May 6, 2013
Are we by nature political animals?
The Critique of Political Naturalism
Hans Sluga
Political philosophy has gone through a significant revival in recent decades. While it played no role whatsoever in the early phases of twentieth century analytic philosophy it has by now become a standard part of the analytic curriculum. And political thought was equally marginalized in other characteristic movements of twentieth century philosophy (phenomenology, existential philosophy, and hermeneutics). But for the last thirty years or so, philosophers have devoted themselves with increasing passion to matters of politics. They have argued for the distinctive value of democracy as a system of government; they have advanced the values of political liberty and sometimes those of political equality, and they have haggled particularly hard over the precise formulation of principles of political justice. Given the patent and sometimes painful and impact of politics on our lives, the attention of philosophers to this distinctive aspect of human existence is to be welcomed.
But one is struck by the narrowness of the philosophers’ focus, the uniformly normative character of the philosophical literature. It is evident that Political philosophy sees itself today as an entirely normative, prescriptive type of enterprise; it describes itself sometimes even simply as an applied ethical theory. What is missing in the excitement is serious attention to the reality of the political phenomena. We are lacking, as we might put it, a political ontology comparable to the social ontology on which some philosophers have recently begun to work. Surely, one might say here, we must understand the political situation in which we find ourselves before we can say what is to be done in it. It is useful to think for a moment about the similarities between politics and playing a game, say, specifically chess. Before we can tell a player how to proceed, he or she needs to know some basic facts about the game. We must describe the nature of the chess board, the different figures, and their possible moves. We may say that we have to specify the constitutive rules of the game before we can explain how to play it in the right way. Only after a player has grasped the constitutive rules of chess can we provide him with strategic rules for playing the game. We might say then that the king must be kept protected; that pieces must not be sacrificed unnecessarily, and so on. I want to add here that learning to play a winning game in chess involves more than knowledge of such prescriptive rules. The serious chess player will also have to study individual games played by chess masters. Similarly in politics we also need to spell out its constitutive facts before we can specify normative principles of right political action. And we might add that just as in chess, it is not enough for a political agent to know such principles, he or she must also study the way politics has been practiced by others. There is something attractive and also illuminating to think of politics as a game or, at least, on the model of a game. But then we must not overlook that it is a game of a very peculiar kind. In contrast to chess, its constitutive principles are variable, its prescriptive principles contested, and the lessons we can draw from political history are always ambivalent. Still the politics-game analogy might help us to avoid the somewhat grandiloquent idea of a political ontology; no one would speak, after all, of an ontology of chess or of ping pong, or of tossing a ball into the air. Talk of constitutive and strategic, prescriptive rules may certainly mislead us. There are rules in politics, but unlike those in games they are typically produced only in the political process; they are, moreover, always contestable and often actually contested; and they are also never final. Our normative political philosophers often see themselves as a sort of umpire in the political game: the one who decides when the game is being played right. But that very conception of the political philosopher may be grounded in a false analogy.
I am concerned here with a fundamental question of political ontology: the question of the exact politics in human life. Is politics an essential feature of being human? Are we “naturally” and perhaps even “biologically” primed to be political beings? Or is politics, as we know it, a product of historical and contingent circumstances? That question has been put to us by nineteenth century anarchism and its more recent right-wing cousin, twenty-first century libertarianism. Both anarchists and libertarians think that we would be better off without our traditional political institutions. On might, of course, also take the view that, while our political reality is something purely contingent, it is a distinctively positive achievement, something worth nurturing and preserving.
I will attack these questions by considering the formula that “man is by nature a political animal.” That proposition derives from Aristotle and I will therefore first of all examine Aristotle’s form of political naturalism. After that I turn to a contemporary version of the sort that one can find in the contemporary ethological and sociobiological literature. Both forms of political naturalism turn out to have something to teach us. But I will try to argue that neither of them is ultimately satisfactory and in order to make that point I turn once again to Aristotle. While he was indubitably the originator of political naturalism he also provides us with crucial objections not only to the modern versions of such a naturalism but to his own as well. I conclude therefore that the anarchists and libertarians are right when they see politics as a contingent, historical construct. But I will seek to diverge from them eventually by arguing that just like other aspects of historical culture, politics is a significant human achievement.
Aristotelian naturalism
Aristotle asserts that man is by nature a political animal early on in his Politics.[1] But what exactly did he mean by this proposition? Our political orators still like to quote that phrase, but do they understand it the way Aristotle intended? Aristotle wrote: “anthropos physei politikon zoon.” Every one of those four terms calls for attention.
- Physis. We translate the term now routinely as “nature” since Aristotle’s physis coincides more or less with what we call the natural world. But the translation is nevertheless misleading since nature is for us something material, subject to causal necessity, and governed by mechanical laws and is in all these respects different from what Aristotle understood by his term. What is “physical” in Aristotle’s sense has, for one thing, a telos, an inherently purposive character which determines not only what the thing is but also what it can become – its reality and its potential – and how it will behave under this or that condition. It is, thus, part of the physis of an acorn that it can become an oak tree. This does not mean that the acorn is already in some way an oak tree or that by some kind of mechanical necessity it will turn into one. The acorn has rather the potential to be an oak tree and under the right conditions will develop into such a tree. The telos of the acorn will be fully realized only when it becomes an oak tree; its potential will be actualized only in that situation. We may even say that the acorn will reach fruition only if and when it turns into a tree. And this “biological” model of nature is meant to apply equally to every “physical” thing.
