does aristotle’s polis exist ‘by nature’

DOES ARISTOTLE’S POLIS EXIST ‘BY NATURE’?

K. Cherry1 and E.A. Goerner2

Abstract: Aristotle claims man is a political animal and that the polis exists by nature.Taking literally his analogy between the legislator and the craftsman, Aristotle’s crit-ics contend that he ‘blunders’ because the polis is artificial, devised by a legis-lator/founder and imposed on a people. We defend Aristotle’s claims by showing,first, how Aristotle’s claim that man is by nature an animal possessing logos —speech/reason — grounds his account of the natural development of the polis out of theearliest partnerships (which the critics concede are natural); second, that the personwho first brought people together in a polis may well have done so without realizingthe scope of his actions; and, finally, that the developmental process is clearly one ofpraxis (action), not poi�sis (making, the imposition of a form on matter). Aristotle’sclaims are evidenced by the Homeric hero Philoctetes, whom one critic takes to dis-prove Aristotle’s theses.

IIntroduction

Perhaps the best known claims of Aristotle’s political philosophy are that the

polis exists by nature and that man is by nature a political animal (Pol.

1253a2–3).3 Yet precisely what he means is a matter of dispute. The ambigu-

ity has led to a divide among commentators on the Politics. Some scholars

have contended that Aristotle simply ‘blunders’ in saying the polis exists by

nature and that man is by nature a political animal. Some say the ‘mistakes’

are intentional. Others, however, have offered various defences of Aristotle’s

claims in this regard.

Our purpose in this article is hermeneutic. We wish to see whether there is a

reasonable way to interpret Aristotle’s claim about the naturalness of politics

that clears up the dispute. But what is at stake goes beyond merely hermeneu-

tic accuracy.

By contrast with Aristotelian theory in which man is political ‘all the way

down’, so to speak, most modern, liberal political theory — from Hobbes

through Kant to Rawls and Habermas — is in one way or another con-

structivist. Human beings are by nature non-political animals; polities exist

by human contrivance to master the state of nature. Man makes himself a

political being by a real or hypothetical contract constructing a polity in

which alone a rational order of right comes into existence or, at least, is

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVII. No. 4. Winter 2006

1 Dept of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 217 O’Shaughnessy Hall,Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. Email: [email protected].

2 Email: [email protected] For the sake of convenience and consistency, all references to Aristotle will be from

the Loeb editions, though we have occasionally altered the translations.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011For personal use only -- not for reproduction

approximated.4 Some contemporary theorists have turned to Aristotle for help

in trying to work out an alternative to modern rationalistic constructivism.5

But if Aristotle fails even on his own terms to show that human nature is

directed toward life in the polis and that, in consequence, the polis exists by

nature, then those who have sought in Aristotle an alternative to liberal politi-

cal theory need to re-think that enterprise from the ground up without help

from him.6

We think that Aristotle’s claims are defensible and, in light of what he

argues in the Politics, are consistent with — perhaps even essential to — other

elements of his political and ethical theory. In this article we provide an inter-

pretation of those claims that, by drawing from key passages throughout his

ethical and political works, makes sense of the admittedly problematic argu-

ments Aristotle offered in immediate support of the thesis that the polis exists

by nature and that man is naturally a political animal. His arguments are com-

pressed and elliptical, as commentators have long complained. But we will

endeavour to show that they are nevertheless consistent and persuasive.

564 K. CHERRY & E.A. GOERNER

4 Thus, David Keyt writes: ‘One of the basic issues between Aristotle and ThomasHobbes in political philosophy concerns the nature of the political community. Aristotleargues that the political community, or the polis, is a natural entity like an animal or aman. Hobbes maintains in opposition to Aristotle that the political community is entirelya product of art.’ David Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems in Aristotle’s Politics’, in A Com-panion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. David Keyt and Fred J. Miller, Jr. (Oxford, 1991),p. 118.

5 See Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, CA, 1996); Ronald Beiner,Political Judgment (Chicago, 1983); Jill Frank, ‘Citizens, Slaves, and Foreigners: Aris-totle on Human Nature’, American Political Science Review, 98 (February 2004),pp. 91–104; William Galston, Justice and the Human Good (Chicago, 1980); AlasdairMacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN, 1984); Martha Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian SocialDemocracy’, in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Bruce Douglas, Gerald M. Mara andHenry S. Richardson (New York, 1990); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits ofJustice (Cambridge and New York, 1982); Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach, ‘On Civic Friend-ship’, Ethics, 107 (October 1996), pp. 97–128; and Thomas W. Smith, Revaluing Ethics(Albany, NY, 2001). For a critique of this interpretation of Aristotle, see Susan Bickford,‘Beyond Friendship: Aristotle on Conflict, Deliberation, and Attention’, Journal ofPolitics, 58 (2) (1996), pp. 398–421; W.R. Newell, ‘Superlative Virtue: The Problemof Monarchy in Aristotle’s Politics’, Western Political Quarterly, 40 (1) (1987),pp. 159–78; and Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal (Berkeley, CA,1993). For an interesting and perhaps more plausible alternative to Aristotle, see CaryNederman, ‘Freedom, Community, and Function: Communitarian Lessons of MedievalPolitical Theory’, American Political Science Review, 86 (4) (1992), pp. 977–86.

6 Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Norms of Liberty (University Park,PA, 2005), summarize the neo-Aristotelian communitarian critique of liberalism (pp.8–17) but present their own ‘neo-Aristotelian’ account of politics which supports liberalpolitics even as it disagrees with the traditional liberal justifications for liberal politics.However, Rasmussen and Den Uyl admit that while Aristotle influences their enterprise,their conclusions, in fact, may not be his (cf. p. 115).


DOES ARISTOTLE’S POLIS EXIST ‘BY NATURE’? 565

Although we think that the critics are wrong to reject Aristotle’s claims as

‘blunders’, we also think that his defenders have thus far failed to provide an

adequate interpretation of the passages in question. Our interpretation rests on

two fundamental arguments. First, we argue, the polis arises out of a process

of what we will call ‘logos-sociality’, the uniquely human capacity for reason

and speech about the just and unjust, the advantageous and disadvantageous,

the good and bad (Pol. 1253a14–18). But this capacity, exercised fully only in

the polis, is also characteristic of the household. Therefore, we conclude, the

polis naturally develops out of the household, as Aristotle claims; both the

formation of a polis and the formation of a household result from the exercise

of practical reason and choice.

Second, we argue that when Aristotle praises those who take a significant

role in bringing a polis into existence, he does not mean that these ‘founders’

impose a constitution upon a people, as a sculptor imposes a form of the statue

on matter. We provide alternate interpretations of both the case of the one who

first organized a polis (Pol. 1253a30–31) and the case of all subsequent

poleis. Regarding the former, we suggest, based on a reading of Book III, that

the one who first brought a polis into being may have had no clear conception

and thus no explicit intention of doing so: the change may be fully identifiable

only in retrospect. Regarding subsequent foundings and re-foundings, we

suggest, based on Aristotle’s references to Solon and Lycurgus and his dis-

tinction between praxis and poi�sis (doing and making), that the role of

founders is not imposing form on matter but rather one that is fundamentally

socio-political: proposing, guiding, leading, evoking a polis’s human response

of self-transformation. It is through a process of shared logos-sociality — a

capacity, we will argue, that is natural — that the polis comes into being.

Whence it can rightly be said, on Aristotle’s terms, to exist by nature.

