The Lagoon

by Armand Marie Leroi

  Set the question of ownership aside, and the difference between a freeman and a slave is, in Aristotle’s view, the ability to exercise reason. To place it in a modern setting, the difference is between senior management and the workers that they control at, say, a Fulfilment Centre of the sort that mail-order firms run. For a senior manager, control is a monthly report to the board; for a ‘picker’, control is a handheld device that instructs him what to pick off the shelves and where, that plots an optimal path for him, and relays real-time efficiency data on his movements to roving ‘controllers’. It’s a job that a robot could do were robots cheaper. Indulging in a whimsical thought experiment Aristotle says that if we had lyres that could play by themselves or automatic looms, we’d have no need of either servants or slaves. How little he knew.

  In the Fulfilment Centre, Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery amounts to the claim that some men are naturally suited to be managers, just as others are naturally suited to be pickers. An objectionable doctrine? No, says the head of the hiring committee, having dismissed nine out of ten management trainees for want of ‘natural leadership’: that’s just the way it is. Moreover, Aristotle would say that, given that men differ by nature in their ratiocinative abilities, it is better for both the master and the slave to have the relationship they do, and our managers would surely agree. The pickers might too?

  It is not my intention to defend either Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery or corporate hiring practices. I wish merely to show that his theory of natural slavery is not a pathological product of fourth-century Greek slave-owning society, but a general theory that speaks to the socio-economic structure of any state-level society, including our own. Indeed, it may be said that all modern battles over inequality ultimately turn on the question of whether ‘natural slaves’ exist and, if so, how to distinguish them from ‘legal slaves’. This is most obvious in the extreme. I grew up in Apartheid South Africa, a state founded on the notion that Africans were, by nature, incapable of running anything just as Europeans, by nature, were so capable. There are hints in the Politics that Aristotle, too, believed that barbarians were, in general, natural slaves; he even suggests that slave-raiding wars are naturally just. Aristotle’s word for a master’s activity, despotikē, doesn’t really have an English equivalent. But baasskap – ‘boss-ship’ – works very well in Afrikaans.

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  THE GREEKS, SAID Plato, cluster around the Mediterranean like frogs around a pond. From Sicily to Asia Minor, and beyond to the southern Black Sea, there were more than a thousand Greek city-states. They came in a multitude of political flavours. By the time Aristotle was born, Athenian democracy had been running for more than a century. It wasn’t the only democracy, just the most famous, powerful and extreme. Other states were run by aristocracies; many were ruled by kings. Some kings were good, others grotesque. Phalaris of Acragas, who had ruled that Sicilian statelet in the sixth century, was still remembered, though not fondly, for roasting his political opponents in a bull made of bronze – and because he, in turn, got roasted too. It is said that Aristotle collected 158 accounts of the Greek city-states, all of which are now lost apart from The Athenian Constitution, which was recovered from Egypt’s sands in the late nineteenth century.* These accounts are the true subject of the Politics.

  His explanatory system pervades the book. The state has a final cause: it exists for the sake of some purpose as surely as does the shell of a snail. Its formal cause is the constitution – not just a written document, but its whole economic, legal and political structure. The ‘lawgiver’, or rather his craft, is the efficient cause. By ‘lawgiver’ he means a man such as Solon of Athens (fl. 590 BC) or Lycurgus of Sparta (c. 800 BC) who moulded his city and citizens into what they were. The state’s people and territory are the brute matter from which it is formed.

  All this sounds very biological and, like the Meteorology, the Politics is rich in organismal metaphors. The state not only has an origin, development and purpose, but an optimal size and self-maintenance mechanisms. It is composed of many interdependent, functional units, but it is also a whole. Its constitution holds it together, as an animal’s soul unifies its parts. Inverting Heraclitus’ metaphor of the river into which you cannot step twice, he likens the constitution to a river that retains its identity even though the waters that flow through it – the citizens – are ever changing. It can even decay or, at least, be transformed into something else. The Politics is, inescapably, political science written by a biologist.