All this is understood. We usually ignore, however, another aspect of Aristotle’s conception of the “physical” which reveals that his conception of nature was certainly not biological in our sense of the word. A “physical” thing has for Aristotle not only a forward direction to what it may become, it also directs us backwards to where the thing came from. When we see the sapling of an oak tree we will be aware of its telos (the mature tree) but can also infer backwards that the sapling must have come from an origin that contained within itself the potential for the sapling and the fully mature tree. Something similar can, of course, be said within our own mechanistic view of the natural world. Both the sapling and the tree derive from the oak’s genome. But this genome is itself material whereas the origin of the oak tree is for Aristotle to be found in something non-material – an element in addition to the matter from which the plant has sprung. This non-material element Aristotle terms “the form” of the object. It is important to see that Aristotle’s teleological account of physis and his theory of forms belong together; they are two aspects of one single story and it is in both respects that our own view of nature differs. We will see how this distinction bears on Aristotle’s proposition that man is political by physis.
Of more immediate significance for his conception of politics is that Aristotle contrasts physis and nomos, or, as we are accustomed to say nature and culture. This is, once again, a potentially misleading rendering for we can translate “nomos” also as “law,” “convention,” or even “custom” and must remember that the word refers originally to the act of possession that occurs when human beings turned sedentary and claimed parts of the earth as their possession. (“Nomos” = the German “nehmen” i.e., to take)[2] In their original meaning, the words “physis” and “nomos” correspond thus respectively, we might also say more cautiously, to what comes of itself and what is taken. Physis is accordingly that which obtains everywhere, equally, and on its own, and as such requires no human doing while nomos, by contrast, is that which is due to human effort, is constructed, constituted, invented, or acquired – such as possession, property, habits, customs, conventions, and also the laws that govern a particular polis.
Man is for Aristotle “naturally” political in the sense of physis just characterized. It is not that he is always and inevitably political, but, being what he is, he has the capacity to be political under the right circumstances and he reaches the full realization of his nature, full fruition only in being political. We have, however, not only the capacity but also the disposition to be political beings and to act politically. But conditions, both inner and outer, will determine whether we ever get to that point. By declaring man to be political by physis, Aristotle is saying then that being political is not just a nomos, not merely an invented practice or a local habit. It is not that in some places men are political and in others not. They are everywhere, at all times, and under all conditions political, and by this he means that they always have that potential and that they have it without any special effort on their part and that even when they are not engaged in political life, when inner and outer circumstances prevent them from realizing their natural disposition to be political.
- Zoon. Here we must note once more that Aristotle’s view of life is not ours. Living things are distinguished for him by possessing a different form from non-living ones. The form of a species determines what an organism is, what its potentials are, how it will develop and behave under appropriate conditions, what, in other words, its telos is. Thus, all human beings belong to one species because they share the form of being human and this determines their reality and potential and their telos. That is, of course, not our modern concept of species. For us a species is nothing but a population of organisms that are related by descent and have a sufficiently similar genome. We can speak of this dual relationship of appropriate causal connectedness and similarity in genetic endowment as constituting a family resemblance. Species are, thus, from our modern perspective, populations of organisms held together by family resemblance. Similar considerations can be brought to bear on other and more incidental uses of the term “form” as my own earlier use of the term when I talked of “forms of political organization” or “forms of rule.” In each case, we are speaking in effect only of groupings held together by family resemblance. This is of bearing, for instance, in a discussion of democracy. There is, on our view, no determinate form of government that we can label “democracy.” The term “democracy” does not correspond to an ideal type. There is, instead, a population of political systems that exhibit more or less family resemblance. To study “democracy” means then to study the causal (historical) and similarity relations between these political systems. This point will prove of interest also in our discussion of the concept of the political because here, too, we are tempted to speak as if there were a single “formal” characteristic that everything political must possess. But the concept of the political is also only a family resemblance concept. That observation has significant consequences and will help us, in particular, to understand what it means to say that there are no political phenomena but only political interpretations of phenomena. To treat the concept of the political as a family resemblance concept will get us to see that the phenomena we call political are held together only by our recognition of a dual bond of causal relatedness and similarity and that the bounds of what we recognize in this way as political may shift.
Though human beings have their distinctive form, according to Aristotle, they are similar to other animals in certain significant respects. Aristotle believes, in fact, that we can rightfully speak of some non-human animals as political beings though “a human being is more of a political animal than a bee or any other gregarious animal.”[3] In order to understand this (qualified) comparison one must turn to Aristotle’s History of Animals with its detailed characterization of gregariousness. Aristotle writes there that among the gregarious animals are various species of bird and fish, as well as “the bee, the wasp, the ant” and that these must be distinguished from solitary animals, on the one hand, and from those that can live either gregariously or in a solitary fashion, on the other. Man, he adds surprisingly, belongs to this third group and he is thus not in the strictest sense a gregarious animal. That man is capable of living in a solitary manner does not mean, however, that he can fully realize his telos in this form of life. Gregarious animals live together for the purposes of procreation, of nurturing their offspring, and of mutual aid. Our own utter dependency at the moment of birth, our continuing need for protection, shelter, food, clothing, education and a host of other needs force us to rely on others, make us humans also by nature gregarious beings and a solitary man would have to forgo many essentials of human life. Gregariousness is, in any case, the precondition for our being political animals, though not all gregarious animals are political in Aristotle’s eyes. That holds only of those that have “one, common objective.” Aristotle adds: “Of this kind is man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane.” There are, moreover, some political animals that live under a ruler while others exist in an anarchic fashion. “The crane and several kinds of bee are under a ruler,” Aristotle writes, “while ants and many others are anarchic.” And finally, there are among the gregarious animals (as well as among the solitary ones) some that are sedentary while others are nomadic.[4] While the History of Animals does not explore the significance of these distinctions, we can easily extrapolate the lessons that Aristotle wants to draw from them. There are for him, so it appears, three characteristics that make gregarious animals into political beings in the fullest sense: (1) that they direct themselves to a common end, (2) that they live under a ruler, and (3) that they live in settled conditions. While some gregarious animals exhibit one or the other of these characteristics and can therefore be called political in a partial or weak sense, the most fully political among them will have all three characteristics. This certainly holds for man.