We conclude by offering an interpretation of the Homeric tale of Philoc-

tetes — a story to which Aristotle himself refers but used by a critic as proof

that Aristotle’s arguments about the naturalness of the polis are, in fact,

flawed. On our reading, however, the story confirms Aristotle’s theses about

the naturalness of the polis and the fundamentally political nature of human

beings. It is a concrete example of these theses that perfectly illustrates the

arguments we make below.

IIThe Debate

One of the more common approaches to these passages is to conclude that

Aristotle simply commits a ‘blunder’ in claiming that man is by nature a politi-

cal animal and that the polis exists by nature. This interpretation is more com-

mon than one might think. For instance, a version of it was accepted by

C.C.W. Taylor for his essay on the Politics in The Cambridge Companion to


Aristotle. Taylor states that none of Aristotle’s arguments shows ‘that the kind

of self-sufficiency which is achieved by the polis is natural’.7

Richard Mulgan, to take another example, contends that Aristotle uses the

term ‘political animal’ in different ways, without realizing that ‘he was

being inconsistent’.8 The problem is that the literal meaning of ‘political’

(��) is belonging to a polis, a city-state; but Aristotle also speaks of

bees, for example, as political animals and human beings as only ‘more’ politi-

cal than bees.9 In response to this problem, some translators have substituted

‘social’ for ‘political’ in contexts where Aristotle cannot be referring to the

literal meaning of ‘belonging to the polis’. Mulgan considers two possibil-

ities. First, he suggests, ‘Aristotle deliberately used the phrase [political ani-

mal] in two quite different senses in the space of five lines without giving any

indication of such a change’, a possibility that he says ‘hardly seems credible’.

Second, he says, ‘it is quite possible that he may not have noticed, any more

than most of his subsequent commentators and translators, that he was being

inconsistent’. Mulgan opts for the second possibility and concludes that it is a

fallacy Aristotle ‘might well have been tempted into’ in his ‘desire to accom-

modate his political theory to his general biological principles’.10

We readily grant that Aristotle does easily lead modern readers into the

kind of irritating dead end in which Mulgan finds himself, having to say that

the author of the first systematic books on logic either deliberately or inadver-

tently opens his book on politics with a patent fallacy. But Aristotle’s linguis-

tic practice here, though not the same as that which we commonly follow, is in

fact quite consistent with his usages elsewhere. Briefly put, while we tend to

use two different terms for a genus and species — for instance, we would call

man a political animal within the broader genus of social animals — Aris-

totle’s tendency is to see a genus as hierarchically arranged so that the most

fully realized form within it (the highest species) is simultaneously the form

in terms of which the other, lower, forms are to be understood by disciplined

analogy rather than mere metaphor.11 This is linguistically reflected in his

simultaneous use of the term for the highest species as the term for the genus

as a whole, the less complete forms pointing towards the completed form.


7 C.C.W. Taylor, ‘Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. JonathanBarnes (Cambridge and New York, 1991), pp. 238, 238 n.4. Taylor explicitly relies onKeyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’.

8 R.G. Mulgan, ‘Aristotle’s Doctrine That Man Is a Political Animal’, Hermes 102(1974), pp. 438–45, p. 444.

9 Ibid., p. 443 (and Pol. 1253a 7–9).10 Ibid., pp. 444–5.11 The clearest example of this is the discussion of ‘friendship’ in the Nicomachean

Ethics, in which the lesser associations of pleasure and utility are called friendship onlyin light of their resemblance — however slight — to the notion of true friendship. Ascareful and subtle an interpreter as Thomas Aquinas notes that Aristotle uses terms inprecisely this way (Summa Theologica II–II. 120.2 c and ad 2).



While Aristotle had available a term such as social (��) to describe ani-

mals such as cranes and bees, he chose to use the word political. Obviously

such animals do not live in a polis, but employing the specific term for the

highest form of association as a generic for lower ones also indicates not only

that they have something in common with the political animal that is man, but

also that the lower forms of association can be viewed as less fully realized,

less perfected forms of the associative possibilities of animate material life.

We will claim that, in Aristotle’s view, one would have to think of the human

species as having suffered from arrested development (analogous to that of an

individual) if through some accident it had not developed beyond the social

form of the household. Reflecting on that way of using key terms allows one

to make sense of Aristotle’s claim that the polis is the end of the other human

associations or partnerships, for nature is an end insofar as that which each

thing is when its growth is completed is its nature (Pol. 1252b31–34). What

Mulgan takes as an ‘inconsistency’ is, rather, fully consistent with Aristo-

telian linguistic practice — and a practice which, we suggest, is crucial to

understanding Aristotle’s arguments elsewhere in the Politics.

Other commentators who emphasize the difficulty in making sense of Aris-

totle’s claim that the polis exists by nature have a more charitable explanation.

Aristotle makes this claim about the polis, they argue, for reasons ‘other than

because it is simply true’.12 Their suggestion is that the claim is of a suffi-

ciently ‘problematic character’ that careful readers will note the problems and

therefore recognize the irresolvable tension between political life and the

good life of philosophy.13 However, Aristotle, on their view, remains inclined

to defend the polis as natural because of the real danger posed by the pure con-

ventionalism of the sophists.14 While we would not deny that Aristotle sees

the relationship between philosophy and politics as complicated, we disagree

that his claims about the naturalness of the polis are somehow disingenuous

and think our interpretation resolves some of the tensions to which these com-

mentators point. Just as our argument will make a case to the effect that the

very nature of the family in Aristotle’s view both points beyond itself to the

polis and, reflexively, is shaped by the polis (a relationship that can be fraught

with tension as classical Greek tragedy often points out), our argument about

the nature of the polis allows for its also pointing beyond itself to philosophy

with analogous tensions. But this article is not the place to address that issue.

Yet these commentators — even those who think Aristotle ‘blunders’ —

are more cognizant of the breadth of his claim than are many of those who

12 Wayne Ambler, ‘Aristotle’s Understanding of the Naturalness of the City’, Reviewof Politics, 47 (1985), pp. 163–85, p. 179.

13 Michael Davis, The Politics of Philosophy (Lanham, MD, 1996), p. 29, cf. ch. 1.14 Carnes Lord, ‘Aristotle’s Anthropology’, in Essays on the Foundation of Aristo-

telian Political Science, ed. Carnes Lord and David K. O’Connor (Berkeley, CA, 1991),pp. 60, 73.


hope to defend Aristotle. This simplest defence is that the polis, insofar as it is

necessary for man’s natural development, is likewise natural.15 Though this

explanation has the merit of simplicity, it fails, as many commentators have

noticed, to take into account what Aristotle actually says.16 Aristotle does not

only say the polis is natural. He says that it exists by nature (Pol. 1252b30). To

defend Aristotle’s claims by leaving out part of what he says is not a defence

but a dodge.

Other commentators have offered defences that take seriously the depth of

Aristotle’s claims. Joseph Chan, for instance, draws a distinction between the

‘type of human community’ the polis is — as opposed to, say, the family —

and ‘a particular polis having a form of the polis-type’, e.g. democracy or oli-

garchy.17 The polis can be said to exist by nature on the level of type, insofar

as the features which define any polis are made necessary by human nature.

The form of a particular polis — which includes its particular laws and cus-

toms — is, however, determined by the human action of legislators.