  We should not lean on metaphors too hard. As with his model of the physical processes of the sublunary world, they remain just metaphors. Humans, in Aristotle’s view, may be political animals, but we are more political than any other. We are the only animal capable of moral reasoning, and the only one that can articulate its results by language. Hobbes, Hegel and Spencer – to name but three – would compare the state directly to an organism. Aristotle, the only biologist among them, does not. He also never says that the state has a physis – a nature, an internal principle of change – that all natural entities do. That is because the state, although a ‘creation of nature’, is not, in his view, a purely natural entity since it is also shaped by human agency. It is an organic-artefact hybrid – you could call it a cyborg state. ‘Everyone has, by nature, an instinct for society. But the man who first instituted this performed the greatest service.’ We have gone from the state as the product of herd instinct to the state as the product of some constitutional genius without pausing for breath. Philosophically, this is tricky; scientifically, it’s unavoidable. Any human society is, inevitably, constructed from the desires, innate or not, of individuals and the laws of the land. ‘Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their law, we lie,’ runs Simonides’ epitaph to the fallen heroes. But even a Spartan would rather be at home siring sons than generating flies by the Thermopylae pass.

  Laws are necessary. There is a conflict between the true purpose of human life and our innate ability to achieve it. Humans, Aristotle says, should aim at happiness – eudaimonia – by which he means the active exercise of virtue according to reason. That, however, can be achieved only by submission to the state. He has a very dim view of human nature. True, we may have an innate capacity to co-operate and engage in moral reasoning, but without the rule of law we are the ‘worst of animals’. We are savage, unholy, lustful and gluttonous.

  If Aristotle’s political science began with sociobiology it has now left it far behind. Indeed, his politikē epistēmē isn’t a natural science at all, but a practical one: its purpose is to advise rulers. Should the philosopher speak to power, he may even be able to do a little political engineering: Plato tried it in Sicily; Aristotle may have tried again at Assos. Like Socrates–Plato, he has a vision of the ideal state. It’s one that maximizes the number of its citizens who can live the good life, who can achieve eudaimonia. That sounds lovely, but – and here’s the catch – in his state citizenship requires freedom from menial work, so tradesmen, craftsmen and labourers need not apply. (That women, children and slaves can’t be citizens goes without saying.) It’s a state in which the middle class is numerically predominant (a top-shaped income distribution) and a vaguely delimited, but apparently quite high, property-bar to citizenship. His state is designed to allow gentlemen to cultivate their souls. It is the sort of state that existed in England when Hanoverians sat on her throne and the landed gentry sat in her Parliament. It would be quite a hard sell today.

  Aristotle’s dislike of democracy is not just a wealthy philosopher’s snobbery, but also a reaction to the Athenian way of government. Public life in fourth-century Athens was squalid. Every citizen could go up to the Pnyx and vote on the legislation of the day. Many did – if only for the sake of the three obols they got for attending. The result was institutionalized mob rule. Trained by sophists in the art, demagogues roused the rabble. Sykophantai* – informers, blackmailers and slanderers – infested the legal system. A man coul
d find himself in court on trivial or trumped-up charges, his fortune, home or life forfeit. Elected officials deposed each other by lawsuits. Brave military commanders, who had the misfortune to lose their battles and survive, suddenly saw the virtues of discretion and stayed abroad rather than return and argue for their lives. In 406 Athens executed six generals who had, so the accusation ran, failed to rescue the survivors of a naval engagement. Bribery and corruption were endemic. In his Ecclesiazusae, first performed in 392, Aristophanes has the women take over the government since the men are making such a mess of things. The farce is crude but pointed: things were that bad. Even a philosopher, remote from public affairs, could be denounced and hauled before a court. Aristotle never forgot Socrates’ fate.