There emerges from this a fairly complex picture of what it means for human beings to be by nature political animals. It means, first of all, that human beings have certain basic and fixed needs that can be satisfied in a gregarious form of existence; but it also means that they have the capacity to respond to these needs in other human beings and, finally, also that they have a natural disposition to do so. Second, human beings are naturally political also in the sense that in living together they can pursue a single common purpose. Third, human beings are naturally political also in the sense that they live naturally under a system of rulership. Fourth and finally, human beings are naturally political in that they live naturally in settled conditions. Each of these claims calls, of course for further analysis since each of them involves, presumably, a number of more specific human capacities and dispositions. Some of these will become apparent as we go.
The characteristics described so far do not yet, however, exhaust the nature of our specifically human form of politics. We must recall here Aristotle’s statement that man is a political being “in a higher degree” than the other gregarious animals. (1253a) He does not mean to say by this that the difference between human and animal politics is one of degree or that man is just more intensely political than other gregarious animals. He holds, rather, that man differs from the non-human political animals by having some uniquely human capacities and dispositions that bear on politics. Man, and man alone, possesses according to Aristotle the faculty of logos, that is, of language or reason. One important difference between us and the non-human political animals follows from this. Their forms of gregariousness are fixed once and for all. Bees do not choose their form of government and ants do not deliberate about their interactions.[5] Human politics, on the other hand, characteristically involves both deliberating and the making of choices. In contrast to the non-human animals we can therefore also organize our political coexistence in a number of different ways; hence, that multiplicity of forms of government that Plato and Aristotle identify. The laws that govern our political life have to be enacted; they are not like the fixed laws that govern the political life of the bees. It turns out paradoxically that we are creatures who by nature – that is, on the basis of our physis – require nomos, that is, convention and enacted law. That the forms of human gregariousness are not determined once and for all is also a source of the political disagreement. Factions, parties, and conflicts characterize human politics. This leads, in turn, to that political instability which Plato comments on in book 8 of the Republic. Human politics, in contrast to the regulated life of the gregarious bees, involves, of course, not just physical struggle but also deliberation and debate. Such deliberation may concerns how political power is to be distributed but also what is best. In making political choices, we are, in other words, guided by “normative” considerations concerning what is useful, healthy, good, and just. While human politics remains always concerned with the satisfaction of our basic bodily needs, we can, in contrast to other gregarious animals, also strive for justice in our relations to each other. We can pursue human excellence, goodness, and justice in a rational (i. e., deliberative) manner. Aristotle writes accordingly that the human polis “comes to be for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well.” (1252b) But because human politics allows the making of different choices, our kind of politics can also go wrong in ways impossible in animal life and the human pursuit of excellence and justice can generate bloody disagreement and end in destructive conflicts of a sort unknown in animal life.
- Anthropos. We translate the term most appropriately as “human being” but can also use the simpler “man” as long as we understand that word to refer to the species (= “Mensch”) rather than just the male of the species. But we must not overlook that the word is grammatically masculine and means literally “someone of the male gender who looks like a man” (anér + ops + male gender ending). Though Aristotle believed indubitably that being political is a characteristic of human kind as a whole, he also thought that only the males of this kind are actually in a position to realize this potential. That conclusion does not follow for him simply from the root meaning of the word “anthropos.” It is a consequence, rather, of his view of the relations between men and women and of their respective place in the polis. But one may still conjecture that the view of politics as a male domain is made easier for Aristotle because of the grammar and etymology of the Greek word.
In characterizing what makes human politics unique we must certainly consider human kind as a whole. Aristotle assumes, in fact, boldly that nature makes nothing in vain and that every natural kind has its distinctive form and, hence, its own unique purpose, function or telos. Human beings are distinguished from others by being furnished with language or reason (logos) and man can, therefore, be defined as a “rational animal,” i.e., as an animal in possession of logos. It is this characteristic that determines the nature of human politics, that makes human beings political to a higher degree than other animals, and that allows us to describe man in this specific sense to be a political animal, a zoon politikón. For Aristotle the human characteristics of being a rational animal and of being a political animal thus coincide. (What distinguishes man from other living beings is thus on Aristotle’s account not something anatomical or physiological – such as a set of genes – but our possession of language or reason. But the possession of logos is hardly a biological characteristic in the modern sense and “reason” is certainly not a category modern biologists employ. For Aristotle human kind is then not our biological species homo sapiens; man is characterized, rather, by the distinctively cultural feature of being a linguistic or rational animal.)
By declaring man to have logos Aristotle means to say that human kind can use words, can make statements, can construct and understand arguments, can be literate, can wield concepts, and can grasp general principles of both a theoretical and normative sort. Logos is, however, most significantly the capacity to make distinctions. Through logos man is enabled to deliberate specifically on the distinction between what is good and what is bad (in a broad and not necessarily “moral” sense). This ability is responsible for the specifically human element in our politics. It should be obvious at this point that Aristotle’s concept of the political contains, in fact, two elements. He believes that we are naturally political in a first, elementary sense because we are, like the gregarious animals, not self-sufficient but naturally dependent on each other for our survival. But we are political also in a richer and more specifically human way in that our politics involves reason, deliberation, and judgment. Since reason is natural to us, so is this particular kind of politics.