Cary J. Nederman, however, notes that Chan’s distinction between the

form and type of a polis is not a distinction found in Aristotle and seeks to

offer a solution ‘from within the Aristotelian corpus’.18 He argues that while

the polis is natural insofar as it is necessary for the natural human capacity of

choice to develop, the polis exists by nature because ‘citizens individually and

jointly seek the good life and the happiness which is conferred thereby’. Legis-

lators and statesman are not an external cause of the polis, but ‘simply facili-

tate’ the natural desire of people to live together for the sake of the good life.19

We think that Nederman is, by and large, right about this, but believe there

is more that needs to be said on the matter. For instance, Nederman could

plausibly be said to fall victim to the criticism he makes of Chan; while his

argument is consistent with the general direction of Aristotle’s corpus, he

nowhere addresses and interprets the explicit arguments Aristotle gives in

support of the claim that the polis exists by nature. Consequently, the argu-

ments of critics who critique these explicit arguments still require comment.

More importantly, although Nederman seems to imply that the polis comes

into existence almost automatically, other commentators deny this and claim


15 For versions of this defence, see Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford,1948); A.C. Bradley, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of the State’, in A Companion to Aristotle’sPolitics, ed. Keyt and Miller, pp. 13–56; Stephen Everson, ‘Aristotle on the Foundationsof the State’, Political Studies, 36 (1) (1988), pp. 89–101; and Fred J. Miller, Jr., ‘Aris-totle’s Political Naturalism’, Apeiron, 22 (1989), pp. 195–218.

16 See, especially, David Keyt, ‘Fred Miller on Aristotle’s Political Naturalism’,Ancient Philosophy, 16 (1996), pp. 425–30. Miller responds on pp. 443–54.

17 Joseph Chan, ‘Does Aristotle’s Political Theory Rest on a Blunder?’, History ofPolitical Thought, 13 (2) (1992), pp. 189–202, p. 196.

18 Cary J. Nederman, ‘The Puzzle of the Political Animal’, Review of Politics, 56(1994), pp. 283–304, pp. 286–7.

19 Ibid., p. 303.



the polis ‘comes into being through a discontinuous act’.20 These commenta-

tors are correct to note that Aristotle’s emphasis on the critical role of the

legislator seems to undermine an argument such as Nederman’s.

Indeed, the most comprehensive critique of Aristotle’s claims is by David

Keyt, who cites Aristotle’s emphasis on the legislator as the first sign that the

polis cannot exist by nature.21 Keyt argues that the polis is ‘an artifact of prac-

tical reason’, comparing it to ‘objects of art such as paintings, statues, and

poems’ which ‘are never produced by nature alone’. For example, Keyt

argues that the repeated analogies between the legislator and the craftsman

imply that ‘a lawgiver creates a polis by imposing a form — a constitution —

upon a population of citizens and a territory’.22 Therefore, not only Aristotle’s

claim that the polis exists by nature, but also his claims that man is by nature a

political animal and that the polis is prior in nature to the individual are, on

Keyt’s reading, fallacious. Keyt argues that ‘according to Aristotle’s own

principles the political community is an artifact of practical reason, not a

product of nature, and that, consequently, there is a blunder at the very root of

Aristotle’s political philosophy’ (emphasis added).23

What is necessary to defend Aristotle’s claim, then, is an account of how

the polis comes about by nature that grants the special role of the legislator

while at the same time denying that this role implies that the polis is therefore

artificial. It is just such an account that we provide below.

IIINature and Human Nature: Logos-Sociality

Often taken as the opposite of what is by artifice, ‘nature’ is surely one of the

most polysemous terms in Greek as well as in English, and Aristotle’s use of

the term is no exception. ‘Nature’ (��, physis) — as in the nature of man —

is a substantive form of the verb �� , phyoo, meaning to grow, produce, put

forth leaves, etc.; (of humans) to beget, generate; to put forth shoots; also to

grow, spring up, arise, develop; (of humans) to be begotten or born; to be so

and so by nature, to be by nature disposed to so and so.24 Some of these mean-

ings are still available in English in terms such as physics, physician, physical,

and all the terms constructed from phyt- or phyto- (plant) such as phytology or

phytosociology or phytoplankton.

What is important for present purposes is to note the deep connection of the

Greek word for nature (as well as its derivatives, such as natural, according to

20 Lord, ‘Aristotle’s Anthropology’, p. 60.21 David Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, pp. 118–19. Cary Nederman and Joseph

Chan wrote explicitly to respond to Keyt’s article, as did Fred Miller and others.22 Ibid., pp. 119–20.23 Ibid., p. 118.24 H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (New York, 9th edn., 1996),

pp. 1964–5.


nature, etc.) with the notion of the begetting and growing of different kinds of

things, each of which tends to mature in accordance with the norm of its kind:

as for men to grow a beard (�� , phyein pogona). ‘Nature’ can, of

course, be used to refer to the essential characteristics of inanimate things,

those which do not have an internal principle of development. But it does so

by extension from the central etymological thrust. The use of ‘nature’ with

respect to humans is clearly closer to the central etymological thrust, since

humans are developmental, growing things. However, in speaking of the ‘na-

ture’ of humans one is inevitably confronted with a principle of development

to maturation and completion (or perfection) of the human developmental tra-

jectory that differs specifically from other living things, not only from plants

and animals in general, but also from other social animals.

The nature of human beings, whether referred to as ‘political animals’ or

‘rational animals’ (literally, animals having speech/logos [Pol. 1253a 9–10]), is

composite in a special way, and consequently Aristotle’s use of the term ‘na-

ture’ with respect to humans, is equally complex. For example, Aristotle

refers to ‘the natural desire for reproductive activity as in the other animals

and plants’ (Pol. 1253a29–30). In other words, because generically animals,

humans participate with other animals in processes that are invariable, neces-

sary, biologically determined, e.g. breathing and sexual arousal. So such

activities can properly be called ‘natural’, but one needs to understand that

‘natural’ in a very broad sense referring to the whole class of living things. At

the other extreme, ‘natural’ also refers to what manifests the particular (and

biologically determined) difference of the human species, i.e. the possession

of logos (speech/reason, and so judgment and choice).

Unlike ‘voice’ which man shares with other animals, logos, speech/reason,

is able

to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the rightand the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from theother animals that he alone has the perception of good and bad and right andwrong, and the other [ethical things] and it is partnership in these things thatmakes a household and a polis (Pol. 1253a14–18).

So right from the start of the Politics Aristotle emphasizes the communicative

and community-building character of logos, though he never claims that only

one particular language is natural to man.

We shall call this particularly human kind of sociality which is manifested

in both polis and household, logos-sociality.

In other words, Aristotle’s account of human nature is such that a human

being is the kind of thing whose inner principle of growth and development is

one that is in significant measure shaped by choices dependent on exercises of

reasoned and communicated judgments about what is to be done, about the

advantageous and the harmful, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust,

and other similar things. That natural, rational activity interacts with the




activity of those aspects of human nature which man shares with other living

things.25

But logos itself has to discover such things over time for a number of rea-

sons. The advantageous and the harmful, the good and the bad, the just and the

unjust, are not self-evident but have to be thought through; nor are they

unchanging and universal, but must be adapted to time, place and circum-

stance.26 Further, in the process of thinking through such matters reason and

speech can be mistaken, deformed, and so in need of being reformed. The

whole corpus of Aristotle’s ethical-political writing testifies to that, for it con-

sists in an attempt to review critically common judgments about such matters

and to lay out guidelines for reforming them where necessary and possible for

both individuals and communities, especially the polis.

