Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life 9780198839583, 0198839588

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CLASSICS IN THEORY General Editors Brooke A. Holmes  Miriam Leonard  Tim Whitmarsh

CLASSICS IN THEORY Classics in Theory explores the new directions for classical scholarship opened up by critical theory. Inherently interdisciplinary, the series creates a forum for the exchange of ideas between classics, anthropology, modern literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and other related fields. Invigorating and agenda-setting volumes analyze the cross-fertilizations between theory and classical scholarship and set out a vision for future work on the productive intersections between the ancient world and contemporary thought.

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life Sara Brill

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Sara Brill 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933021 ISBN 978–0–19–883958–3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Silas and Oscar

Acknowledgments The arguments presented in this book have been a long time in the making and have benefited in countless ways from a community of thoughtful and generous interlocutors. In particular, I would like to thank María Acosta, Claudia Baracchi, Emanuela Bianchi, Jocelyn Boryczka, David Crawford, Ryan Drake, Shane Ewegen, Jill Gordon, Hillary Haldane, Brooke Holmes, Maggie Labinski, Danielle Layne, Richard Lee, Marina McCoy, Shannon Mussett, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Nickolas Pappas, David Roochnik, Michael Shaw, Kris Sealey, Kristi Sweet, and Adriel Trott. I am grateful also for the career-long support and advice from Walter Brogan, Drew Hyland, Michael Naas, and John Sallis. Early formulation of a few central claims saw the light of day in the form of a conference paper for the Posthuman Antiquities conference co-organized by Emanuela Bianchi, Brooke Holmes, and myself and hosted at NYU in November 2014. I am grateful to the participants and audience members, and especially to Emanuela and Brooke themselves for long-running and soul-sustaining conversation about these ideas and many others. The arguments presented here were also vetted with a variety of audiences through the Ancient Philosophy Society (a long-time intellectual home), Marquette University’s Summer Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, the 2018 Collegium Phaenomenologicum (at the invitation of Sean Kirkland), the History of Philosophy Society, the 2017 Feminism and Classics conference, and philo(SOPHIA), faculty and students at Boston University, the University of Buffalo, and Gonzaga University, and in a writing group with Thornton Lockwood and Chelsea Harry. Portions of Chapters 1 and 4 were published in Antiquities beyond Humanism, and part of the coda appeared in a post for the APA blog, Women in Philosophy; I thank OUP and the APA for permission to reprint. A section of Chapter  5 was delivered as part of

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the  André Schuwer Lecture, sponsored by the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center of Duquesne University, and presented at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy; I would like to thank John Sallis and Jeffrey McCurry for the opportunity to present. I am grateful too for the expert shepherding of this manuscript at OUP by Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton, Jennifer King, and Henry Clarke. Thanks also is due to the Classics in Theory series editors and to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their invaluable time and attention. My thanks also go to Fairfield University, the Humanities Institute of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Philosophy Department for providing muchappreciated institutional support. Finally, my greatest debt and deepest thanks go to Ryan, Silas, and Oscar for creating the richest possible environment in which to study and share in the sweetness of life.

Introduction In a particularly dramatic moment in his Politics, Aristotle describes in some detail the systematic erosion of trust, friendship, frank speech, and economic security that are characteristic of a tyranny, and the fear, isolation, paranoia, and poverty that replace them. In Aristotle’s analysis, a tyranny thrives on the dismantling of social bonds, i.e., the institutions and qualities that allow humans to share their lives with one another. It is this very aspect that assures the instability of the tyranny, and that marks out in negative form what for Aristotle is essential to a recognizably human life. For while the division of labor secures human survival, it is the ability and desire to perform our most cherished tasks with one another, to share these aspects of our lives, that is necessary for the living well at which political life aims. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life is a study of Aristotle’s treatment of this fundamental political phenomenon, the sharing of life (in Greek, suzēn), both as it sheds light on his analysis of human political life and as it illuminates his location of this life within the broader context of his study of living beings as such. The conventional interpretation of Aristotle’s political thought, shared by scholars with otherwise widely divergent philosophic interests (Martin Heidegger and David Keyt, for instance), is that human political community reveals a fundamental division between the realm of the human and the realm of the animal.1 Aristotle’s conception of the political bond as a form of human connection beginning in the 1  See, for instance, Keyt’s comments about the division between political life, which he reads as properly human, and the animal life of pleasure (Keyt (1989) 18), and Heidegger’s infamous assertion that the animal is poor in world (Heidegger (1996) 177), or Giorgio Agamben’s comments about the caesura within the human between human and animal (Agamben (2003) 15), all of which are discussed in greater detail presently. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

2  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

sharing of life and culminating in the performance of noble deeds, however, sits uneasily with such a formulation. Because, for Aristotle, suzēn includes a robust capacity to share affect that is held across a broad spectrum of living beings as well as a specific dynamics of attachment (to material things, ideas, and other living beings), it serves not only to mark out what Aristotle thinks is distinct about human life but also to discern how even these distinctions fall into place in a larger vision of living being.2 In short, the concept of shared life is uniquely positioned to il­lu­min­ate the connection between the zoological, ethical, and political lenses through which Aristotle pursues his investigation of human political life. A comprehensive study of the relationality it reveals tells us something essential about Aristotle’s approach to human political phenomena; namely, that they arise as forms of attachment whose political character can only be seen when measured on a zoological scale, where they emerge not as categorically distinct from animal sociality, but as intensifications of it.3 That is, we fundamentally misunderstand Aristotle’s conception of human pol­it­ical community if we see it as a rejection rather than an expression of human animality, and for this we require a nuanced, detailed analysis of the relation between his zoological work and his pol­it­ical theorizing. Providing such an analysis, in turn, requires us

2  In this, a study of suzēn contributes to the long-running debate about the degree of continuity between humans and non-human animals in Aristotle’s thought. For the primary ethical stakes in this debate, see especially Sorabji (1993), Nussbaum (2001), Osborne (2007), and Keil and Kreft (2019). In treating the political bond as grounded in the intimacy of shared perception, I do not preclude the forms of distance that may also characterize broader relations between citizens. See Konstan (2018). 3  As DePew (1995) has observed, both Kullmann (1991) and Cooper (1990) offer forms of an intensification thesis grounded in the possession of logos, Kullmann that the possession of logos intensifies animal sociality and Cooper that it allows for more sophisticated forms of the division of labor. Here I extend Kullmann’s analysis of the zoological character of Aristotle’s anthropology, as it is given in the Politics, to Aristotle’s polis analysis as well. I take his reasons for not doing so to hinge upon the assumed division between “the biological” and “the rational” in Aristotle’s thought. Kullmann’s subsequent alignments of the political with the biological and logos with the rational obscure the political basis of logos and result in the conclusion that the human is a more political animal than others because of some extrapolitical capacity, as Güremen (2018) astutely observes. A more expansive sense of both logos (like that called for in Frank (2015) and Aygün (2017)) and zōion would permit a clearer view of the political function of logos and would also bring logos under the purview of zōē, which, I will argue, is more in line with Aristotle’s thinking across his ethics and politics, as becomes evident if we focus on the use of logos to enshrine the attachment created by a shared perception of just and unjust within polis institutions via the forms of politeia.