Man is for Aristotle rational by physis which really means that he has an inherent potential for being rational. We are, in other words, born with this potentiality. This does not mean that every member of the human kind actually possesses or will at some point come to possess the fully developed use of the faculty of reason. In fact, Aristotle is certain that this will not be the case. But when someone fails to become fully rational he fails at the same time at being fully human and we can therefore not expect him to be able to participate fully in the distinctively human form of politics. In his relations with others, such a person is likely rather to fall back into forms of gregariousness characteristic of and appropriate for other and lower animals. Aristotle allows, in fact, for the possibility that most human beings never reach their fulfillment in politics and that many will not even come to recognize that they need to be political in order to be fully human. He accuses “the common run of people and the most vulgar” accordingly of identifying happiness with pleasure and, hence, of being satisfied with something less than a fully rational and fully political form of existence. These sorts of people, he adds in the Nicomachean Ethics, “betray their utter slavishness in their preference for a life suitable to cattle.” (NE, 1095b) And this comment we can take literally in that both slaves and cattle lack for Aristotle the use of reason and are, thus, strictly speaking incapable of living a fully human existence. Those human beings who do not live a political life are in Aristotle’s eyes accordingly unfortunates who either lack the power of reason or those who exercise their reason insufficiently and hence fail to understand what makes for a completely human life or those who are prevented by some – internal or external – condition from living a fully human, political existence. The assertion that man is by nature a political animal does therefore not mean for Aristotle that everybody actually lives a political life. It means, rather, that a political existence is an ideal which only a few will actually be able to live up to.
Natural slaves, Aristotle writes in this context, lack reason altogether. Their ability to use (the Greek) language is strictly limited. They possess reason or language, so to say, only as a recessive capacity in so far as they are members of the human kind, not as something they will ever come to develop. In children, reason or language is as yet undeveloped, though here it may eventually mature. Women possess reason, but they lack authority, as Aristotle puts it – that is, when they speak on matters of ruling no man will listen. Even in men who are not natural slaves, reason may turn out to be underdeveloped. What, after all, does a peasant or shoemaker know of ideas and concepts? How literate is a trader in the market? They lack the time and training to occupy themselves with the principles of the good and the bad and thus really lack the capacity for political reason and hence for political action. These men are in Aristotle’s language “banausoi,” mere mechanics and thus unqualified for politics.
It is admittedly human kind as such which is naturally political for Aristotle, but it turns out that free and economically independent males are, in fact, the only human beings he considers qualified to be active citizens. The explanation for this is not just that only such males possess reason in its fully developed form, but it turns out that in order to be politically qualified one must possess something else in addition, which is authority. To have authority requires that one spend one’s life in the agora engaged in political debate and deliberation. But this requires, in turn, that one is freed from the need for economic labor. One must, in other words, be the master of a household that can provide for one’s needs and that does not require one’s constant presence. It follows that in order to be political in the fullest, highest, and most human sense one must be freed from the kind of “political” life the gregarious animals are forced to live. We can see then that politics as gregariousness is, after all, more sharply distinguished from politics as the exercise of human reason than Aristotle had suggested when he spoke of man as being political to a higher degree than the gregarious animals.
- Politikós. The English adjective “political” derives, of course, from the Greek and it is tempting to assume that the two words must therefore mean more or less the same. But the etymology is misleading because the Greeks employed the term “politikós” in a distinctively different conceptual field from ours. The term was for them, most importantly, related to the term “polis” and the political was for them in consequence whatever pertains to the polis; but the latter word, and that is decisive, had for them also a very specific meaning for which our modern vocabulary has no equivalent. We should certainly not speak of the polis as a “state” since that term has distinctly modern connotations.[6] We should also not call the polis a “city” since that term refers us to a quite different Roman institution and the translation of “polis” as “city-state” is prohibited for both these reasons. Analogous things can be said about the term “republic” and the title of Plato’s famous dialogue should therefore have been left untranslated as Politeia or been rendered somewhat awkwardly as The Order of the Polis.
When Aristotle declares man to be a political animal his crucial point is that man is by nature a polis dweller, someone who will find perfection only within a polis, in being part of the life of a polis. He enlarges on this by writing that “he who is without a polis, by reason of his nature and not of some accident, is either a poor sort of being or a being higher than man.” (1253a) We need the polis then and its life to be fully human. That dependence is, indeed, so marked that Aristotle allows himself the paradoxical claim that the polis is actually “prior in the order of nature to the household and the individual.” (1253a) This claim is based on the thought that “the whole is necessarily prior to the part” which Aristotle justifies, in turn, by asserting that “all things derive their essential character from their function and their capacity.” (Ibid.) Something incapable of discharging its function is, on that ground, not strictly speaking the same as the fully functioning object. Since he believes that human beings cannot be fully human outside the polis, it follows that the polis is prior to the individual in the order of nature and that human beings are destined to be members of a polis. This does not imply that the polis has always existed as long as there have been human beings. In the same breath in which he asserts that the polis exists by nature Aristotle also declares the man who invented the first polis to have been one of mankind’s greatest benefactors. That the polis exists by nature means for him, rather, that human kind cannot get to full fruition in any other kind of community.