Whatever their position on whether Aristotle ‘blunders’ in asserting that

the polis exists by nature, commentators have uniformly accepted his earlier

assertion that the first partnerships — those of husband and wife, and natural

ruler and naturally ruled — exist by nature. Many are willing to accept that the

household, comprised of these two, is also natural.27 Even Keyt believes that

‘household generates household just as man generates man’ and that the house-

hold is ‘the one community whose generation does fit Aristotle’s theory’.28

It is our contention that in admitting the naturalness of these first partner-

ships, Aristotle’s critics effectively concede too much. Aristotle is explicit

that the proper locus for speech about the just and unjust is not the city alone

but includes the household (Pol. 1253a14–18; see also Eudemian Ethics

1242a22–25). Whereas man is placed among the genus of animals which

form partnerships (�� ), the specifically human kind of partnership is

tied to the exercise of the specifically human capacity for logos. Now many of

the commentators object that, unlike the household, the polis comes to be

through the intentional action of a human being rather than biological neces-

sity. But as Chan points out, ‘[t]his is true also in the cases of the household

and the village. Now if the mere fact that a certain thing’s existence requires

25 Recent accounts of Aristotle’s conception of nature tend to emphasize the capacityfor choice as both part of and constitutive of human nature. See, for instance, Jill Frank, ADemocracy of Distinction (Chicago, 2005), especially Chapter One; and J.K. Ward, ‘Ar-istotle on Physis: Human Nature in the Ethics and Politics’, Polis, 22 (2) (2005),pp. 287–308.

26 In the celebrated passage on natural right (NE 1134b18 ff.), he uses ‘natural’ torefer not only to immutable and universal physical laws (governing fire) but also to referto something that is mutable and not universal, namely what is just, determined by reasonbut still natural.

27 Cf. Ambler, ‘Aristotle’s Understanding’, pp.167–8; Davis, Politics of Philosophy,pp.15–16; Wolfgang Kullman, ‘Man as a Political Animal in Aristotle’, in A Companionto Aristotle’s Politics, ed. Keyt and Miller, pp. 96–8; Lord, ‘Aristotle’s Anthropology’,p. 56; and Mary P. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen (Savage, MD, 1992), pp. 15–16.

28 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, p. 122.


human involvement and effort renders that thing unnatural, then all types of

human relation are unnatural’.29 Even within the immediate context of the

household (��) it becomes apparent that Aristotle should not be taken to

mean that the household/family exists solely through biological necessity.

This is not to deny that the urge for reproduction that affects men and

women as well as males and females of the other species is a biological neces-

sity, something natural in the broadest sense of the term. This is why Aristotle

is able to say that ‘man is by nature a pairing [animal] even more than a politi-

cal [animal], inasmuch as the household (or family) is earlier and more neces-

sary than the polis, and procreation more common to [all] animals’ (NE

1162a16–19). But prima facie this passage contradicts the assertions of

Book I: ‘The polis is prior in nature to the household and to each of us’ (Pol.

1253a19–20). Can both of those assertions be true?

Here is where attention to context is crucial and reveals Aristotle’s use of

the term ‘natural’ in two common but different senses. In the Ethics he is try-

ing to distinguish dialectically a specifically human form of relationship from

that form of relationship that humans share with animals in general. His point

is that the biological drive and activity of procreation is prior and more neces-

sary, invariable and biologically determined, than specifically human and

speech/logos-shaped forms of life (i.e. ‘natural’ in a way that general biologi-

cal laws can be said to be natural and that even his critics on the issue of the

naturalness of politics are prepared to accept). The human aspect of the pro-

creative relationship (the household or family) rests on the biological neces-

sities that humans share with the other animals and Aristotle’s argument at

this point in Ethics is to work out the specifics of familial friendships while

respecting the constraints of the fundamental biological components of those

friendships.

In contrast, the context of the argument in Book I of Politics is quite differ-

ent. There, at the opening of the work, he is attempting a dialectical refutation

of those who hold that the polis is essentially the same as a household, the only

difference being size, the number of members. The point of his argument is

not to deny that political life has nothing in common with other forms of ani-

mal and human community, but to show that the specifically political form of

human community is such that it constitutes a whole of which households,

however natural, universal and biologically necessary, are parts, and parts

that are regulated and limited by the activity of the whole. The pivot points in

this dialectic are the assertions that ‘man alone of the animals possesses logos

[speech/reason]’ (Pol. 1253a9–10) and that ‘logos is about the useful and the

harmful, and so also about the just and the unjust . . . the good and the bad and

the other judgments, but sharing these things makes a household and a polis’

(Pol. 1253a14–18). In this context the polis is naturally prior to the household

(and to the individual) not temporally or in terms of universal biological


29 Chan, ‘Blunder’, p. 193, emphasis added.



necessity but ontologically.30 The polis alone, he claims, is the association in

which the human capacity for logos develops to its fullest extent. The house-

hold also involves a sharing of perceptions via reasoning and discourse of

good and bad, the advantageous and the harmful, the just and the unjust; but

only the polis is able to develop fully the activity of ordering human life by

reasoning and discourse, by logos. As such the polis is a more fully human

community of speaking and reasoning than the household. Of course, both are

driven and constrained by biological necessity, by ‘nature’ in its broad sense.

But in the polis the realm and power of speech and reason — the realm and

power of human choice shaped by speech and reason rather than by pre-

rational drives and necessities — reaches its ‘natural’ limits.

In this context, the argument gives full force to Aristotle’s fundamental

definition of man — found not only in the theoretical works but in the Politics

itself — as ‘the animal having logos’: man cannot but act under the influence

of reason and speech. Speech is the fundamental phenomenon of specifically

human life. It is man’s nature to act through reason and choice. This is the pri-

mary argument for Aristotle’s assertion that the polis exists by nature.

Although humans are motivated by the same urges that lead certain ani-

mals — the ‘social animals’ Aristotle refers to elsewhere — to create what

could be called families in a loose sense, something more is going on in

human relationships. The selection of a particular woman by a particular man

(and, thankfully, in our time, vice versa) is one characterized by deliberate

choice. In particular, as Aristotle himself observes (Pol. 1334b29 ff.), human

reproduction is characterized by the capacity to choose the best time for pro-

creation; and, after scientific investigation, he recommends legislative regula-

tion of ages for marriage. Moreover, Aristotle is at pains to note the diversity

of the ways human households structure their activity to satisfy the biological

need for food. Some groups of people structure their household activity

nomadically around herding domesticated animals, some around hunting

including fishing and brigandage, some around agriculture, and then various

mixtures of the above.

These variations in the organization of life are ‘natural’, according to Aris-

totle. But note that they are natural in two different ways. First, they are natu-

ral in that they are driven by the universal biological necessity of obtaining

food. Second, they are natural in that the biological necessity is satisfied in

diverse ways devised in the natural human mode of logos-sociality: different

groups of human beings have employed practical rationality and speech to

devise and share distinctly different ways of organizing the activity of the

household in relation to their environments in order to satisfy a biological

necessity common to all animals.

30 It should also be noted that the family is more widespread than the polis because,on Aristotle’s account, the conditions for the latter to develop do not occur always andeverywhere.


Both of these elements are in fact natural, the latter because it is natural in

the invariable sense and the former because it represents the exercise of what

is specific to the nature of man.

