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8 ARISTOTLE’S POLITY TODAY Lenn E. Goodman I t’s hard to say just how much philosophy is autobiographical. Surely those philosophers who devote their lives to musing on the reality of possible worlds or the unreality of time seem to survey an arid landscape. Perhaps the territory they scan draws their gaze because of its remoteness from the world they live in. But Aristotle’s rich panorama of the world beyond the mind offers tantalizing insights into his perspective too, not confessions ala Rousseau or Augustine but vistas vividly colored by the values and insights of the viewing subject. Aristotle did not live to enjoy an old age retired to some priesthood for study and reflection, emerging, perhaps , from time to time, with advice or instruction. But he does picture such a retirement, wondering, perhaps, if it would suit.1 Addressing childhood , more that of others than his own, he prescribes music in education— not, heaven forfend, to make professional performers of one’s offspring, but to broaden their experience, enliven and enlarge their character, open up their sensibilities to emotional potentials beyond what we might wish them to know by direct experience (Politics, VIII.3–7).2 The outlook is revealing —a professional intellectual praises liberal education and enriched experience , and not just for the young. Similarly, when Aristotle mentions the chance for friendship between persons of disparate social standing,3 disparages barbarians for treating wives like slaves (Politics I.2.1252b5–6), and glowingly paints the best of friendships as reliant not just on benefits exchanged or pleasures shared but on mutual admiration and respect, he might be describing a good marriage—although Greek conventions demarcating the public from the private make it awkward for him to say so.4 He does list friendship prominently among the factors that draw men and women together as couples (Nicomachean Ethics VIII.12.1162a16–24; Swanson 1992, 25.) And, unlike Plato, who projects equality for women and men but never actually married, Aristotle did, after all, marry two women in his life, a former princess and a former slave. He rescued the first 129 130 LENN E. GOODMAN on the ruin of his patron’s state and provided in his will for remarriage by the second, should she wish it—but in keeping with his own and not her former station.5 Aristotle lacks the sublimated radicalism of Plato’s Republic and is all too ready, with an outsider’s warmth, to affirm and rationalize what he beholds , whether it be the institution of slavery or the sequestration of (respectable ) women. But his deference to the status quo makes his critiques all the more trenchant, whether arguing that some men are natural slaves, even if they and their peers have never noticed it, or insisting that women too need virtues, even if not the identical virtues that he would expect in a man (Politics I.13). Clearly when Aristotle analyses life as a system of activities and among activities gives the highest rank to the life of the mind, finding it the most self-sufficient and the most fulfilling of what is best in us, he is sketching his own ideal. Likewise when he chides his students against squeamishness about their dissections, urging that if we admire art for virtuosic representations of nature, all the more should we admire the original, and recognize, with Heraclitus, that here too there are gods (Parts of Animals I.5.644b32–645a34). When Aristotle says that one who would live without friends and fellows must be either subhuman or superhuman, a beast or a god, he echoes a thought of Homer’s and traces in it the course of his own reflections on society, without which human life would not be human in actuality at all.6 Aristotle’s thesis that man is a social animal draws out and makes explicit a key premise of Plato’s in the Republic. To show that the tyrant is indeed not the happiest but the most wretched of men, Plato must show not only that tyranny robs the tyrant of friendship and trust but also that in so doing it harms his well-being, by thwarting the social nature constitutive in every healthy human identity. The tyrant will be alienated not only from others but also from himself. He demonstrates what he imagines to be his power only through perversity, and his inner drives and urges are therefore at war with one another. His fragmented personality...

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