Introduction  3

to explore—and critically evaluate—the ancient sources of some of the most vital concepts of contemporary critical theory. If the concepts of biopower and biopolitics have enjoyed near ubiquity in contemporary theoretical discourses for the past several decades, this is in no small part due to the profound salience of the distinctions that reside at their heart to assessment of con­tem­por­ ary political life, distinctions between matter and meaning, the bio­ logic­al and the political, the bodily and the discursive. According to one of the most influential political theorists of the past several decades, Giorgio Agamben, this is due, in part, to the ancient lin­ eage of these distinctions, running, he claims, through the political thought of Aristotle to the most significant and horrifying events of recent history. It is this lineage that concerns a number of Agamben’s critics, and for good reason.4 Agamben’s use of the difference between what he calls “mere,” or bare, or biological life, on the one hand, and meaningful, political, discursive life on the other, to distinguish between the two ancient Greek words for life—zōē (life itself) and bios (manner of life) respectively—is alien to the approach to life we encounter in much of ancient Greek philosophy and literature, in which we frequently find instead insistence that life itself grants meaning.5 The family of words to which zōē belongs asserts a distinct and decisive connection between vitality and vividness that is in keeping with a broad linguistic association between embodiment and signification.6 The privileged role Aristotle grants to living being 4  E.g. Dubreuil (2006), Finlayson (2010), Holmes (2019), and Miller (forthcoming). 5  E.g. Agamben (1998) 1–12 and 187–8. An approach to life as meaning-granting, such as that of Aristotle’s, also has implications for what it means to think about and represent living, a point that Michael Thompson’s efforts to mark out the distinctively normative character of natural historical judgments make especially clearly, see Thompson (2008); see also Matthews (1992). The present study is primarily concerned with the political valence of zōē, and so limits itself mainly to discussions of zōē and zēn in the Politics, Nichomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and the discussion of animal character and manner of life in History of Animals, but does so in conversation with the scholarship on the larger consideration of zōē and psuchē in de Anima, the Parva Naturalia, and other texts. For such broader studies, see in particular Matthews (1992), Whiting (1992), Lloyd (1992), Code and Moravcsik (1992), King (2001), Shields (2007) and (2008), Henry (2008), Katayama (2008), and Mouracade (2008). 6  As with, for instance, the relation between zōion (living being) and zōgraphia (the art of painting). See e.g. Pollitt (1974) for a survey of words that do the double work of naming parts of the body and parts of speech, including: stoicheion, “one of a row or series,” but also “an elementary sound,” “a letter,” and later, famously, the simple and common constituents of bodily things as such, that is, “element”; rhuthmos (from rheō, “to flow, run, stream or gush”), meaning originally the positionings of the human body during dance and acquiring the

4  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

in his Metaphysics, as an especially clear indication of substance, draws upon this connection. Further, if living being serves as a paradigm of substance, this is at least in part because, as Aristotle claims very clearly in the Politics, living being is also a paradigm of rule: “a living being is the first thing composed out of soul and body, of which the one is the ruling element by nature, the other the ruled” (1254a34–6).7 For Aristotle, to be alive is to instantiate an operation of power, to participate in a force that infuses the cosmos, moving the heavenly bodies and animating all living beings.8 The conjunction of ruling and living in Aristotle’s thought is obscured if we adopt Agamben’s alignment of zōē with bare life, subject to a state of exception whereby it is included in political life by its exclusion.9 Far from being exposed and vulnerable to power, zōē, as Aristotle considers it, is an especially clear expression of power. This misreading is significant for at least two reasons, which I mention here and will develop in the rest of the introduction. First, it treats a contemporary distinction between human and animal as an ancient one, allowing the slippage between them to be overlooked. Second, it covers over Aristotle’s contribution to a unique aspect of ancient Greek theorizing about power. For if, following Foucault, the contemporary model of power has swung from the sovereign right to take life to the biopolitical right to make live, Plato and Aristotle provide the outline of a model of power as the right to generate life, and this understood in both ancient senses senses of “measured motion, time, rhythm, proportion, symmetry, arrangement, order,” eventually even indicating the shape or form of things, as when Herodotus notes that the Hellenes “changed the rhuthmon of the letter” of the Phoenician alphabet (LSJ s.v.); rhuthmos and the meanings it embraces clarifies the use of a series of words connecting the elements of music and poetry to the movements of the body that accompany them in dance: pous, “foot,” basis, “step,” arsis, “up-step,” and arthron, “joints,” and later extended to the parts of speech we call articles. Arthron stems from arō, a radical form of arariskō, a verb whose transitive use conveys the sense of “to fit together,” “to construct,” “to contrive,” “to please or gratify” and whose intransitive use indicates “to be close in order,” “to fit well or closely,” “to be fitting.” By means of arō, arthron is connected to such words as harmozō, “to fit together,” “join,” arti, “just” or “exactly,” artiazō, “to play at odd or even” or “to count,” and arithmos, “number,” “counting.” 7  Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Aristotle’s Politics are my own, in con­sult­ ation with those of Lord and Saunders. The Greek text is that of Ross. 8  See, e.g., de Caelo 279a17–279b3. 9 Both of which require Agamben to import more contemporary sources, Walter Benjamin in the case of bare life and Carl Schmidt in the case of the state of exception.

Introduction  5

of life, both as the generation of living beings (zōia) and as the generation of their manner of life (bios), their styles and tastes, predilections and desires, their capacities, inclinations, affect. Politics emerges from this understanding as the art of generating excellent citizens. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life addresses this intertwining of power and life in Aristotle’s thought. I argue for three interlocked theses. First, the capacity for shared life—understood as designating the forms of human intimacy that derive from the possession of language and the capacity for choice—stands as the ground and animating motivation of human political life. A particular vision of the nature of life and living as a collective enterprise thus occupies the center of Aristotle’s political theory. As a potent generative force with a distinct power and pleasure, zōē emerges as the heart of this theory; human political life is an expression of its strength.10 Aristotle’s political theory thus unfolds alongside his thinking about animality in general, and political animality in particular, and should be approached with this zoological lens in mind. Second, Aristotle’s understanding of the lives and characters of animals treats human political life not as operating outside the terms of animal sociality but as a more extreme form of it. When, for instance, Aristotle compares human mothers and birds on the basis of the intensity of their desire to share in the suffering of their loved ones (EE 1240a36), or observes that humans particularly follow the tendency held across a broad swath of living beings to priv­ il­ ege members of their own kind (EN 1155a20), he asserts a continuity between the affective bases of human and non-human animal fellow feeling.11 It is only on the basis of this continuity that we can clearly see what is peculiar about human political life,

10  Whether Aristotle’s Politics supports the vitalist impulses Connell sees at work in his Generation of Animals will be taken up in subsequent chapters; see Connell (2016) Ch. 6. 11  Tracing this intimacy reveals his relevance to the broad field of theoretical discourse that queries the human, including contemporary debates about the evolutionary status of human moral psychology sparked by theories of empathy in work by Frans de Waal and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy; feminist engagement with nature, animality, and materiality along the lines of work by Elizabeth Grosz and Hasana Sharp; and efforts to theorize the fate of humanism and the post-human amongst scholars like Bonnie Honig, Carey Wolfe, and Claire Colebrook.