IVFrom the Household to the First Polis

But what of Aristotle’s claim that the person who first brought people

together in a polis is responsible for the greatest of goods (Pol. 1253a30–31)?

Surely such a claim would not be made if the polis were something that tended

to arise without human rational choice.31

Given the development of the other partnerships discussed in Book I — the

household and village — we propose the following account. The first person

who brought people together in a polis may have had no intention of creating a

specifically new kind of partnership, a polis, the nature of which he fully

understood in advance. Rather, just as the village was an outgrowth of the

household — made necessary by the increasing size of a household — so too

the polis begins as an outgrowth of the village.32

Of course, any interpretation of the development of the village from the

household is bound to be limited by the little Aristotle says about it. The vil-

lage is said to be a colony (��, apoikia) from the household, formed by

the sons of one father who remain tied closely to that first household (Pol.

1252b16 ff.). One might reasonably suppose that one household could no lon-

ger support the original father and mother and their grown children along with

their spouses and their children. Therefore, it would make sense for some of

the grown children to form households of their own, partially independent of

that of their parents but remaining closely connected. They would perform

many of the same tasks, each in its own household and farm or pasture, but

some division of labour would tend to take place, enabling the village to pro-

vide better for needs beyond those of day-to-day life.

Hence, we hypothesize that Aristotle’s argument runs as follows: just as the

first village arose when several households were capable of providing for

non-daily needs, so, too, the first polis arose when several villages, under the

rule of a patriarch, were capable of providing a level of self-sufficiency


31 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, translates the verb in this passage (�� theactive aorist participle of ��) as ‘formed’, but this seems to presume his interpre-tation rather than provide a basis for it. Aristotle uses this verb at the very beginning ofthe Politics to describe how every kind of partnership comes together (��,Pol. 1252a2). Indeed, he uses it in discussing both the male–female reproductive partner-ship and the household, which, as we discussed earlier, even his toughest critics are will-ing to concede are natural (Pol. 1252b13, 1259b3).

32 Contra Lord, ‘Aristotle’s Anthropology’, p. 60; Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’,p. 123; and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 2nd edn., 1998), p. 23, thepolis is not discontinuous from the family and village.



unattainable by a village. As Aristotle suggests in his discussion of the earliest

cities, such self-sufficiency included a more effective organization of

defence, the resources for more impressive religious sacrifices, judicial

means of settling disputes between or among inhabitants of different villages

(Pol. 1285b4 ff.). Even if the first polis were instituted by a patriarch who

united villages at least some of which were not descended from his patriarchal

line but were brought together by him under his military, religious and judi-

cial government, there is no reason to think that either he or the people whom

he organized necessarily understood fully how radical a transformation they

had begun. This new level of military, religious and judicial functioning

would eventually provide the economic self-sufficiency not only for mere life

but also for the blossoming of the self-sufficient good life of civilization. This

first founder of a polis might have understood that he was bringing together a

people to do something new in the way of war, the arts of peace, or settling a

new country. But it might be only in retrospect that the change to a form

self-sufficient for the complete flourishing of specifically human capacities

could be fully identified.

There is nothing in Aristotle which explicitly suggests a conscious effort on

the part of someone to bring the first polis into existence in the way that a

shoemaker already has his conception of a shoe in mind before he starts mak-

ing the shoe. Rather, the notion of a household generating a community of

households, called a village, which generates more villages, which are orga-

nized by someone into a larger unit to deal with some perceived needs for

more land, new economic and/or defence problems is entirely consistent with

the argument offered by Aristotle (Pol. 1252b28 ff.). This is not to claim that

these developments are spontaneous or random. They are undoubtedly a mani-

festation of logos-sociality, speech at least about the advantageous and the

harmful, a distinguishing part of human nature (Pol. 1253a10–16). But action

guided by speech and reasoning, even if led by someone able to win people

over to a new organization of life to respond to new challenges, is simply not

at all the same as the formation of an artifact by a workman who imposes a

form he has conceived on matter which has no inherent tendency to develop

into his artifact. Both leader and led interact with one another in relation to

their shared capacity to form communities that more fully develop and

employ their innate capacities to meet the needs of life for beings character-

ized by logos-sociality.

Thus far, we have only tried to explain how the first polis could be said to

be ‘by nature’. But what of subsequent poleis? They clearly do not develop

naturally in the same way as we have sketched above, but it does not follow

that they are therefore artificial.


VBut If There Is a Founder, How Does the Polis Exist by Nature?

Taking literally Aristotle’s craftsman analogy, the claim of his critics is that

legislators impose a constitution (form) on a people (matter). For example,

Keyt argues that the repeated analogies between the legislator and the crafts-

man imply that ‘a lawgiver creates a polis by imposing a form — a constitu-

tion — upon a population of citizens and a territory’.33 Likewise, Hannah

Arendt argues that Plato and Aristotle shared the traditional Greek under-

standing that the laws of the polis ‘were not results of action but products of

making’. As a result of their ‘wish to turn against politics and against action’,

they emphasized the similarities between legislators and craftsmen:

the result of their action is a tangible product, and its process has a clearlyrecognizable end. This is no longer or, rather, not yet action [praxis], prop-erly speaking, but making [��], which they prefer because of its greaterreliability.

In short, ‘Plato and, to a lesser degree, Aristotle . . . were the first to propose

handling political matters and ruling political bodies in the mode of fabrica-

tion.’34

We do not wish to deny the important role played by the ancient Greek legis-

lators such as Solon or Lycurgus. However, admitting that role need not lead

one to conclude that they imposed constitutions on the people. Obviously,

both the craftsman and the legislator have a causal relationship to the form of

an artifact and a polis respectively. So one must look to see whether or not

their generic similarity at the very abstract level of having a causal role in

forming something is then specifically differentiated such that their specific

functions are essentially different.

At the beginning of Book III, Aristotle describes the constitution as some

organization of the inhabitants of the polis (�� , Pol. 1274b38), which is

the chief — though not exclusive — characteristic of the city (Pol.

1276b9–11). A polis is a whole consisting of many parts, arranged together.

The relevant theoretical question, therefore, is how these parts come to be

arranged. Is it that the arrangement is imposed on the citizens, or does it come

about in some other way? In the case of an artifact like a poem or statue, the

poet or craftsman is the external principle that imposes from outside a form on


33 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, p. 119, cf. pp. 120, 122, citing Pol. 1273b32–3,1274b18–19, 1276b1–11, 1325b40–26a8.

34 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 194–5, 230. R.G. Mulgan, Aristotle’s PoliticalTheory (New York, 1977), uses the same terminology: ‘Though men have some sort ofimpulse which inclines them towards the community of the polis, this community is not aspontaneous creation. It has to be deliberately imposed on men and needs to be reim-posed on each succeeding generation’ (p. 24, emphases added).



matter, words or clay which have no internal tendency to develop in that way.

But is that the way Aristotle envisages the role and function of the legislator?

The distinction we wish to draw here is one familiar to students of Aristotle.

