, we'll see that he does connect contemplation in general to God. In a way, philosophy looks to coincide with theology.

1:22:53 Mark: Ah, yeah.

1:22:53 Unknown speaker: At the end of that.

1:22:54 Mark: Yeah. But I like that he takes this on and he connects the two. And I also like the image here. He says you're always going to have in a state, other states around you that are going to be hostile. And so you have to have soldiers, you have to have. Have the warlike virtues, the Homeric virtues still alive in your culture. But that is a means to an end. So he talks about specific societies that have these cultures, these very warlike cultures, and put all their emphasis on training their people to be good warriors and really what a poverty of spirit that leads them to. And then when they finally achieve what the war is supposed to bring, which is peace, then they can't handle it well.

1:23:37 Unknown speaker: They become kind of incontinent with respect to their abilities to choose. Because living the virtuous life involves having proper habits as well as choosing rightly. Choosing well, I should say they can't do it because they haven't developed the habits of that excellent life.

1:23:54 Mark: All right. I found in chapter 14 a quote related to this. No limits on government. The politician therefore composes a body of laws, ought to extend his views to everything, the different parts of the soul and their actions, more particularly to those things which are of a superior nature and ends in the same manner to the lives of men in their different actions. A legislator ought to instill those laws in the minds of men which are most useful for them, both in their public and private capacities. We are makers of people. So it's not just coincidence that in a well run state people can fulfill their potential.

When we think about that, we would think of the state protecting us from each other. We have all these things from law something floating around in our heads. And he's really thinking of something much closer to Plato's Republic where you're actively getting in there and instilling these habits.

1:24:43 Unknown speaker: Well, so this is an interesting distinction, right? That from the Lockean or Hobbesian perspective, we are all fundamentally disconnected individuals and that the goal of the regime is to prevent us from killing each other and that this is good. But there's a kind of constant regulatory effect of preventing disaster that politics has on human beings. Otherwise it's utter chaos and it's just people slitting each other's throats. That's probably more Hobbes than anything else. But it's of that kind of tradition,

1:25:23 Wes: these Lockean and Hobbesian notions. It's a matter of need or necessity that people come together, right? And for Aristotle that's just a developmental stage which the polis should surpass. So that the purpose of the polis actually goes beyond need and necessity and is meant to foster the good life.

1:25:42 Unknown speaker: Exactly. It's integral to the flourishing of human beings that being a member of the polis is integral to being a human being in the fullest sense of the word. So then that, that for Aristotle, in the way he sort of looks at the world, brings him to saying, well then the best polis is going to be the one that helps make people the best. And that's why you naturally get this notion of, well, what are we going to do to have as part of our structure the best citizens. And there's this notion in our liberal democratic part of our tradition that we think that it's kind of nosy that we would even have any conception that our community ought to have any notion at all of trying to help us be good.

We just leave that utterly alone and that the regime has nothing to say about that. Why? Well, if we think about Hobbes, then we would say, well, that's because being in a community is only saving us from our own deaths and that it's not for our own good, except insofar as saving us from killing each other.

1:26:53 Wes: It's also related to the notion of individual liberty, where what the state does sets up a groundwork where many different forms of life can actually flourish. So it's not instituting any particular form of life, it's allowing different forms of life to flourish within its framework. So the notion of liberty means different communities within the state get to choose their own good, and those communities may try and foster it socially, but the difference is that it's not being done at the level of lawmaking.

1:27:23 Unknown speaker: That's the pursuit of happiness.

1:27:25 Wes: Yep.

1:27:25 Mark: I guess I just want to turn that question back, though. Is that something that we've just settled for? I'm asking you guys, as individuals, do you have the secret wish that you could be like Plato and Aristotle and get in there and mess with things and make us all better and not leave it to these subcultures over which you have no control?

1:27:44 Wes: I think the thing that people worry about with that is the problem of totalitarianism.

1:27:48 Mark: But I would be a good wise tyrant.

1:27:51 Unknown speaker: It seems to me that Aristotle's case is significantly different than Plato's case, at least Plato's version of the Republic, which seems far more prescriptive in this way than Aristotle's notion of a polity that governs with a view to the good of the polity. There seems to be room in there for the notion of the good of the weightlifter is different than the good of the computer programmer. There would be room in the best regime so that all of those sorts could flourish in accordance to their way of being. Excellent.