6  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

namely, its amplification of animal intimacy. For it is the very intensity and endurance of human sociality that accounts for the fragility of human political life, a fragility that requires a mode of analysis—an ecology—that Aristotle does not extend to other animal habitats. This approach to human politics has implications not only for Aristotle’s account of human nature, but also his vision of the polis itself, which stands as the concretization of an intergenerational partnership formed by the shared perception of justice and in­just­ ice. In his analysis of the destabilizing political effects of human acquisitiveness, of overreaching, of a failure to discern what is one’s own and what belongs to others, Aristotle charts the manner in which the intimacy arising from shared life gives way to contempt. That is, he locates the pathologies of human political life in the very mechanisms of attachment that make it possible and in their production of forms of life that are, paradoxically, unlivable. Implicit in Aristotle’s conception of shared life is a theory of attachment grounded in the material and symbolic conditions of human birth; this theory not only connects his thinking about a wide variety of human phenomena with his account of non-human animal life, but also reveals an alienated stance toward human natality, one that is entangled in the dynamics of sex and gender as they are at work in ancient Greek political culture. In this, it casts new light on the interstices of reproductive, political, and philosophical life in Aristotle’s thought. But in order to see these connections we have to discern the political valence of zōē and the model of power that undergirds Aristotle’s diagnosis of human political life. Thus, third, I argue that Aristotle’s specific contribution to the understanding of power as the generation of life is to conceive of the management of human generativity as a primary task of pol­it­ ics, a task that informs Aristotle’s understanding of the politically salutary forms of attachment, the nature of political expertise, and the aim of the best city. The contours of such a model of politics, zōē-politics, are made particularly clear in two aspects of Aristotle’s theorizing about the trajectory of human political life: a) in the approach to natality that connects Aristotle’s conception of property, insistence on private ownership, and eugenics legislation, and b) in the natal longing implicit in Aristotle’s understanding of the

Introduction  7

maternal bond, which serves the development of a conception of self-actualization operative in his formulations of the highest form of life to which humans can aspire.

0.1  Life, Animality, and the Reception of Aristotle’s Political Theory When in his Metaphysics Aristotle treats living being as a paradigm of substance, he places the philosophic investigation of life at the center of what he called “first philosophy.” For Aristotle, one cannot “do” metaphysics in any meaningful sense without an inquiry into the nature of living beings. The same must be said of the philosophical study of human political life, whose forms of rule can be observed “first” in the relation between soul and body that constitutes a living being. And yet, until recently the tendency of con­tem­ por­ary approaches to Aristotle’s political thought has been to hold these forms of inquiry apart, for reasons that move well beyond Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical sciences and stem largely from a broad conceptual orientation toward living beings that, I aim to show, operates at significant distance from that of Aristotle. When Martin Heidegger infamously claims that the animal is poor in world, or Hannah Arendt distinguishes animal laborans from homo faber, or Giorgio Agamben locates an “intimate caesura” between human and animal within the human and asserts that “the total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man” they locate themselves within a long-standing tradition of constructing “the animal” as the bearer of biological necessity, as the enemy of the rational and the political, as a representative of the basest aspects of embodiment, as, in the most extreme form of the construction, inhuman.12 It is, perhaps iron­ic­ al­ly, the same tradition from which analytically oriented scholars of ancient philosophy draw. The division between animal and human that Agamben locates within the human is constructed and treated nearly identically by Keyt, who observes that “since man is partly an 12  See Heidegger (1996) 177; Arendt (1958); Agamben (2003) 15.

8  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

animal and partly a god” the traditional three lives trope—the life of pleasure, the life of politics, and the philosophic life—“reflect three aspects of his nature.” Keyt continues: “The apolaustic life reflects man’s animal (or generic) nature; the political life, his human (or specific) nature; and the philosophic life, his divine nature” and concludes that “the practical and political life is incompatible with each of the other two lives.”13 I submit that the source of this separation of the animal from the political is not Aristotle, and that we cannot align zōion with “the animal” in this sense. In the growth of plants, the perceptual capacities and movement of animals, and the impulse that animates thinking, speaking, and deliberating Aristotle sees the working of a single complex activity, living (to zēn), come to expression in an array of forms of life (bioi), and it is in these, if anywhere, that one could find the resources needed for a philosophic account of the nature of life as such (zōē). Because the living is distinguished from the non-living not by a radical break, but by incremental, nearly indiscernible steps, the theorist of life, the zoologist, must have eyes trained to discern the most significant indicators of difference: “Nature proceeds from the inanimate to the animal by such small steps that, because of the continuity, we fail to see to which side the boundary and the middle between them belongs” (HA 7.588b4–6).14 Aristotle’s zoological theorizing unfolds precisely as an effort to shore up this failure, to cultivate the gaze by means of which the incremental movement from inanimate to animate, and from one form of animal to another, can be marked. And while Aristotle’s low opinion of cattle, for instance, is clear, if we assume the same general attitude toward all non-human living beings we miss the broader scope of his thinking about zōion as such. This is, after all, a category that includes not only cattle and

13 Keyt (1989) 18. For a more recent assertion of an animal/divine divide within the human, see Kietzmann (2019). 14  Οὕτω δ’ ἐκ τῶν ἀψύχων εἰς τὰ ζῷα μεταβαίνει κατὰ μικρὸν ἡ φύσις, ὥστε τῇ συνεχείᾳ λανθάνει τὸ μεθόριον αὐτῶν καὶ τὸ μέσον ποτέρων ἐστίν. How and where to demarcate qualitative from quantitative change is of course a matter of debate, the terms of which I will address more directly below. For a recent summary, see the introduction of Keil and Kreft (2019).

Introduction  9

wild beasts and humans but also the divine.15 When Aristotle asserts that the one who is without a city is either a beast or a god (Pol. 1253a26–9) he is not making use of a distinction between animal and divine; rather, contra Keyt, he is marking out two extreme poles of animality, the beastly (to thērion) and the divine (ho theos).16 Moreover, contra Agamben, the perceiving and thinking that are particularly revelatory of certain living beings, and that make possible their political existence, are explicitly treated by Aristotle not as standing outside the realm of zōē but precisely as expressions of zōē, indeed as the most vivid expressions belonging to a particular kind of living being (e.g. EE 1244b25).17 Far from operating as the “mute” representative of materiality, zōē figures, essentially, into Aristotle’s most speculative thinking about the nature of divine and human intellectual capacities. If “the animal” emerges from out of this study, it does so as a capacious category that must be filled with the differentiae of specific animals. Not so for more contemporary commentators and ­thinkers, for whom the animal serves as the repository of all that is blameworthy about the human. So conceived, “the animal” is filled with an ethical and political valence often at far remove from the actual features of actual animals. In this sense, “the animal” as it is read into Aristotle is an invention of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury translation practices informed by a lineage of thinking that has its source less in Aristotle’s own thinking than, more likely, in the broader cultural forces that produced early Christian conceptualizations of human and divine.18 We thus need to resist the temptation to read a more contemporary denial of human animality into

15  Meta 12.7.1072b24–30; see also EN 1178b8–22 and EE 1141a33–b2. Agamben observes this extension of the category of the zōion to the divine early on in Homo Sacer (Agamben (1998) 1), but does not consider the implications it holds for a reduction of zōē to biological life. Of course, it is not at all self-evident in what sense the divine is alive and provides a paradigm for living. Over the course of several chapters I develop an argument for the centrality of zōē to Aristotle’s political theory that broaches the question of what we learn about the divine when we learn that it is alive, taking into account the challenges in Bodéüs (2000) and Menn (2012) to the claim that the divine is synonymous with the unmoved mover. 16  E.g., Keyt (1989) 18. 17  Aristotle will go so far as to say that “living is a kind of knowing” (EE 1244b29): τὸ γὰρ ζῆν δεῖ τιθέναι γνῶσιν τινά. 18  See Kullmann (1991).