Aristotle did, however, most certainly not mean to say merely that human beings can survive only by acting jointly and that they are thus made to live in some kind of political community or other; he meant, rather, very specifically that human beings are made to live in the distinctive type of community exemplified by the Greek polis. There are for him other types of community such as the household or family, the village, and the cluster of villages. But the polis, he insists, is the highest form of political community. In contrast to the others, it is self-sufficient in being able to provide for the basic needs of its inhabitants but, unlike other forms of community, it serves also more than the needs of survival. Succinctly, he writes of the polis that “it comes to be for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well.”[7] The polis is, thus, for Aristotle both a practical necessity and also a “moral” institution, the place where questions of justice are raised and settled. “Justice is a political matter,” as Aristotle puts it once again succinctly. “For justice is the organization of a political community.”[8] There is a second, and possibly even more important distinction to the polis. Only in it can human equality be realized. According to Aristotle’s principle there is both a ruling and a ruled element in every combination of constituents. This holds for him indubitably in the elementary associations of a husband and a wife, of a parent and a child, and of a master and a slave. In the polis, however, economically independent free males can ideally interact with each other on a level of equality. Even then there must admittedly be both ruling and subjected elements, but equality among free males is possible in that they will take turns in ruling and being ruled.
There is yet another and even more noticeable way in which the term “politikós” is situated in a different conceptual field from our term “political” for the Greeks knew as yet nothing of our distinction between the political and the social. The latter term is, in fact, of later and Roman origin and has for us two quite different uses. In the first, we treat political things as a sub-class of the social ones and speak of political theory accordingly as a social science. In the second, we treat the political and the social as disjoint and speak of social phenomena as a specific class of things that lie outside the sphere of the political. While sociologists often use the term in the first manner, political scientists and political philosophers often prefer the second.
Aristotle seems to come close to a concept of the social in two places. The first is where he distinguishes the gregarious from the non-gregarious animals and speaks of the political animals as a sub-class of the former. The second is where he distinguishes between two different kinds of community (koinonia), one political and the other not. The relations of a husband and a wife, of a parent and a child, and of a master and a slave represent for him non-political forms of community. Since households are made up of these, Aristotle also says that the household itself is a non-political community. Even the communal relations of villagers are for him not political in the fullest sense. It is only in the polis where people relate to each other as citizens that we can speak of a political form of community. But this political community comprehends much more than we would include in it. What we might think of today as “private” or “civic” activities are all considered by him to be political in character, including sports, entertainment, and religion. On the Aristotelian picture, economic life is, on the one hand, predominantly a non-political matter which concerns individual households. But since economics also bears on the survival of the polis it is at the same time of political concern. None of these distinctions coincide with ours. And this is not surprising since much of what we call society today (in contrast to the political domain) did either not exist in Greek times or was considered to be part of the political sphere. In contrast to the Greeks we are familiar with a large number of institutions that cannot be subsumed under the title of either household or political life. They concern business and industry, religion, culture, sports, and entertainment. Given the relatively undifferentiated character of life in the ancient world, it may have been plausible for Aristotle to think that the satisfaction of basic human needs requires the specifically political organization of the polis and is therefore a political matter. To us this is less than evident since our basic needs are now often taken care of in “private” schools, “private” hospitals, through the workings of “privately” owned corporations, “private” insurance companies, and “private” pension funds. We know, in other words, a whole sphere of life that is not political in the specifically modern sense of the word.
- Anthropos physei politikón zoon. Man is by nature a political animal The Aristotelian formula embodies thus, as we can see now, a rich conception of politics which is sharply distinct from our modern, minimalist one. According to Aristotle, human beings require for their fulfillment not just politics in the narrowly modern sense of the word; they need the whole rich life of the polis of which government is only one part – though admittedly a crucial one. The full richness of Aristotle’s conception of the polis comes out most clearly in the later (and often neglected) books of the Politics which seek to describe the appropriate “political” conditions of human life.[9] Aristotle writes at the start of book seven that the determination of the best form of government requires us to get clear first of all about “which life is most worthy of choice.” (1323a) He considers this claim compelling because he is certain that “the best life, both for the individual separately and for the polis collectively, is a life of virtue sufficiently equipped with the resources needed to take part in virtuous actions.” (1223b) He lists accordingly a series of components which a political system must possess, if it is to function properly. “First, there should be a food supply. Second, crafts (for life needs many tools). Third, weapons; for the members of the community must also have weapons of their own, both in order to rule (since there are people who disobey) and in order to deal with outsiders who attempt to wrong them. Fourth, a ready supply of wealth, both for internal needs and for wars. Fifth, but of primary importance, the supervision of religious matters, which is called a priesthood. Sixth, and most necessary of all, judgment about what is beneficial and what is fair in their relations with one another.” (1328b) One might interpret him to be saying only that these necessities are preconditions for the existence and functioning of our political institutions, but this is not what Aristotle has in mind. Notice his characterization of these things as components of the polis in contrast to private property which he also considers necessary for the polis but “not a component of a polis.” (1328a)
On the basis of these considerations Aristotle goes on to specify some further characteristics of a properly functioning polis. Thus he writes that a polis must be neither too small nor too large. “In size or extent, it should be large enough to enable the inhabitants to live a life of leisure in a way that is generous and at the same time temperate.” (1326b) But it must also not be so large that the free men who take turn in ruling the polis cannot know each other face-to-face. In order to maintain the proper size of the polis there will have to be population control and planning and when the polis threatens to become too large, some of its inhabitants will have to be sent out to form their own polis somewhere else. For the purpose of its survival the city also must foster “temperance, courage, endurance” in its citizens (1333a) and to that end it must institute a system of public education. Finally, to assure continued self-sufficiency the polis must be situated in the proper geographical location, close to fresh water, not too close to and not too far away from the sea, sheltered from the cold north winds and laid out according to the proper ground plan. And so on and so on.