  No wonder Aristotle thought that he could do better. But he is no utopian. Rather little of the Politics is about the ideal state. Nearly all of it is about real states in their inexhaustible variety. Passionate for order, he tries to sort them out. Animals are classified by the variety of their organs and their relations to each other. States, he says, can be classified in the same way. The state’s functional units are its classes: farmers, artisans, traders, labourers, military, the rich, public servants, administrators and judges. Their relationships – who rules whom – and the quality of their rule tell you what kind of state you have. The result is a complex taxonomy of power and virtue.

  Aristotle’s political pragmatism is reflected in his explanation of diversity. The main reason, he says, that there are so many different kinds of states is that people seek happiness in different ways and so make different ways of life and forms of government for themselves. The parallel with his teleological account of animal diversity is obvious. Here too, however, his teleology is not heedless: material necessity constrains constitutions. Oligarchies form in the plains where power rests on cavalry and hence accrues to the rich; democracies rise from arable soil where many people work their own farms. The character of its people also shapes the state. Europeans are spirited but not very bright and so organizationally useless; Asians are clever but supine and so tend to wind up as slaves. This is a consequence of their climate. The temperamentally middle-of-the-road Greeks (‘courageous and sensible’) have, of course, the best sort of character for good government. And they’re free. Honesty, however, compels him to admit one weakness. If the Greeks could but agree on a single constitution, he says, they’d rule the world. If . . .

  As Aristotle describes them, the most striking aspect of the Greek states is their fragility. Athenian democracy, it’s true, was quite old. But across the Aegean monarchies, oligarchies and democracies alike lived mayfly lives. The picture he gives is of polities riding waves of scarcely controlled chaos. Much of the Politics is devoted to the causes and cures of instability. Since it isn’t a purely natural entity, Aristotle does not give the state a life cycle, but not one of the constitutional forms he considers is immune to revolution (metabolē).

  Analysing the causes of constitutional change, Aristotle speaks of the desire of men for honour, money, power and justice. All of them lead to faction. He also speaks of how apparently trivial events – a squabble over a provincial heiress, say – can bring down the state. He touches on social and demographic factors, and points to the destabilizing effect of immigration even though – or is it because? – in Athens he’s a resident alien and can’t even own a house. But again and again it is to the malign effects of inequality that he returns. A sudden increase in the poor or rich or powerful will destroy or transform the state just as a monstrously hypertrophied body part will destroy an animal. No wild-eyed social reformer, he wants to know how to keep a lid on things – there are chapters full of tips for tyrants. But there are also arguments against manifestly mad laws. In The Republic Socrates–Plato, those dreamy utopians, had argued that women should be shared communally. For various quite cogent reasons Aristotle thinks that this is a bad idea. (The desires, much less rights, of the women in question are not among them.)

  Although the state is, at least in part, an artificial construct, it is one of the instruments that allows humans – or those few lucky enough to be citizens – to manifest their full potential. In The Parts of Animals, describing the order of the living world, he expressly says that we are the one species capable of the good life. Like our arms, erect postures and reasoning minds, the state is an instrument of our divinity.

  That is why, for all its flaws, Aristotle loved the polis. Correctly constructed, it could be the home of happiness itself. And yet the Politics is an essentially nostalgic work. By the time he wrote it, the age of the independent Greek city-state was past, and the age of empire had arrived. The conquerors were his friends; he was practically one of them. When Macedon made of proud Athens a vassal, Aristotle was still teaching Alexander at Mieza. The ironies haunt the book.

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  THE EAGLE, SAYS Aristotle, is at war with the drakōn, which it eats. Elsewhere he says that the drakōn strikes, and destroys, the catfish in shallow waters. Although our ‘dragon’ descends from the drakōn via a long and complex transmutation, Aristotle means by it only a large serpent, probably the water snake, Natrix tessellata, which also went by the evocative name hydros. At the Vouváris’ mouth, you can sometimes see them slipping into the water and swimming away.

  Eagles do eat snakes, and snakes do eat catfish, but, like so much of Aristotle’s ecological data in Book VII of Historia animalium, the first of these claims has the whiff of folklore, even myth, about it. In Iliad XII there’s an aerial battle between an eagle and a monstrous, blood-red snake. The snake writhes free and falls among the Trojans as they make ready to attack the Achaean fleet. The Trojans take the fallen snake as an ill omen – as it turns out, rightly so. That particular mythological element is easily traced,* but the origin of Aristotle’s belief that the dragon snake also sucks the juice of the pikris, a species of daisy, is more obscure.