1:28:24 Wes: Yeah, we should note that he does talk about liberty in the context of a democratic state. In chapter two of book six, he talks about liberty and equality.

1:28:33 Unknown speaker: Yeah, he has actually a pretty nice analysis of the tension between liberty and equality there, which, when I read it, I thought you could have just read this straight out the.

1:28:41 Mark: Of.

1:28:41 Unknown speaker: Of the Federalist Papers or of controversies within American democracy right now.

1:28:46 Wes: And that's where we get the solution is that agricultural population which he's looking for people not too poor, not too wealthy.

1:28:55 Seth: Probably the most important thing in this entire book, from my perspective, is that Aristotle talks about the importance of the rule of law and relevant to all of the things that you've been saying about our current political situation and so, so forth. If we don't maintain the rule of law, if you don't respect the law, if you don't have an orderly way of adjudicating disputes through the law, then you have no foundation for any kind of society, regardless of what the government is.

1:29:27 Mark: You know, maybe the evolution to taking these things out of the state's hands has a lot to do with just the fact that like we were saying before that Aristotle's community is a community of friends, of people, you know, even though law, like you're saying, is important and that is there to sort of prevent us from abusing each other. That's more like we four are forming an LLC and we need some rules to keep us from getting mad or to meet all the contingencies. So we have to have some rules in place that's much different than the impersonal arm of law, where it's affecting millions of people that you will never meet, which is just something that's not on Aristotle's radar at all. So that if we want to retain anything like the benefits that Aristotle thinks we get from a society, then it has to be we're dealing with smaller groups.

1:30:17 Wes: Yeah, he rules out larger states.

1:30:20 Mark: So if there's something psychologically valuable coming out of the community, according to Aristotle, not even just valuable, but necessary, we have to be getting that in some other way. And that's to go all existentialist is maybe part of what is screwed up about our society now is that we don't have these communities to give us a consistent sense of self. Right, right. MacIntyre's take on this is that we're divided amongst ourselves. You could see, say your company that you work for is a community and your family is some kind of community. But the rest of it, I mean, what really is the common thing say that we as Americans are Westerners is like crap on tv, you know, it's like that's not a community.

That's a one way, that's a cultural touchstone. But it doesn't give us that sort of feedback that we need to become whole coherent persons. And so we have to, for instance, make up shit like the pel community of that I will talk to you guys. And we have all these new friends we've made reach out to us and can cause us to reflect on our own thinking to improve it and just, I don't know, does it work? Do we now out of that say, get what Aristotle wants us to get out of community?

1:31:31 Unknown speaker: I think you would say that. Not unless it's a self sufficient community. He would say that those kinds of things, those individual participations go in the right direction. But the proper polity is going to be something pretty darn small and it's going to involve people knowing everybody else more or less and deliberating together more or less about the goods of that community. And then there'll be other communities around.

1:31:58 Wes: Right.

1:31:59 Unknown speaker: But you won't together form a super community, a super polity that's not going to be possible for that super polity to be tuned to the good of your particular community.

1:32:11 Seth: So does that mean that Aristotle's politics is a useful text in this day and age for homeowners associations? It doesn't have anything really to tell us about representative democracy of 400 million people?

1:32:30 Unknown speaker: I don't think so.

1:32:30 Wes: 290 million.

1:32:31 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:32:32 Seth: Or however many there are.

1:32:34 Unknown speaker: I think that even in our own liberal democracy there's this tension between the Hobbesian tradition of having a government that manages to get people to live together without killing each other and one that helps people flourish and be the best they can be and also maybe instill some habits in them. We have civic class and we have certain notions of public education that go towards this direction of a minimum education within our community. To be a fully fledged citizen, that notion is that you have to be educated not just in fundamentals like reading, writing and arithmetic, but also in the ways in which this community works.

But also we have this notion of there being multiple individual communities that have to be under this umbrella and we need to have structures that prevent them from dominating too much over each other and killing each other and adjudicating their differences while maintaining our territorial and economic interests. That part of it doesn't seem to be very much in Aristotle. Exactly.