At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes among the vari-

ous arts and sciences, some of which aim at the ‘activity of practicing the art’,

others ‘some product’, and still others aim at ‘certain things’ which result

from ‘the practice of the arts themselves’ (NE 1094a4 ff.). This distinction is

fleshed out in his discussion of the intellectual virtues in Book VI of the

Nicomachean Ethics, where he discusses the difference between making and

doing (�� , 1140a1 ff.). Both making and doing are set

apart from the exercise of the other intellectual virtues insofar as they con-

sider things which are variable rather than invariable. But this seems to be

their only similarity. Making is different from doing in that the former is

directed towards an end separate from the making, while the latter is directed

toward the act itself (NE 1139a36 ff., 1140b4–6). Making and doing are, in

fact, so different that they require different rational capacities, ‘for doing is

not a form of making, nor making a form of doing’ (NE 1140a5–6). Art

(��) is said to be the ‘rational quality, concerned with making’, and it is

‘not concerned with doing’. The rational quality which is concerned with

doing, then, is said to be prudence (��), the capacity to deliberate

well about what is good and advantageous for oneself. It is, in short, that

which is ‘concerned with action in relation to the good and bad for men’ (NE

1140b4–6) and different from the intellectual capacity for making.35

Aristotle later indicates that the knowledge of political things (��) is

a part of prudence (NE 1141b23 ff.); and within this knowledge of political

things, he suggests, is a particular kind of knowledge which is ‘supreme and

directive’ as regards the polis. This kind of knowledge is ��, legisla-

tive knowledge. By contrast, it is a lesser form of political knowledge, simple

��, which is compared to craftsmanship.36 All of this, then, suggests

that Aristotle conceives of the legislator as one who engages in acting, not

35 Sometimes the division is not so obvious. In his treatment of the intellectual virtues(NE 1139a27 ff.), Aristotle contrasts practical thinking (�� ) not withmaking but with speculative thinking (�� ). The former is said to be con-cerned with truth about action, while the latter is concerned with the simple attainment oftruth or falsity. The genus of practical activity includes within it both acting and making.Once again, the difficulty is that Aristotle uses the same term to describe the (broader)genus and the (narrower) species. But even in this passage Aristotle does indicate thatthere is a difference between acting and making (�� ). Mak-ing results in a product, which is used for the sake of something else; by contrast,action — particularly, Aristotle notes here, ‘good action’ — is its own end.

36 Is this, then, a counter-example to our thesis that Aristotle uses the highest genus asthe species term? We think not, for he laments, while respecting the fact, that it is com-mon usage for �� to refer to the usual ‘action and deliberation’ within the polisrather than to the architectonic legislative science (NE 1141b24–26).


making. But the difficulty is to identify precisely how prudence — the virtue

concerned with acting, the excellence in deliberating about what is both good

and advantageous — is exercised in the legislator’s activity.

The pivot of the argument here is the drive for what Aristotle calls ‘autarchy’

(��), meaning self-sufficiency in the sense of not being dependent on

the actions of others for full functioning.37 Thus a child is not self-sufficient

but dependent upon others because unable or only partly able to nourish,

clothe, house and defend itself. Similarly, the household and the village are in

different degrees not fully able to satisfy the economic and security needs of

their members. Only the polis is fully capable of meeting those needs, the

needs of ‘mere life’. But the polis is not only a necessary means for achieving

economic and security self-sufficiency, it alone ‘exists for the sake of living

well’ (�� , Pol. 1252b30). What is crucial here is that the

whole intellectual enterprise of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics is

organized around a search for clarity about the substantive constituent or con-

stituents of happiness or living well, since all, both the many and the culti-

vated, agree that ‘to live well’ or ‘to do well’ is the same as ‘to be happy’. The

whole of his argument begins from his perception, confirmed by universal

agreement, of this universal human drive to live well. That drive is doubly

natural both in the sense that it is universal and in the sense that how to satisfy

it is a matter of dispute, depending in crucial respects on the specifically

human capacity for logos, speaking and reasoning, about choices regarding

what is to be done, about the advantageous and the harmful, the good and the

bad, the just and the unjust, and similar things.

To take an example from the Politics, a politically organized people, lead-

ers and led, may deliberate over the best paths of communal self-formation

through educational practices (broadly understood), an activity that, Aristotle

claims, lawgivers, with the exception of Lycurgus, have seldom addressed,

leaving it mostly to chance. In a central way the Nicomachean Ethics and the

Politics are designed to promote a fully human approach to self-formation by

societies of social animals the form of whose sociality is not wholly dictated by

instinctive biological drives but rather leaves itself open to reflexive transfor-

mation by what we have called ‘logos-sociality’, the sociality characteristic of

human nature in that its form and direction is partly the result of the rational

reflection and communication encompassed in the Greek term logos.

Our argument here is not that he necessarily succeeds in that task, but that

Aristotle’s Politics is itself a prime example of the way in which political life

develops into the good life. Of course, by ‘the good life’ many people mean

mainly wine, women or men, and song. But he takes it to be the fullest possible

development and exercise of the capacities inherent in human nature which

would include the things just mentioned in only moderate and prudent doses.


37 See NE 1097b9–21, 1134a27, 1177a28; Pol. 1252b29, 1253a2, 1253a27, 1256b5,1257a31, 1275b21, 1321b18, 1326b3–30.



The phenomenon of scientific philosophy could scarcely have arisen without

the kind of civilizational resources that the existence of the Greek cities made

available; and that philosophic activity gave a new mode in which the

logos-sociality of the city might be exercised. Our claim is that a careful read-

ing of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics makes clear that the rise and

development of the polis is a developmental continuation by nature of human

sociality which already contains the city in larval form, so to speak.

In contrast to the craftsman, Aristotle’s legislator does not treat humans as

raw material to be sculpted in a manner of his choosing. Rather, the formation

of a constitution is a process of shared logos-sociality, a constituent aspect of

the nature of human beings. Thus, insofar as humans develop their social rela-

tionships by the use of reason, they do so by nature, by an internal, essential

principle. By contrast, the forms of artifacts (the products of making, of

��) are not expressions of a developmental principle in the materials from

which they are made but are imposed by a maker essentially different from

both the materials that are formed and from the final product.38

Aristotle speaks of legislators working jointly with the citizenry of a given

polis in forming a constitution. Some legislators — like Solon and Lycurgus,

to whom Aristotle often refers — may be citizens of the city for which they

legislate, though not all are (e.g. Androdamas of Rhegium who legislated for

the Chalcidians, Pol. 1274b23–25, cf. 1273b30–34). In discussing the consti-

tution of Sparta in Book II, Aristotle says that the Spartan men ‘handed over

themselves to the lawgiver’ having been prepared for obedience by their mili-

tary training (Pol. 1270a4 ff., emphasis added). Likewise, Solon was chosen

by the Athenians — both the oligarchs and democrats — to be both mediator

and archon; there is no suggestion that he simply imposed a set of laws on

them without their consent (cf. Constitution of Athens V.1). On the contrary,

he responded to their appeal to lead them out of a political impasse that

threatened civil war among the classes.

The claim of Aristotle’s critics that constitution making is artificial in a

radical sense seems in fact to be based on a reduction of leadership to imposi-

tion on a passive, deluded, coerced, bribed or unaware populace. But both in

the case of the Spartan men and in that of the Athenians, Aristotle envisages

38 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, contends that the polis cannot be by nature insofaras in ‘natural genesis product and producer have the very same form’, whereas in ‘artifi-cial production, the producer has the form of the product only in his mind’ (p. 121). Inother words, ‘the polis evolves from the village and the household, both of which differ inspecies (though not in genus) from the polis’ and therefore does not arise ‘through theagency of a distinct object that is the same in species as itself’ (p. 122). But on our read-ing, the polis is not a ‘product’, nor is the legislator a ‘producer’. Rather, the polis existsby nature because it results from the shared exercise of what we have called logos-sociality, an activity common to household, village and polis. Logos-sociality is the ‘in-ternal source of motion’ that Keyt believes is characteristic of that class of things which,according to Aristotelian principles, exists by nature (p. 123).


members of a polis seeing some pressing need for fundamental institutional

reform and responding to that need by agreeing to have someone, who has

emerged as a leader by acquiring a reputation for sagacity and fairness, pro-

pose a new constitutional arrangement for the whole polis.