Aristotle (and the Greeks more generally) subscribed to this rich conception of politics despite their well-known and pronounced individualism. They did so because they were acutely aware that every individual achievement is dependent on human cooperation. This would be particularly evident for Aristotle since he believed that the distinctively human features which make us political beings are language and communication and these are, of course, inherently communal phenomena. We might say today that the Greeks understood human beings to be essentially social beings but this is misleading unless we add that they also thought of the social as essentially political in character.
Aristotle was, however, keenly aware that not all human beings live under conditions favorable to the exercise of their political capacities but he was convinced that such human beings lead an inferior sort of life. To live politically in the full sense is for Aristotle, in other words, not just a human possibility but a human potential. We miss out on something in our telos, if we live a-politically. Aristotle declares, thus: “Anyone who cannot form a community with others, or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a polis – is either a beast or a god.”[10] Anyone who ignores political matters leads thus an incomplete human life. This holds, in particular, of all those who spend their lives in pursuing nothing but pleasure, or in being craftsmen, in business, or in the crafts and arts. He considers, in fact, “any art or craft which adversely affects man’s natural fitness” – i.e., his political fitness – to be inferior and he holds the same of “any employment which is pursued for the sake of gain.” These, he says, are likely to “preoccupy and debase the mind.” The politically active free man will certainly have to acquire some knowledge and some practical skills. “It is not out of keeping with a freeman’s character to study these up to a point; but too much concentration upon them, with a view to attaining perfection, is liable to cause the same evil effects that have just been mentioned, namely, to draw the freeman away from political life.”[11] While Aristotle recognizes that someone preoccupied with other matters may sometimes find himself necessitated to engage in politics in order to preserve his own kind of existence, he considers politics to be, in effect, an end in itself and someone who treats it only as a means to some other end is therefore for him still a defective human being. He writes admittedly in the Nicomachean Ethics that the greatest human happiness is found in philosophical contemplation rather than in political action since only the former can bring us close to the perfection of divine existence. He adds, however, immediately: “But we shall also need external well-being, since we are only human. Our nature is not self-sufficient for engaging in study: our body must be healthy and we must have food and generally be cared for.”[12] For this reason, even the sage remains in essence a political being.
Ethological naturalism in politics
The view that we are naturally and necessarily political beings draws support not just from traditional philosophical and Aristotelian sources. It appears to find confirmation also in the work of modern ethologists. To illustrate this point I will consider the attempt of the distinguished Dutch ethologist Frans de Waal to show that “the roots of politics are older than humanity” and that human politics must be seen as “part of an evolutionary heritage we share with our close relatives.”[13] Basing himself on primate studies at the zoo at Arnhem in the Netherlands, de Waal concludes that this shared heritage is so extensive that we can speak legitimately even of a chimpanzee politics. If de Waal is right, our human need and capacity for politics is encoded in genes we share with our primate forebears and we can say in this specific sense that being political is inherent in our being human. But there is surely a long road to travel from a tribe of chimpanzees in a Dutch zoo to the classical polis and from there to the complexities of the modern state. De Waal knows this, of course, in principle but he tends to ignore it in practice. While he rejects a purely genetic account of human behavior, he is most critical of purely cultural explanations. Living beings, he writes, differ from each other “genetically, anatomically, hormonally, neurologically, and behaviorally,” but “it simply does not make sense to isolate the last difference from the other four.” He concedes that genetic programs do not ‘dictate’ behavior.[14] But he insists that the biological and genetic factors must be recognized. Indeed, although human behavior “is never hereditary from A to Z, the genetic influence may be greater than has been suggested.”[15]
De Waal’s work certainly reveals that chimpanzees are capable of extended and highly complex interactions: they collaborate extensively and over long times, they recognize each other as individuals, and they acquire both practical and social skills from each other. Such collaboration takes in the simplest case the form of multiple and repeated binary interaction. But these do not yet, on de Waal’s view, qualify these animals to be considered political beings. For that something more is required and this is their capacity for a “triangulating” type of interaction. Such interaction occurs, for instance, when one chimpanzee intervenes in the interactions of two others. While we can depict simple collaborations between the animals as
A ←→ B,
Triangulating actions involve typically an interaction between at least three animals such that
C
↓
A ←→ B.
According to de Waal, chimpanzees engage in such triangulations in a regular and systematic fashion. De Waal goes on to argue that the same type of interaction is characteristic of human politics and that our kind of politics becomes therefore fully comprehensible only when seen in relation to the behavioral repertoire of our primate cousins. He understands, in other words, that social systems are constituted by more than binary interactions, that they involve also hierarchical clusters of actions of the “triangulating” kind. This marks an essential step beyond the usual social theorizing which tends to treat social (including political) structures as composites if binary relationships. De Waal’s observation is of particular interest with respect to politics where hierarchies of triangulating actions play, indeed, an essential role.
There are obvious differences between the Aristotelian view of man as naturally a political animal and the ethological naturalism illustrated by de Waal. This difference is due, in the first instance, to their radically different conceptions of nature. While Aristotle thinks of nature in terms of potentialities and teleologies, modern ethologists like de Waal understand it in terms of genes and causal necessities. More specific differences between them are to be found in two other places.