10  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

Aristotle’s texts, even if that denial attempts to anchor itself within Aristotle’s thought. If I am right about Aristotle’s thinking about living beings, then the conception of human being held by inheritors of the reading of Aristotle that is criticized here is in need of a “re-animalization.”19 It is not especially new to observe the limitations of Heidegger’s treatment of Aristotle’s approach to living beings, a topic Jacques Derrida has treated in some detail.20 Wolfgang Kullmann and Guenter Bien both mark in passing a discontent with Heidegger’s treatment of the concepts of zōē and zōion, particularly his alignment of zōion with “beast.”21 Nor have the infelicities of Agamben’s reductive reading of zōē gone unmarked by scholars.22 And yet, in contemporary theoretical engagement with Aristotle’s political thought, little attention has been given to the implication of zōē in the perceiving, thinking, and speaking that make human political life possible and that animate its every aspect.23 Instead, the alignment of zōē with bare life, while equivocal in Agamben, has received near universal acceptance by his readers, even by those who are critical of his larger project,24 particularly for its failure to account for the selective production of bare life within communities coded

19  Here I am appropriating and repurposing a term used by Alan Bloom, for whom, in a clear example of the kind of thinking about animality I aim to rebut, it is intended as a criticism. I do so in a manner closely related to the movement toward re-naturalization argued for by Elizabeth Grosz, with significant elaboration by Hasana Sharp. 20  See, e.g., Derrida (2007), (2008a), (2008b), (2009), (2011). 21  Kullmann (1991) and Bien (1973). See also Kullmann (1980) 107: “Heidegger once remarked negatively, that when the Greeks understood man as zōon [animal], they in prin­ ciple always thought of man as homo animalus, which meant that they had a very low opinion of his nature. However Heidegger does not really go beyond the modern dichotomy between beast and man, which stems from the Christian tradition and which is also fundamental for more recent social research. Aristotle’s conception is more fine grained. Man is indeed like the beasts a zōon, but stands as such in the highest rung of the scala naturae.” Kullmann cites Heidegger’s “On Humanism,” p. 66 of the second German edition, and notes that Bien (1973, 123 note 27) already objected that zōion doesn’t mean beast in a pejorative sense but rather “animated being” or “living creature.” 22  For criticism of Agamben’s zōē/bios construction, see Debreuil (2006) Finlayson (2010), Derrida (2008b), Holmes (2019), Miller (forthcoming). 23  Nor to what we learn about zōē from the fact that it can be shared, although Debreuil (2006) marks an important exception. Agamben himself will make brief reference to suzēn in his study of monastic life (Agamben, 2013) but does not develop the significance of this term for his earlier formulation of the difference between zōē and bios. 24  E.g., Paul Patton, who reads zōē as “the simple fact of life in a biological sense” (2007, 204).

Introduction  11

by gender, class, and race,25 and even amongst those who are crit­ic­al specifically of his reading of Aristotle.26 Agamben’s work thus continues to exert profound influence over contemporary political theory and its approach to ancient political thought—as with, for instance, the appropriation of Agamben’s formulation of zōē for theoretical and activist purposes in the work of Julia Kristeva and Rosi Braidotti—and the broader implications of his connection to a problematic, if also entrenched, interpretation of Aristotle’s formulation of the human as a political animal remain largely unexplored.27 Thus, while mainstream analytic approaches to ancient Greek conceptions of life operate with a similar orientation toward the animal in Aristotle’s thought, it is Agamben who treats zōē and bios as vital to understanding the political valence of life in the con­ tem­por­ary context, and it is to his constructions of these terms—particularly his alignment of zōē with bare life—that scholars turn in assessing the contribution of ancient Greek thought to theorizing life. The effect of Agamben’s invocation of Aristotle has been to foreclose engagement with Aristotle’s understanding of life rather than open it up. There may very well be ways of shoring up the flaws of Agamben’s construction of zōē and bios from within his thought, but I am interested here in developing an alternate account of zōē, one that I think better accommodates Aristotle’s text, the broader context of ancient Greek thinking about life, and a genealogical task that could be of service to a variety of strands of contemporary critical theory. The problems of a conflation of bios with political life are well demonstrated by a turn to Aristotle’s zoological works, where bios serves as a differentiating category that Aristotle attributes to all living beings, whether political or not, and does so primarily in order to indicate the integration of parts and capacities by means of which a living being seeks to assure its endurance in a particular topos.28 25  E.g., Ziarek (2007), Deutscher (2016), Smith (2010). 26  See, e.g., Patton (2007), Finlayson (2010), Smith (2010), Swiffen (2012). 27  Holmes (2019) and Miller (forthcoming) make important advances in this direction. See Braidotti (2008); Kristeva (2000), (2002), and (2010) and the discussion of these texts in Hansen (2013). 28  See Lennox (2010a) and (2010b).

12  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

And even when Aristotle turns to document the effects of human political pathologies in the ethical register, we cannot simply align bios with political life without overlooking Aristotle’s efforts to point out that there are certain manners of life that are decidedly antisocial, that pull in the opposite direction of the hormē for pol­it­ ical community. I have in mind here comments he makes about the life of pleasure, but also, more controversially, suggestions he makes about the unique self-sufficiency of the contemplative life. The case of zōē is more complex. Agamben himself is, at times, ambiguous about the relationship between zōē and bare life,29 and, as Ewa Ziarek has observed, this ambiguity has not always been ­sufficiently noted by Agamben’s commentators.30 Ziarek’s more probing construction of bare life, that it is “not the same as bio­ logic­al zoē, [sic]” but rather “the remainder of the destroyed pol­it­ ical bios,” nevertheless construes zōē as the unproblematic correlate to biological life.31 In doing so she is perfectly consistent with Agamben’s approach to zōē, and it is his reductive approach that overlooks the conceptual breadth of the term in Aristotle (and elsewhere).32 For while it is commonplace to refer to Aristotle’s biology, or to describe an aspect of his ethics or politics as biological, the an­ achron­ ism in doing so—especially given the connotation of determinism the “biological” carries for contemporary ears, and the accompanying tendency to meld the “biological” with the ma­ter­ial— has not gone unremarked by scholars.33 There is no ancient Greek 29 In Homo Sacer he will at one moment draw a clear alignment between zōē and bare life (e.g., 187–8) while qualifying it at the next, as, for instance his claim that mere life “is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe [sic] of the Greeks, nor bios” but rather a “zone of indistinction” or his claim that we must acknowledge that “we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe [sic] and bios” (Agamben (1998) 109 and 187 re­spect­ive­ly). See also the discussion of these passages in Miller (forthcoming). 30  Nor, I would add, by Agamben himself, as when he seems to double down on the alignment between bare life and zōē in The Use of Bodies, e.g., xix. 31  Ziarek (2008) 90. 32  Even when Agamben gestures beyond his own zōē/bios formulation, or queries what a zōē would be that was not bare life (Agamben (2015) 225), he continues to think of zōē along the lines of natural, or biological, or reproductive life. 33 E.g., Gotthelf and Lennox (1987) 5, Balme (1987a), and Pellegrin (2015) 31. Nevertheless, these cautionary observations have not changed the broad scholarly tendency to characterize Aristotle’s work in this way and Pellegrin (2015), Cooper (1982/2004), Depew (1995), Kullmann (1991), and Lord (1991), for instance, all observe what they call the bio­ logic­al character of Aristotle’s Politics.