Aristotle’s discussion of the reaction of the Spartan women to Lycurgus’s

reforms confirms this view. He notes that the Spartan women, who lacked the

military training of the men, refused to accept the laws he had set forth and

remained exempt from them. Were the lawgiver simply imposing form on

matter, we would not expect such resistance to be decisive. But ‘since they

[the women] resisted, he gave it up’ (Pol. 1269b13–1270a8).

Still the question remains: how does the polis come into being naturally?

Isn’t there a crucially important difference between ‘natural’ as used in rela-

tion to the social existence of other animals and ‘natural’ used in relation to

human institutions, devised by human rational reflection, such as a polis?

This seems to be at the root of the critics’ arguments. Social animals, human

and non-human, create ‘families’ of one sort or another just by ‘doing what

comes naturally’, not only in the begetting but in the rearing of the young. But

political organization seems rather to be the result of debate, argument and

choice among alternative options.39

We do not want to deny that difference. But we do claim that for humans,

though not for other social animals, ‘doing what comes naturally’ includes

arranging and re-arranging their common lives in response to common prob-

lems posed for their innate associative tendencies by means of a process of

debate, argument and choice among options in response both to family prob-

lems and to constitutional and legislative matters often mediated or focused

by proposals of a leader or leaders. Yet insofar as (and only insofar as) they

adopt proposals that frustrate some aspects of the full achievement of the nat-

ural drive toward political life, they act against nature. Speaking of the con-

stitutional distribution of offices, Aristotle writes: ‘but equal shares to

unequals and unequal shares to equals is against nature, and nothing against

nature is beautiful’ (Pol. 1325b8–10, emphasis added).

Earlier we discussed what we called ‘logos-sociality’, which entails discus-

sion about the advantageous and disadvantageous, the just and unjust (Pol.

1253a14 ff.). Speech about such matters occurs in all of the various forms of

human association, because it is simply the distinctive way of human nature.

But only the polis, less bound than other forms of sociality by the narrow


39 Chan, ‘Blunder’, pp. 192–6, argues that the polis can be said to be natural as a ‘typeof human community’, distinguished from the family, in contrast to the particulararrangements of a particular polis with respect to which he, like Keyt and Mulgan, con-siders the legislator to act as an external ‘artificer.’ However, on our analysis the processof specification, the process of logos-sociality, is equally natural. The type (i.e., thegenus) only exists in particular specifications. Moreover, some species, i.e., constitu-tions, are more natural than others insofar as they more fully express the natural drive tofull actualization of the human associative capacity.



constraints of necessity, permits — indeed demands — speech, debate, deliber-

ation and choice about more than mere life, about what Aristotle calls the good

life, about the possibilities for human flourishing that only ‘civilization’ (taken

in its etymologically literal sense) makes possible. It is precisely in making pos-

sible the start of the full development of speech and reason that Aristotle

regards the one who first brought a polis together as the greatest of benefactors.

However, insofar as speech of this sort also takes place in the lower or ear-

lier associations of the household and village, the polis represents not a dis-

continuous break with such associations but rather their fulfilment.

In this way, too, we do not interpret Aristotle as thinking the polis arises

from the imposition of political form on a people. Rather, it is by engaging in

the same speech which characterizes human communities in general that the

legislator and the people together bring about a particular city. Such speech is

encouraged by both material necessity — the city comes into being for the

sake of life — and desire for something beyond necessity (it exists for the sake

of the good life). The difficulty, of course, is in harmonizing these two dimen-

sions of human existence, and many commentators have chosen to do so by

emphasizing one over the other. Aristotle’s man is a composite (NE 1154b22–32).

Both material and biological necessity — which affects all living things —

and logos, speech/reason — which is unique to man — characterize the for-

mation of the household just as they do the formation of the polis.

But because the trait specific to human nature is logos, the legislator cannot

simply impose his ‘ideal constitution’ on humans as humans, as a sculptor

would form a statue of clay. The giving of the laws involves the persuasive

speech of leadership.

But what about tyranny? Surely tyrannies rest more on force and fraud than

on persuasive speech about the just and unjust, the good and the bad, the

advantageous and the harmful. No doubt. And that seems to be the reason that

Aristotle remarks: ‘Tyranny is reasonably mentioned last because of all

regimes it is the least a polity, whereas our investigation is about polities’

(Pol. 1293b27–30). Yet, even a polis ruled by a tyrant may still retain some of

the advantages for mere life that generated cities in the first place.40 In fact, in one

enumeration of the regimes in Book IV, tyranny is omitted (Pol. 1293a35–45).

On our reading, this makes perfect sense: tyranny is the regime which least

involves a process of shared logos-choice, and insofar as that is a central com-

ponent of the naturalness of the polis, then tyranny is the least natural regime

(Pol. 1287b39–41).

40 Even the other extreme form of one-man-rule described by Aristotle, absolutekingship (��, pambasileia), involves participation by the people who, recog-nizing his extraordinary excellence, gladly choose to be ruled by him (Pol. 1284b32–34,1287a1–17, 1288a26–29).


VIPhiloctetes

The story of the Achaean hero Philoctetes, retold in Sophocles’ play Philoc-

tetes, powerfully illustrates our interpretation of Aristotle’s argument, espe-

cially since David Keyt uses it to show how Aristotle’s ‘organic thesis’ fails.41

The story was well known to Aristotle.42 The great, semi-divine hero, Heracles,

had given his matchless bow to Philoctetes who was fated to use it in the con-

quest of Troy. But, while sailing with the Greek army to attack Troy, he was

bitten by a snake. The wound festered. Its stench and his cries of pain so exas-

perated those on board that they eventually abandoned him on an uninhabited

island.

Nine years into the siege of Troy, the army received a prophecy: they would

never take Troy without his aid. Their chiefs sent Odysseus and the young

Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, to bring back Philoctetes and his bow.

Keyt’s construal of what he calls Aristotle’s organic thesis is that just as a

hand cannot exist as a hand without a body, so a man cannot exist as a man

without a polis. Consequently, ‘the organic thesis entails that any given polis

can exist without Philoctetes but not Philoctetes without a polis . . . [H]e

would cease being a human being’.43 But Aristotle explicitly denies that being

polis-less by chance, rather than by nature, causes a man to cease to be a man

(Pol. 1253a3–4). Because Philoctetes is polis-less by chance, ‘by Aristotle’s

own principles Philoctetes while living in isolation remains a human being.