(1) While Aristotle’s distinction between the merely “gregarious” animals and the political ones is mirrored in de Waal’s recognition of the difference between animals capable of binary interactions and those capable of triangulating political action, Aristotle has, all in all, a more complex understanding of what enters into our being political in the full and human sense. A decisive characteristic of human politics is for Aristotle that we live in settled communities and pursue there a common good. All animals that live under such conditions are for him, indeed, more highly political than gregarious animals that live nomadically and are seeking their own individual ends (such as flocks of grazing animals that congregate but have no shared place of habitation and are set entirely on feeding themselves). Aristotle treats bees, ants and other gregarious insects therefore as paradigmatically political since they live together in hives or nests and are concerned with attaining a common good. They offer thus a close comparison to human politics – a claim with a long and varied history but one that is misleading from a modern biological view-point. The gregarious insects are, in fact, too far removed from us on the evolutionary ladder to permit for illuminating comparisons between their kind of “politics” and ours. In particular, we must note that the “political” behavior of the insects is genetically fixed whereas ours is exceedingly malleable and this is, indeed, highly characteristic of politics as we understand it. Like other animals we may be genetically primed to live gregariously, but the forms of human gregariousness are variable and almost always contested. De Waal compares human politics, for that reason, not to the rigidly structured life of the gregarious insects but to the loose forms of interactions characteristic of our closest animal relatives, the primates. In doing so, he underplays, however, one important difference between us and them. In contrast to human beings, chimpanzees have no fixed abodes and no sharply bounded territories; they occupy, rather, temporary shelters and move as tribes from one location to another. In living in this manner, the primates may remind us of the life of our pre-historic ancestors but they cannot compare to our own, institutionalized political existence. From an Aristotelian perspective, the life of the primates would for that reason not qualify as a close model of our own kind of politics. And this point has, in fact, been made in criticism of de Waal’s view by ethologists who have argued that we can speak of chimpanzee behavior, at best, as pre- or proto-political.[16]
This may be the right characterization, though not on the grounds that chimpanzees lack an institutional order which unites a large number of not directly related animals. For we might reasonably argue that de Waal has set aside the traditional (Greek and specifically Platonic-Aristotelian) conception of politics in terms of the institutional structure of the polis or the state and has adopted, instead, a process and action oriented understanding of the political. Both chimpanzees and human beings are for him genuinely political beings, in so far as they endeavor to get what they want through manipulation of interaction. Such manipulation is, of course, easiest to pursue where interactive relations are fluid and open to intervention and that is the case in the higher mammals and not in the insects. For de Waal, the political process requires, indeed, no formal structure and is available to creatures that live, like the chimpanzees and our own ancestors, in tribal communities in the wild. Aristotle’s view implies, on the other hand, that our ancestors were not genuinely political beings as long as they lived a nomadic and tribal existence. Human politics is for Aristotle thus an historical creation as he makes clear when he characterizes the inventor of the first polis as one of mankind’s greatest benefactors. However, on de Waal’s alternative (and more modern) conception the political process does not require the institutionalized conditions of historical human life. Aristotle and de Waal operate thus, in effect, with two substantially different conceptions of politics.
(2) In contrast to Aristotle, de Waal makes no firm distinction between animal and human politics. Like most contemporary ethologists and sociobiologists he postulates, instead, an essential continuity between animal and human life and assumes quite uncritically that exactly the same terms and categories apply to both. He speaks of his s chimpanzees thus as engaged in an elaborate system of “economic exchange,” as forming “coalitions,” and of being capable of “strategic planning” within a system of “power-relations.” He is not worried by such borrowings from a terminology that relates, first of all, to human life. Such anthropomorphisms come as naturally to him as the reverse move of applying concepts appropriate in animal life to human politics. When he notes, for instance, that his chimpanzees maintain a system of rank that confers privileges in food and sex on the dominant animals, he concludes that his animals “would obviously feel very much at home in a political arena.”[17] That characterization must, however, be hyperbolic since chimpanzees lack language and would therefore not, in fact, be able to participate in human politics. But the role of language in human politics is not one of de Waal’s preoccupations. Politics is for him, rather, a “power politics” based, as he sees it, on violence, subjugation, and fear. He devotes the central chapters of his book accordingly to an account of power struggles within his group of chimpanzees. The events he describes are intricate, extend over time, and involve most of the members of the colony he is observing. De Waal takes it to be evident that these struggles give “logical coherence and even a democratic structure” to his community of chimpanzees and thus confer on it a political character. “All parties search for social significance and continue to do so until a temporary balance is achieved. This balance determines the new hierarchical positions… When we see how this formalization takes places during reconciliations, we understand that the hierarchy is a cohesive factor, which puts limits on competition and conflict. Child care, play, sex, and cooperation depend on the resultant stability. But underneath the surface the situation is constantly in a state of flux.”[18]
De Waal implies here that human politics, too, must be understood in terms of a competition for resources, a struggle for power, and an effort to establish and maintain an order of domination. But the comparison overlooks profound differences that separate animal and human behavior. One such difference is that the animals’ needs are more or less fixed, another that its power resources are always more or less the same, and a third that one and the same type of domination is constantly being reproduced. Nothing is, on the other hand, more difficult to determine than what constitutes human need. Social theorists have floundered on this ever since Plato spoke in the Republic of the basic human need for food, shelter, and clothing. Plato understood, in any case, that human politics is concerned not just with the satisfaction of these fundamental needs. The great dilemma for human politics, as he saw it, is, in fact, our desire for continuously more. The power resources that human beings bring to politics are also constantly changing in consequence of the growth of human knowledge and the advances of human technology. Unlike chimpanzees, human beings fight not only with the limited weaponry of their bodies, but with the sophisticated means of their brain power. There is, moreover, no singular hierarchical order in human life; instead, systems of social and political order cross each other, intersect, vary and are constantly contested. We should not doubt that need, power, and hierarchy factor into human politics but this does not mean that they do so in the same way as in animal life. It certainly does not mean that human politics is exhausted by these concerns. Aristotle rightly rejected that assumption. Not only is the issue of justice central to human politics but so are also concerns with freedom, equality, friendship, honor, greatness, etc. None of these ideals are relevant to animal “politics” and it is precisely these aspects of human politics that are blocked from view when we relate it too closely to life in the animal world.