Introduction  13

word or phrase that could be easily translated by “biological,” nor, as we will see, does Aristotle’s logos of bios map easily on to what we would call a biological account. It is worth bearing in mind David Balme’s reminder that for Aristotle “matter qua matter is not a thing but a role played by things.”34 The logic of embodiment that emerges from out of Aristotle’s zoological work is a regional logic, one that may have cosmic aspirations but that unfolds in very earthly realities and struggles to accommodate itself to what Emanuela Bianchi calls the aleatory character of materiality.35 To speak of Aristotle’s zoology, then, is to speak of a broad inquiry into the nature of living beings, an inquiry aimed at discerning the very terms of living embodiment itself.36 It is this broader context that forms what I am calling his zoological perspective, and, I submit, it is within this broader context that we should locate Aristotle’s ana­lysis of human political life. There is need, then, for a full-scale re-evaluation of Aristotle’s thinking about zōē and zōion, one that incorporates the recent wealth of philosophically nuanced approaches to the relationship between Aristotle’s zoological work and his ethico-political thought. The concept of suzēn illuminates this relationship, and its study contributes to ongoing efforts over the past thirty years or so to bring Aristotle’s investigations of animals into the fold of his larger philosophical projects.37 If we set aside Agamben’s formulation, and 34  Balme (1990) 49. Ebrey (2015) 66 offers a nearly identical formulation of matter, and Code (2015) section 2 assumes such a formulation. 35  See Bianchi (2014) and Balme (1987b). See also Ebrey (2015) on the inaccuracy of referring to “material necessity” in Aristotle and Gelber’s (2015b) argument against treating facts about matter as primitive. I take Johnson’s (2006, 4) alignment of Aristotelian ex­plan­ ation with biological theories of evolutionary adaptation as strategic, designed mainly to distinguish it from natural theology. 36  I take Aristotle’s ordering of animals to be in the service of this broader effort at understanding, and not co-extensive with it. This understanding of Aristotle’s zoological work is thus often more aligned with the “relativist,” as opposed to “essentialist,” position regarding Aristotle’s stance toward the classification of animals, for reasons that I will argue throughout this book. Pivotal texts in this debate include Balme (1987), Devereux and Pellegrin (1990), Pellegrin (1982/1986, 1987), Gotthelf and Lennox (1987), Lloyd (1990), Leunissen and Gotthelf (2010), Granger (1985), and Charles (2000); for a recent revisiting of the debate in light of his interpretation of the role of dualizers in Aristotle’s zoology, see Carraro (2019). 37 The work of Allan Gotthelf, James Lennox, David Balme, Geoffrey Lloyd, Pierre Pellegrin, and David Charles has proven decisive early on in this effort, with Mariska Leunissen, David Ebrey, Jessica Gelber, Devin Henry, and Karen Nielsen making significant recent inroads and my claims about the role of bios in Aristotle’s thought build on their work, especially Lennox (2010a) and (2010b).

14  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

the larger attitude toward animality to which it is connected, and attempt the more comprehensive review of zōē/zēn in Aristotle’s thought that is invited by a study of suzēn, we see that political life, even and especially human political life, is an expression of zōē and thus a fundamental aspect of human animality, not a repudiation of it. The specifically human complication for Aristotle arises from the fact that humans have greater impediments to their living than other animals do: they can be the source of their own failure to live, even as they also mark the possibility of greater divinity in the choice of actions for the sake of the beautiful. Or, as Aristotle will put it, when perfected humans are the best animal, when vicious, they are the worst (Pol. 1253a31–3). Aristotle’s ambivalence is not, then, directed at zōē or zōion, but at the human equivocation between gregarious and solitary, at the human capacity to reject, or at least veer away from, its hormē toward political partnership. In the possibility of estrangement from one’s political nature, we do encounter also the possibility of an antagonism between zōē and bios, one that often results in a flight from political life or a destruction of political institutions; nevertheless, and I take this to be crucial, this antagonism is a symptom of human failure at its animality, not a function of the ontological status of zōē as such. A more comprehensive review of Aristotle’s uses of zōē and bios would have to begin by drawing out more carefully the close verbal attraction of zōē to the act of living. While zōē and bios share the same etymological root, Aristotle tends to use forms of zaō to indicate the action of living rather than forms of bioō, a rare verb, as Agamben himself observes.38 Zōē carries this association with zēn, and zōion refers to the being that is defined by the act of living, an act made possible by psuchē, such that Aristotle may distinguish living from non-living by what is empsuchon and what is apsuchon. To be sure, the act of living is actually composed of many kinds of ancillary actions and is not without ambiguity itself; like being, living is said in many ways (dA 413a22). Consequently, there are different potencies of soul, that is, different aspects of psuchē harnessed for various tasks. While I don’t want to wade too far into 38  Agamben (1998) 2.

Introduction  15

the intricacies of de Anima here, my point is simply to mark the verbal nature of zōē and to zēn. With respect to the relationship between bios and zōē, bios, as manner of life, specifies a mode or even style under which the activities of living are undertaken. As highlighting a course of life, it bears some resemblance to the orbits of heavenly bodies. The activity of living stands to the manner in which it is taken up as that which grants the manner its meaning, that is, as its end. It is thus simply false to conclude, as Agamben does, that the very idea of zōē serving as the telos of bios “simply would not have made sense in classical Greek thought.”39 Rather, this is precisely how zōē appears in relation to bios in the passage from de Anima that Agamben is considering when he draws this conclusion: “What is ensouled is distinguished from what is soulless by living [diōristhai to empsuchon tou apsuchon tōi zēn]” (dA 413a21–2).40 For the vast majority of living beings, their bios is oriented toward attaining sufficient integration with their environment as to secure their sustenance, the exercise of their capacities, and the endurance of their species; this is why their bios is named by the topos in which their living is conducted: land-dweller or water-dweller. For the being endowed with the capacity to choose, the human, the end is no different, but the impediments of attaining the end of living are greater, and manners of living proliferate, forming many bioi from which to choose. For Aristotle, living (zēn) also has some relation to choice, although, as we will see, differently than bios: the human may choose to not exercise the capacities needed to live, may refuse to eat, to see, to hear, to act, to think, often for good reason. Because the human is also the animal that can poison its topos both literally and figuratively, that can create political environments that are intolerable, that are abiōtos (“insupportable,” or “intolerable”) or that result in kakobios (literally, “living poorly”). The human is thus both blessed and tyrannized by choice, and its capacity to fail at living is

39  Agamben (2015) 228. 40  See also the discussion of living (zēn) according to activity (energeia) and as end (telos) at EE 1244b23–4, as well as EN 1098a12–14 and 1098b18–19. An alignment of human living with planetary orbits is asserted in Rapp (2019b) as well.

16  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

precisely what makes an ethics and a politics necessary and what renders most vivid the kind of animal that is the human. What emerges from even this preliminary review is that, in the human context, Aristotle’s concern is most often bound up with discerning which manner of life is most choice-worthy from the perspective of best accomplishing the act of living, that is, which bios is most likely to yield a living done well, a zēn that is eu. Any attempt to discern their relationship to one another should begin with some inquiry into their implication in the human capacity for choice. And to see this, it is necessary to locate Aristotle’s work within a broader strand of thinking about the value of life and living.