  Whatever their source, many of the dozens of competitive and predator–prey relationships that Aristotle describes are, at least, plausible. The real weakness, again, is that it’s data without explanation. Just as there is no zoological Politics to explain the habits of particular species, there isn’t one to explain how and why different species interact as they do. Aristotle has the ingredients of community ecology in his hands but does not use them.

  There is, however, one passage – precious and tantalizingly cryptic – that seems to reveal his views on the position of living things in not just the sublunary world, but also the cosmos. It appears in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics. Like Socrates and Plato before him, Aristotle believes that the constitution of the universe is good. In Metaphysics λ, 10 he attempts to identify the way in which it is so. One way in which it is good is that, like an army or a household, it has a hierarchical structure:

  We must consider also in which way the nature of the whole possesses the good and the best – whether as something separated and by itself, or as its arrangement. Or is it in both ways, like an army? For an army’s goodness is in its ordering, and is also the general. And more the general, since he is not due to the arrangement, but the arrangement is due to him. All things are in some joint arrangement, but not in the same way – even creatures which swim, creatures which fly, and plants. And the arrangement is not such that one thing has no relation to another. They do have a relation: for all things are jointly arranged in relation to one thing. But it is as in a household, where the free have least licence to act as they chance to, but all or most of what they do is arranged, while the slaves and beasts can do a little towards what is communal, but act mostly as they chance to. For that is the kind of principle that nature is of each of them. I mean, for example, that at least each of them must necessarily come to be dissolved; and there are likewise other things in which all share towards the whole.

  Aristotelians often speak with admiration of the Philosopher’s prose. They commend his ability to compress so much meaning into so few words. But, in truth, the pleasure that
they derive from unravelling his tortured syntax and recondite metaphors is the pleasure of tackling a cryptic crossword. He is often shockingly opaque.* Were he not, classical philosophers wouldn’t still be hacking at his texts more than two millennia after they were composed and fewer of them would have jobs. I have before me three monographs and one paper published within the last ten years. Each is by a gifted scholar and each analyses this one, metaphor-laden passage with an acuity, even brilliance, that I cannot hope to match. To varying degrees they all disagree about what it means. And I don’t quite agree with any of them.

  Rewritten into plainer English I think that the passage says this. ‘What makes the cosmos good – even the best possible? An army or a household has an organizing principle (the general/master) and its members have an ordered set of relationships to each other. Does goodness depend on the organizing principle or on the ordered relationships? The answer is: on both, but mostly on the former since that dictates the latter. Like an army or a household, the organisms that inhabit the world are connected to each other by a set of ordered relationships. And, like them, that order is due to some organizing principle, not a man, but a common goal. [“For all things are jointly ordered with respect to one thing.”] But not everyone in an army or a household contributes equally to that common goal. Senior members (officers/masters/higher animals) contribute more than junior members (troopers/slaves/plants); that’s just their nature. Although all of the world’s creatures are necessarily individual entities (and so have their own goals), they also all contribute to the common goal.’

  Aristotle’s household analogy is both beautiful and familiar. It appeared, albeit less explicitly, in his discussion of bodily economics, as the underpinning of what I called his ancillary teleological principles. Here he invokes it to explain the structure of the cosmos itself. But, of course, it is familiar for another reason. When, in 1866, Ernst Haeckel coined oekologie to describe the new science of the economics of nature, it was from oikos – Greek for household – that he did so. The coincidence is testament to the metaphor’s power. But it also makes us wonder: are all the different kinds of animals in the world truly like a household insofar as they are subject to some common organizing principle; or are they more like the residents of a hotel who just happen to find themselves under a single roof? On this question much of the history of modern ecology turns. It is a question that might be asked of Aristotle too.