Missing from de Waal’s account is, in other words, Aristotle’s recognition that human politics has two different aspects. The first it shares with the life of some of our biological relatives while the other is uniquely human. We can agree with de Waal that human beings like their animal relatives compete for resources, struggle for power, and seek to establish and maintain some order of domination. It is also correct that chimpanzees like human beings engage in triangular forms of interaction and that these are essential to all forms of politics. What is missing systematically from animal life is the second aspect of human politics which Aristotle seeks to capture in saying that human beings have speech and can therefore deliberate on the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. Such deliberation presupposes that human beings can actually choose between various kinds of political arrangement, that they can distribute goods in one way or in another, justly or unjustly. It means also that human beings can choose between different forms of government, different power arrangements and forms of domination, and that they face therefore always the question which of these superior.
For all its faults, de Waal’s story remains of interest because of the vividness with which it raises the question of the biological and natural basis of human politics. We have a tendency, as William Connolly has noted, to treat political theory as a free-standing and self-contained enterprise. But human beings are not only rational agents, they are also organisms. Konrad Lorenz once observed that the old is rarely discarded in evolutionary and historical processes.[19] The old components remain, rather, in place but are transformed and given new functions. Our cognitive apparatus, for instance, is an ensemble made up of multiple and distinct elements that have been joined together in the course of evolutionary history. Lorenz holds reasonably that our ability to identify the various components of our cognitive machinery depends on an understanding of how they have been pieced together in time. He supports the claim by pointing out that evolutionary and historical processes are characterized by an element of randomness. There is, in consequence, no inherent necessity in the particular assembly of capacities that constitute the human cognitive apparatus. Only an evolutionary and historical explanation can tell us why that apparatus has come to possess its current form. The crucial point is that we will not be able to discern the construction of our cognitive machinery without attending to the history of its formation. We can illustrate this point by means of an analogy drawn from architecture. When we look at any one of the great European cathedrals we easily note the many incongruous details in their construction. Windows, arches, decorative elements look differently in different parts of the structure, even the ground plan of these great structures may be irregular. Each of these cathedrals has, in fact, been constructed over centuries and their parts have been put together by different architects and craftsmen who have brought to the project their varying practical and aesthetic conceptions. The result of this process can sometimes be jarring but in many cases we admire the finished building for its “organic” unity.
Exactly the same can be said about human politics. What we understand as such has come together from different sources and been aggregated over a very long time. In the course of evolutionary and human history elements have been added to and subtracted from that ensemble. In this way the structure of human politics has been slowly enriched. None of this will be immediately apparent to the untrained eye. We may note, for instance, that human action is basic to politics. But what we call an action is a peculiar amalgam of physiologically determined patterns of behavior, acquired conditioned reflexes, childhood fixations, habituations, conscious learning, deliberate choice, and an appropriately descriptive language that interprets all this. Actions are not elementary phenomena but composite processes that have been made possible through the evolutionary and historical development of our species. Just as in the case of human cognition or that of the European cathedrals it will prove difficult to distinguish the different layers and levels of the mechanism of action unless we consider the temporal processes through which they have come to be formed. Here, too, in other words, the successful understanding of existing structures requires a study of evolutionary and human history. But since actions are constitutive parts of our political reality the same must hold for the latter.
The ethologists understand this and what they say about the evolutionary basis of human politics is surely of interest but they neglect the later phases of the process by which human politics has come to acquire its distinctive character. Having traced part of the history of this process they believe to have discovered all of it. But they neglect, in fact, the most distinctive features of the historical evolution of human politics. They fail to discern what Nietzsche has seen: that human politics is not a natural kind, that it is constituted only by our interpretation of it, that human politics is what it is only because we have given a specific meaning to it, that this meaning changes over time, that politics becomes something new over time, that it acquires new meanings, that these meanings may also lose their force over time, and that we then need to give new meaning to politics, that we may, however, also fail in this undertaking and that politics itself may then become impossible for us to maintain.
Notes
[1] Aristotle, Politics, 1553a 3.
[2] On the etymology of the word see Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, fourth ed., Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, pp. 36-48.
[3] Politics, 1253a 7.
[4] Aristotle, Peri Ta Zoia Istoriōn, book 1, 488a 1-14.
[5] If we are to find anything approximating human politics in the animal realm, it is, in fact, not in the world of the gregarious insects but among our closest evolutionary relatives, the primates. And there, we discover none of the rigid order that obtains in the insect world but, instead, a loose interplay of actions that demand constant calibration and adjustment similar to what we find in the human world. See chapter 4.
[6] Quentin Skinner, “The State” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, edited by Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , pp. 90-131.
[7] Ibid, 1252b.
[8] Ibid, 1253a.
[9] In reading that description we must, moreover, keep that we do not even have it in all its details. For the text of Aristotle’s Politics, as we now have it, is incomplete. Book eight break off in the middle of its description of life in the properly organized polis. We must, in effect, to assume that Aristotle had a lot more to say about the proper ordering of the polis than what he tells us in the existing parts of the text. But even from what we have, there emerges a quite distinctive and rich understanding of polis life.
[10] Ibid., 1253a.
[11] Politics, 1337b.
[12] Nicomachean Ethics, 1178b.
[13] Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics. Power and Sex among Apes, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, revised edition 1988, p. 207.
[14] Ibid., p. 195.
[15] Ibid., p. 197.
[16] Cf. Glendon Schubert, “Primate Politics,” in Primate Politics, ed. By G. Schubert and R.D. Masters, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois U.P., 1991, pp.42-44.
[17] Loc. cit., p. 4.
[18] Ibid., p. 208f.
[19] Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror,