0.2  Zōē, Politics, and Unlivable Life Early on in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra’s nurse pauses in her lament of the labors of caring for the sick to reflect on the lot of human beings in general: “Now every mortal life [bios anthrōpōn] has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive [all ho ti tou zēn philteron], it’s dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love [duserōtes] with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth—we call it life. We know no other. The underworld’s a blank and all the rest just fantasy.”41 If we were to ask of these lines how life appears to humans, the answer is clear: seduced by what stilbei kata gēn, by what glitters on the earth, we 41 

πᾶς δ’ ὀδυνηρὸς βίος ἀνθρώπων, κοὐκ ἔστι πόνων ἀνάπαυσις.   ἀλλ’ ὅ τι τοῦ ζῆν φίλτερον ἄλλο σκότος ἀμπίσχων κρύπτει νεφέλαις. τοῦ δ’ ὅ τι τοῦτο στίλβει κατὰ γῆν (194) δυσέρωτες δὴ φαινόμεθ’ ὄντες, (193) δι’ ἀπειροσύνην ἄλλου βιότου (195)   κοὐκ ἀπόδειξιν τῶν ὑπὸ γαίας·   μύθοις δ’ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα. The cited translation is that of Carson (2006); Kovacs’s translation also merits consultation: “But the life of mortals is wholly trouble, and there is no rest from toil. Anything we might love more than life is hid in a surrounding cloud of darkness, and we are clearly unhappy lovers of whatever light there is that shines on earth because we are ignorant of another life, since the life below is not revealed to us. We are borne along foolishly by mere tales.” Lines 189–96.

Introduction  17

are bound to life as we are to that which gleams and shines, that is, to that which excites our desire and inspires our love. Life, both as zōē and as bios, emerges from these lines first and foremost as an object of desire, as exerting a power both seductive and tyrannical, as equivocating between choice and necessity, and so as also attracting to itself the full range of affective attachment to the erotic ideal: lust, affection, fear of loss, anxiety, hatred. It is thus equally important that we note the tenor of this love: we are duserōtes when it comes to our lives; we are, to follow Greene’s lovely translation, “luckless lovers.”42 Ignorant of any other life, bound to a life of toil and yet still seduced, often unhappy in our love, but beguiled nonetheless. It is this lucklessness, this disastrous love, that drives a turn toward reflection upon life. Perhaps it is a symptom of that pathology known in some quarters as melancholia and in others simply as philosophy to make an object of desire also an object of inquiry, but if this is true, it is a condition held not only by Plato and Aristotle or Empedocles and Heraclitus, but also Euripides and Pindar, Sappho and Anacreon, Aristophanes and Philemon. And while the history of philosophy is filled with attempts to distinguish between being, becoming, and coming-to-be, the being that is the human more often runs roughshod over these distinctions by constitutively running afoul of its becoming and despising the conditions of its coming-to-be. Luckless in its love of life, it fails and falters, its desires elude it, and its love turns to hatred. This animal, the suicidal animal, is an animal that can reject its own nutritive, reproductive, perceptual, and intellectual capacities, can choose to starve itself, blind itself, refuse to speak, move, or think, and not without cause. Because, again, the human is also the animal whose political character, while not unique in the animal kingdom, can become uniquely committed to its own misery and the misery of others, to creating forms of community that poison it, that make it want to stop up its ears and eyes and mouth, and to creating modes of living that are utterly toxic, and,

42  Greene (1955).

18  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

ul­tim­ate­ly, unlivable, an opposition that the duo zōē and bios capture well.43 We can see the antagonism between zōē and bios particularly clearly in a fragment from Philemon: “For we humans live an unlivable life” (hemeis d’ abioton zomēn anthrōpoid bion).44 Philemon presents in comedic mode what is often read as a tragic gesture, the wisdom of Silenus, that, following Sophocles’ formulation, “not to be born is best of all; when life is there, the second best to go whence you came, with the best speed you may.”45 This sentiment was alien neither to Plato, whose Socrates famously claims that the unexamined life isn’t worth living (Ap. 38a506), nor to Aristotle, who devotes quite a bit of time tracing the sources of revolution to pol­it­ ical conditions that are experienced as intolerable and to analyzing potential solutions that ultimately prove “impossible [adunaton]” (e.g., Pol. 1263b28). But any account of ancient Greek anti-natalism would have to locate these impulses within the broader context of ancient Greek approaches to human natality (to the fact of birth), where we find the counter-insistence on life’s inherent value ruefully asserted by Phaedra’s nurse, its shining, or its sweetness, a trope to which Aristotle gestures early in the Politics: “For there is perhaps something fine in living just by itself [kata to zēn auto monon], provided there is no great excess of the hardships of life [kata ton bion]. It is clear that most humans will endure much harsh treatment in their longing for life [glichomenoi tou zēn], so that there is some joy in it itself [en autōi] and a natural sweetness” (1278b25–30); although, we should add, this is hardly a ringing endorsement of human love of life. Plato displays a similar ambivalence when he concludes the Phaedo with Socrates uttering an identical phrase; he refuses to delay the draught that would end his life, lest “I make myself 43  In contemporary theorizing, the question of life’s livability has been most forcefully posed by Judith Butler, particularly in the context of her notions of grievability and vul­ner­ abil­ity. See, e.g., Butler (2004a), (2004b), and (2009). 44  Frag. 93. See also Philemon frag 89 about the problems of humans’ variant ways of life, and the discussion of both in Lovejoy and Boas (1935). 45  Oedipus at Colonus, Lattimore trans. 1410–13. See also Theognis 425–8: “The best lot of all for man is never to have been born nor seen the beams of the burning Sun; this failing, to pass the gates of Hades as soon as one may, and lie under a goodly heap of earth.”

Introduction  19

ridiculous in my own eyes by clinging to life [glichomenos tou zēn]” (Phd. 117a). Both Plato and Aristotle point to the possibility of being mortified by one’s love of life, of being overly attached to life. By this light, Silenus’ wisdom has the character of an antidote; it is the bitter, astringent palate cleanser to the sweet and cloying love for living, the sticky, viscous, longing for life. This ambivalence points to an anxiety that undergirds Silenus’ wisdom. After all, not to be born is not up to us. My death belongs to me in a way my birth does not. We can hear in the exhortation to end one’s life quickly an effort to bring life under the umbrella of choice, to deny what seems to have been felt as the deep egoic wound that we are not the first authors of ourselves, that self-generation, at the individual level, is a fantasy both intensely real and attained only in approximation, only in sublimation. We can thus hear, sounding from the depths of Silenus’ mortal longing—a longing for death, for the cessation of action—strains of a natal longing, a longing for creation, for ceaseless action, for perpetual self-generation. And in the frustration of this longing we encounter the alienated natality that makes the antagonism between zōē and bios possible. The real issue here, then, is not zōē itself but rather the production and imposition of a bios that is aligned against zōē, a manner of living that makes the act of living unbearable, and that motivates the flight from nutritive, perceptual, and intellectual life.46 A hatred of life, a miso-zōē arising from the repudiation of the material conditions of coming-to-be.47 But, and I take this to merit emphasis, the political production of a mode of life that cannot be lived, of an antagonism between bios and zōē, is not a function of zōē itself, but of the human capacity (both individually and col­lect­ive­ly) to fail at zōē, to fail at the very expressions of zōē that most define it as the kind of living being it is. Living poorly is not a condition described 46  The alienated approach to the material and symbolic conditions of human birth that I will develop here as alienated natality is distinct from but related to the phenomenon of natal alienation Orlando Patterson describes as an essential cross-cultural aspect of slavery, whereby enslaved peoples are prohibited from the formation and maintenance of familial bonds. See Patterson (1982) and (2018). 47  And also opens up the possibility of a zōē that offends against bios, a compulsion to continue living even when no manner of doing so is choiceworthy; see Leonard (2019).