1:33:43 Mark: I'm glad we got to do something that you had a history with and an attachment to. I don't know if we did it justice.

1:33:52 Wes: I read the text, made my margin notes, I read some secondary stuff, but I didn't have enough time to really wrap my head around it and prepare myself to explain it in the way that I try to do it.

1:34:02 Seth: Well, think about this. If you were just going to try to explain what we read, how long would it take you?

1:34:08 Wes: Well, it's not like I want to give a straight explanation, but I want to have it in my head.

1:34:13 Mark: Is there some texts that the language is so interesting and challenging, you know, like the Hegel master and slave section that we did, that it deserves a just close focus going through. And I know a lot of people feel that way about Aristotle and certainly there's all the translation issues and. But in this in particular, hardly anything made me stumble and I just felt like a high level overview. Picking out choice details that we thought were amusing is the most I personally could get out of it. Maybe that just says something about how I don't actually see this as providing anything crucial for our modern day, at least any more than like the, than Machiavelli did.

1:34:48 Wes: For me though, there are so many basic questions that are raised. You know, questions of law versus the individual judge and the individual passions and tons of things which would have borne close reading, close discussion.

1:35:00 Seth: I made it through book four and I didn't see that blog post where you listed like the 17 other chapters we were going to read in there until like two days ago. I thought we were going just through book four.

1:35:13 Mark: Certainly we could have just done up to the chapter three, chapter four stuff and then talked about modern politics.

1:35:19 Seth: I don't really want to participate in a discussion about the modern political situation, partially because I don't feel particularly well informed, but I'm also just not. I'm afraid of going down that path. The whole discourse around politics is so disappointing and so discouraging.

1:35:36 Mark: But that's what's to discuss. That's all you have to voice.

1:35:40 Seth: Okay?

1:35:41 Mark: We're trying to transcend these things. We're not trying to participate in liberal talk radio. We're trying to see why, as philosophy people, this whole thing is fucked up.

1:35:50 Wes: Okay?

1:35:51 Seth: See if we could have somehow found a way to talk about what are the requirements of the citizen in our modern democracy and whether or not they're being fulfilled and whether the state is doing its job in making it possible. That might been interesting.

1:36:04 Unknown speaker: If we want to have that discussion, then we need to read the Federalist Papers in Tocqueville.

1:36:08 Wes: Yeah, we should definitely read those at some point.

1:36:11 Seth: I couldn't bear, like if we did something like that and then Facebook and the blogs were just exploded with like Obamacare references and we turned into just another dumping ground on the Internet for.

1:36:24 Wes: Well, we'd be very lucky if that happened traffic wise, but I don't think it would. Yeah, yeah, I think we can have a discussion which is too abstract to serve as fuel for the spleens of the Partisans.

1:36:39 Mark: All right, next time we're going to talk about an essay by Nietzsche from 1873 called on truth and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense. Hey, some people complain that these episodes are too long. They want a little bite of philosophy, if you will. Well, you can get such a bite every day@prially examinedlife.com not in audio form, just written. You can subscribe to it by email. You can get them sent to you right in your little house there. Incidentally, we're looking for additional guest bloggers to help us out. If you've got links to share and can write coherently about them, look for the featured post on this on partially the demonlife.com you can also participate in many fan discussions as part of our ever busy Facebook group.

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1:37:37 Wes: Thank you. Good night.

1:37:38 Seth: Good night.

1:37:39 Unknown speaker: Good night.

1:37:40 Mark: Good night.

1:37:48 Unknown speaker: So much to say to you about the will it be is gone you need time and I need you I'm not about to move on but if I should hold my tongue yet to put us more on PA Remember what I wish for you and don't forget where you are. Don't forget where you are. I think I understand that your emotions do not miss it's hard to keep a balance between things that count your dance it if you need a hand I'll pull you I don't care how far it's part of what I wish for you and don't forget where you are. Don't forget where you are.

1:39:09 Mark: Sam,

1:39:37 Unknown speaker: You know that I care for you I've said it 50 times. Take this as an effort to atone for some of my major crying days. If you want, I'll take these words and store them in my jar but don't forget what I wish for you and don't forget where you are. Forget where you are.

1:40:26 Mark: It.