Since the organic thesis entails the contrary, it must be false.’44

But Aristotle does not use the organic analogy as Keyt thinks. He only

treats the relationship between body parts and wholes on the one hand and

community parts and wholes on the other as analogous at the very abstract

level of parts and wholes, not at the level of continuous physical contact. Aris-

totle’s political community is constituted first and foremost as a common

moral, cultural community of conversation about the good and the bad, and

just and unjust (Pol. 1253a14–18). Aristotle puts this starkly later when he

remarks: ‘ . . . man is by nature a political animal, and so even when men

have no need of assistance from each other, they nonetheless desire to live

together’ (Pol. 1278b18–29). Obviously, a moral, cultural community,

though attenuated in many ways by absence over a long time by travel or war,

may perdure through time in spite of physical separation. Aristotle’s ‘organic


41 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, p. 138.42 He refers to Philoctetes three times in the Nicomachean Ethics, twice in reference

to the play of that name by Sophocles and once to a lost play of Theodectes (NE1146a19–22, 1150b7–9, 1151b17–23). He also refers to the story of Philoctetes in otherplaces, e.g. Poetics 1458b21–22, 1459b5; Rhetoric 1413a7.

43 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, pp. 138–9.44 Ibid., p. 139.



thesis’ is integrally tied to his ‘linguistic argument’ that man is a political ani-

mal precisely because ‘man is an animal having speech’ (Pol. 1253a10).

When Philoctetes first comes into view in Sophocles’s play, the years of

isolation have indeed brought him significantly closer to being like a wild

beast. His isolation from the Greek army has reduced him to the bare subsis-

tence of a sick hunter-gatherer, living like the wild beasts and even looking

like one (Philoctetes, 170–4, 184–5, 225–6).

But Philoctetes presents at least three major kinds of critical evidence in

support of Aristotle’s contention that man is political by nature.

First, even after a decade of isolation he often manifests a permanent,

deep-seated drive for what we have called ‘logos-sociality’. On first hearing

Neoptolemos speak Greek, he cries: ‘Oh, most beloved speech!’ ( � �� , 234); and he repeatedly begs Neoptolemos to help him get back

home, back to his father (e.g. 468–506; 586–7; 662–670).45

Second, as Aristotle maintains, the political relationship is constituted in

part by a shared conception of what is just. Grave violations of justice radi-

cally undermine the political relationship, leading to civil war and revolu-

tion, as much of Aristotle’s Politics argues. Philoctetes shows himself so

innately a political animal, so profoundly concerned for justice, that he is

prepared to commit suicide (971–3, 999) rather than return to the Greek

army which, along with its kings and leaders, has treated him so unjustly.46

His rage and refusal to be treated so unjustly is obviously not in his material inter-

est: he has been promised a cure for his diseased foot by the Aesculapians

(1196–7, 1333–4). He is even prepared to give up the enormous honour

(given the agonal character of the Greek ethic in which risking one’s life for

honour is the norm) of being judged the very best of the Greeks if he con-

quers Troy with his bow (1345–6). His very refusal stakes his life on an

affirmative expression of the essentially political nature of the peculiarly

human ‘logos-sociality’ as focused on justice. His very refusal is political: a

cry against injustice.

Third, the action of the play shows concretely how the nature of man as a

speaking animal makes him by nature a political animal. Neoptolemos, hav-

ing gained his trust and used it to trick him out of his bow (755–923),

changes his mind and offers to give him back his bow and take him home, but

discovers that Philoctetes now distrusts whatever he says and curses him

(1262–1286). He discovers that the bond of politics, a bond of ‘logos-

sociality’, is a bond destroyed by lies. Here is a classic case of a man,

45 His thirst for speech and community is not solely political but more widely social(from our translation of �� , koinonia, and its derivatives).

46 Here a note of precision is in order. The Greek army before Troy, as depicted byHomer, is not exactly a polis. It is a military league of cities. But while in the field it hasthe components of a city: a chief king, a council and an assembly; and their internal rela-tionships and procedures are those of a polis.


Philoctetes, who, though without a polis by virtue of the ill fortune (�� Politics 1253a3–4) of having had bad fellow citizens, unjust liars,

remains political by nature.

At that very moment Sophocles’s play comes to its dramatic dénouement:

Philoctetes remembers the heroic labours and sufferings of Heracles who

won ‘deathless excellence’ (�� ) and whose successor he is.47

Heracles tells him to go to Troy, kill the Trojan Paris, conquer Troy together

with Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, and so win through to a ‘glorious life’

(�� ).

Re-actualizing one’s political nature does not require that every fellow citi-

zen be a just truth-teller, men being such as they are. But it takes at least one,

in this case Neoptolemos.

Philoctetes consents and so re-integrates himself with the political commu-

nity of the Achaean Greeks within which alone, and serving which alone, he

can achieve the highest, most complete telos, the highest fulfilment of his

potential ‘to be’ by performing — in the political community — the deeds that

community needs. Rising above the injustice done to him, instead of clinging

to it and to his resentment, will win him the only immortality a mortal can

have, the little immortality of deathless glory in the eyes of the very Greeks

who abandoned him (1409–50).

Sophocles’s Philoctetes is, thus, also a kind of illumination of an aspect of

what Keyt calls ‘the telic argument’ of Aristotle.48 Not only is the polis the end

or completion of the developmental drive toward successively more complex

forms of specifically human sociality (a sociality built upon material

exchanges but constituted by logos), but an individual’s playing his part in the

political community, in spite of wrongs which need to be forgiven, is by the

nature of man the activity or one of the activities in which the ultimate capac-

ity of that nature is actualized.

VIIConclusion

We have argued, against Aristotle’s critics, that his claim about the natural-

ness of the polis is, in fact, coherent within his political philosophy. Part of the

reason why commentators think otherwise is a failure to recognize that ‘na-

ture’ (physis), though it can refer to the character of something uniform across

time and space, like fire, nevertheless etymologically and in Aristotle’s usage

regarding living things refers to a developmental process starting from gener-

ation and directed at completion in flourishing in a mature form.


47 In the play Heracles appears and speaks to Philoctetes, a dramatic device of theGreek tragic theatre roughly equivalent to our cinematic ‘flashback’ and used to similareffect.

48 Keyt, ‘Three Basic Theorems’, pp. 131–3.



Next we have shown that the developmental process of human sociality is

driven by a set of two nested drives: the general biological drive for mere life

in the mode of social animals — food, shelter, security and reproduction —

and the specifically human drive to live through speech and reason. In Aris-

totle’s view, while those two drives may be analytically distinguished, they

are not wholly separable but interpenetrate and shape one another in varying

degrees. Even in the simplest social group, the family, the peculiar human

activities of speech, deliberation and choice among alternatives are involved.

Since Aristotle’s critics concede that the family exists by nature and since its

existence and organization depend, at least in part, on choices made by practi-

cal reason, the fact that every polis is constituted and organized by choices

made by practical reason does not make the existence of the polis artificial

rather than natural. Since the biological drives for food, security and repro-

duction and the specifically human drive to operate through speech and rea-

son interpenetrate, there is no reason to think that the first development of the

polis from a large village or group of villages need be envisaged — as by

some of the critics — as a radical and discontinuous break. The growth in size

and capacity from village to polis may be such that only by hindsight can one

see that a new species of social life has been achieved.

Though the case of subsequent foundings and re-foundings may seem to

conform to the vision of the founder or reformer as an artisan and the people

as mere matter, we have shown that Aristotle’s analysis explicitly envisages

the interaction of founder or reformer and the people he leads in terms of

praxis, doing, rather than ��, making something artificial. The critical

role of the legislators in this process ought not to be denied. However, the

character of that role is not one of imposition but leading a people in a shared

exercise of what we have called logos-sociality: reason and speech about the

good and bad, the advantageous and disadvantageous, and choice about what

is to be done, i.e. what political arrangements will best serve to promote both

mere life and the good life which is possible only in the polis.

K. Cherry and E.A. Goerner UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME


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