20  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

within the purview of zēn—there is no zaō-equivalent to abiōtos or kakobios in Aristotle’s usage—living poorly is a matter not of some mode of zōē but rather of its failing, of atrophy. The pressing concern for Aristotle is not zōē as such, but unlivable life. Aristotle’s contribution to this element of ancient Greek thinking—this play between natalism and anti-natalism, between philo-zōē and misozōē—is obscured if we adopt a narrow reading of zōē. If we insist on a more comprehensive review of Aristotle’s uses of zōē and bios, we would have to observe, first, that Aristotle’s reference to the purported sweetness of “life alone” is unusual; Aristotle almost never speaks of zōē alone in the sense of mere zōē, but rather, in keeping with zōē’s close attraction to the verb zaō, as zēn, as living, an activity with its own distinct pleasure that attracts a deep and powerful love (e.g. EN 1170a25–1170b14; EE 1244b34–1245a10).48 And this, in turn, is connected to the larger model of power we have been tracing, namely, power as the ­generation of life. Sovereign (to recast Foucault’s engagement with Carl Schmitt) is he who generates life.49 If we apply to this model of power Jean-Pierre Vernant’s thesis about the emergence of politics—that for the ancient Greeks the most pressing concern was not to identify the source of sovereign power but to neutralize it, and this was done by putting it in meson, in the middle—what emerges as a central task of politics is the containment of generative capacity.50 Or, more succinctly, politics arises as a response to human natality (to the fact of birth from another) and takes as one of its primary tasks the control of birth. Plato concedes as much when, in the Statesman, he marks the advent of politeia-life not with the emergence of human life, nor even with the granting of technē, but with the epochal shift from genesis by the earth to genesis by another human, from autochthony to sexual reproduction.51 As we will see, Aristotle too will locate a privileged sociality in the natal scene: animals who, because of 48  See also the discussion of zēn as energeia in EE 1244b23–4 and specifically as the energeia of nous in Meta. 12.7.1272b24–30. 49  See Foucault (1976/2003). Schmitt: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (see Schmitt (1922) 5). 50  Vernant (2000). 51  See Brill (2016).

Introduction  21

their possession of memory, take greater care over the young are politikōteron (HA 589a1–5), because, I read, they are more capable of intergenerational projects, and such a project the polis must be. Hence, Aristotle’s emphasis on the decisive importance of eugenics legislation (Pol. 7.4 and 16). That both thinkers illustrate this vision of politics with language appropriated from human sexual reproduction serves as an important reminder that one cannot be a student of ancient Greek political thought without also being a student of ancient Greek conceptions of birth, and in particular of the simultaneous attraction to and fear of human coming-to-be. However one might construe this attraction/repulsion—terror of the vulnerability of infancy, disgust over the material conditions of coming-to-be, disdain for all-too-human parents, etc.—we simply cannot overlook the service it performs as an engine of cultural production that generates a wide array of images, tropes and countertropes, muthoi and logoi, designed to manage and contain human generativity, often by suppressing human maternity in favor of a fantasy of alternative generation, from the ideology of Athenian autochthony, to the denial of maternal generativity in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which Zeus’s arrogation of gestation and birth play such an important role, to Hippolytus’ lament of the indignity of being born from women. With this context in mind, we could read the desire to which Oedipus gives expression less as a desire for his mother than a desire to be his mother, with any erotic attachment to Jocasta as epiphenomenal to the erotic attachment to his own real and imagined generative capacities. This, in turn, gives a clearer sense of what is at stake in looking to Aristotle’s approach to natality, and of why it is important to do so. If a number of dominant strands of European philosophical inquiry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thematized the human as that being for whom being is a question, the early years of the twenty-first century have seen sustained interrogation of the formulation that subtends this vision of the human: human being as that being for whom birth is a problem. Genealogical scrutiny of this tradition’s two dominant ways of dealing with the “problem”— erasing the material conditions of natality and/or appropriating them—locates their source in the reception of ancient Greek

22  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

philosophy and literature, where we see a sustained effort across genres and texts to manage the social perception of maternity.52 While Plato’s development of this double strategy has been relatively well documented, Aristotle’s contribution to it has received less attention, due, in part, to the programmatic character of Aristotle’s claims about the ancillary, inferior, and passive character of women and “the female.”53 However, if we follow Arendt’s alignment of natality with action, the complexity of Aristotle’s relevance to questions of natality is easier to see: for Arendt, to query natality is to query the conditions of human political agency, about which Aristotle has quite a bit to say. At the same time, in defending herself against the charge of biologism, Arendt is clear that the most vivid expression of natality is not in the labor of the mother but in the actions of the born, and this is so regardless of whether her defense takes the shape of denying the reduction of birth to a “naked physical fact”54 or simply refiguring natality as more meaningfully understood outside the context of the emergence of human beings from the bodies of other human beings.55 Arendt’s withdrawal of natality from maternity resonates with an ancient Greek gesture. But in the Greek context it is also a highly charged and often failed effort, not a fait accompli, and we must discern the impulses animating it within the context of a very particular set of historical and political conditions. It is thus not enough to point out that, for the ancient Greeks, a child was born already “enrobed” in the symbolic, not only in the name of the father to which it would lay claim or be denied claim—displacement of 52  The scholars conducting this genealogy have tended to come out of three broad trajectories: feminist theorists and historians of philosophy, of which Irigaray’s work is canonical, see, e.g., Irigaray (1974/1985), (1977/1985), and (1984/1993) and also Sandford (2010) and Bianchi (2014); thinkers working within Arendt’s conception of natality (with Cavarero (1995) as a rare instance of both), see, e.g., Arendt (1958) and commentaries in Birmingham (2006) and O’Byrne (2010); and classicists and philosophers influenced by Nicole Loraux’s work, see, e.g., Zeitlin (1995), Foley (1993) and (2001), Dué (2009), and Ernoult (2005). 53  On Plato, see references in note 52. With respect to Aristotle, one bright exception to this rule is Bianchi (2014). 54  Arendt (1958) 176. 55  Birmingham (2006) reads her as tending toward the latter; O’Byrne (2010) is more critical of the alignment of natality with logos precisely because it sets “too great a distance between the material and the social” (105) and instead develops a reading that she is very clear Arendt herself did not consistently maintain.

Introduction  23

the event of birth from the granting of a name notwithstanding56— but also in the expectations of its parents and siblings, and, foremost, in the political community which would either accept it or reject it and through which its value would be determined. This is indeed important to point out, but it is not enough. We must look as well to the elements of ancient Greek culture that refuse an alignment of the human mother with the natural, elem­ents that treat birth from a woman as unnatural or anti-natural— e.g. insistence on the male “artificer” “progenitor” “demiurge,” on the womb as confining, strangling, inhibiting, not to mention the birth of illegitimate children or children who exceed in number or fall short in capacity what is to be permitted by the polis (in legislation explicitly grounded in a conception of phusis, in what is natural for human political communities). That is, we must attend to those elements of the Greek imaginary that present birth from a human woman not as the first but as the second (read “lesser”) birth. Or, as Plato hyperbolizes this attitude in the Menexenus, we must contend with a tradition that treats the woman who gives birth as the stepmother, and the earth the real mother (238a). Plato exaggerates an effort to sever natality from human maternity, to distinguish between “generating life” and “giving birth,” that is well attested throughout Greek poetry and prose, across genres, audiences, and political contexts, in medical texts, epic poetry, phil­ oso­phy, etc. Here I offer only a brief survey of particularly striking examples. We see the maligning of maternity in Hesiod’s infamous account of the “first woman” Pandora, with its figuration of fertility as consumption, of birthing as eating, a recapitulation of Ouranos’ stuffing Ge’s children back into her womb but with the order and agency reversed.57 While Chronos consumes his children, for which he is unmanned, Pandora makes children who consume and waste a man’s “substance.” We see it in Pericles’ exhortation to widows to be spoken of as little as possible. And the antagonism the author of

56  See the entry on the amphidromia/dekatē ritual in Humphreys (2019) and her conclusion that the ritual is celebratory not evaluative. 57  See Vernant (1982) and Zeitlin (1995).

24  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

the medical text “On the Nature of the Child” imagines between mother and fetus resonates with these larger cultural fantasies: [Birth] comes about when the child tears some of the internal membranes with its hands and feet by moving and thrashing about. And when one [of these membranes] is torn, the power of the remaining ones is weakened. And when the membranes are torn, the fetus is freed from its bond, and goes out in a rush; for no longer is there any strength [to hold it] once the membranes fail and have been carried away, nor does the womb have the power to restrain the child.58

What holds this account together with Pericles’ silencing of women and Hesiod’s paranoia about female fertility is the fantastical alignment of women not with birth but with death, not with natality but with mortality.59 This is particularly striking in the medical passage—in order to win life, the fetus must escape from the mother, as though she holds not the possibility for its being but the possibility for its failure to be; birth is the violent rending of and rending from the mother.60 It is not difficult to see how this conception of maternity would give rise to a desire for a coming-to-be without the material conditions of birth, a desire we can discern in a significant strand of the mythic framework of Athenian autochthony.61 The birth of Erechtheus to Ge herself, and his subsequent upbringing by Athena, play upon the ideological construction of the plasticity of motherhood in order to erase the need for human maternity, to give articulation to 58  Hong’s translation, see Hong (2012); for further work on motherhood and maternity in the Hippocratic corpus see King (1998); Hanson (1990), (1992), and (2008); and Dean-Jones (1991), (1992), and (1994). 59  On this alignment in Homeric poetry, see Murnaghan (1992). 60  We could also read these lines as an early formulation of, to borrow from Deutscher (2017), the “thanatopolitization” of women’s reproductive capacities, and evaluate them in light of the line of Black feminist thought that has been on the vanguard of this issue, including Hortense Spiller’s pivotal work on the misnaming of black women (Spiller 1987), Dorothy Roberts’s observations about the reproduction of slavery (Roberts 1997), Sara Clark Kaplan’s work on unrepresentability (Kaplan 2007), the work of Loretta Ross and other members of the SisterSong collective on reproductive justice (e.g., Ross and Solinger (2017) and Ross et al. (2017)), and Camisha Russell’s work on race and assisted reproduction (Russell (2017) and (2018)). 61  Even taking into account transformations of the meaning and use of this framework over time, see Rosivach (1987) and Forsdyke (2012).

Introduction  25

the fantasy—traces of which can be seen spanning from Hesiod’s Golden Age to Plato’s critical appropriation of it—of a birth without women.62 The birth of Athena from Zeus brings this gesture to its logical conclusion, severing the woman not simply from the title of mother, but from the act of giving birth itself, and thus severing even the hint of obligation to the woman. As Aeschylus envisions it, in casting her lot for Apollo against the Erinyes, Athena states, “No mother gave me birth. I honor the male in all things but marriage. Yes, with all my heart I am my father’s child.”63 This is but the final blow in a gesture performed first by Orestes, and second by Apollo, who asserts, “Here is the truth, I tell you—see how right I am. The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless a god hurts the roots.”64 Like a stranger for a stranger, this second killing of the mother renders her as other.65 In short, to assume that the ancient Greeks simply thought of the material conditions of birth as natural is to overlook efforts precisely to call the naturalness of women into question, to align women not with phusis but with artifice and expedience (mēchanē). As Loraux observes, if the subsequent history of Greek tragedy presents an alignment of the maternal with the natural, its very excesses with respect to this trope suggest the power of the poetic impulse it was attempting to conquer: “the constant overfantasizing of the artificial dimension of women,” the tendency to view “woman as ‘machine.’ ”66 The resulting tension is the dynamic animating a significant strand of Greek poetic and philosophic imagination. Thus, in order to get a handle on the context in which Aristotle’s thinking about natality develops, we must trace the concerted, if also not entirely successful, effort to render birth from a woman as an unwelcome reminder of mortality. 62  On Athenian autochthony, see Loraux (1994) and (2000), Saxonhouse (1986), Rosivach (1987), and Forsdyke (2012). 63  Fagles’s trans., ll. 750–2. 64  665–71, Fagles’s translation and line numbers, 658–61 standard. 65  See Foley (2001), Zeitlin (1996), and Goldhill (1984). 66  Loraux (2000) 90.

26  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

When we do so, we see that there is something in Aristotle’s political theory that operates according to the logic of exception, that is included by its exclusion. But it is not zōē. Rather, the figure that serves as the excluded ground of human political life, that competes with the generativity arrogated to the male, is the em­bodi­ ment of female generativity, the mother. This erasure/appropriation of maternal labor indelibly marks Aristotle’s political theory. What makes life unlivable, I submit, is the repudiation of the ma­ter­ial conditions of human coming-to-be, the alienated natality we have sketched above. Ambivalence about the material conditions of human birth condemns one to ambivalence about human life. No system of containment that fails to contend with the former will be successful in dealing with the latter. The challenge in understanding Aristotle as a thinker of natality, then, lies in understanding what theorizing natality means in the ancient Greek context, and this requires that we see it in its connection to theorizing about power. The alignment of power with generativity means, in practice, that generativity will be treated as masculine activity.67 It is this effort that creates the conditions for the antagonism between zōē and bios. What is needed, then, is a reappraisal of the political valence of zōē in Aristotle’s thought, one that foregrounds zōē not as “bare” but as sweet, not as “mere” life but as an object of desire. When we do this, what emerges is a framework for understanding human pol­it­ ical life as the fraught attempt to realize zōē in an animal whose impulse to share life seeks expression through the very capacities that also threaten its aims. The political expert will lead the human political community in its common efforts to assure sustenance, reproduction, perception, thought, and character development, efforts that must, in order to be held in common, also assure philia, the correct modes of shared life, proper political bonds, and the right kind of attachments to others. This model of politics—zōē-politics68—is 67  See Sissa (2018) for a recent exploration of the inextricable gender politics at work in ancient Greek theories of democracy and polity. 68  As Mika Ojakangas has pointed out, the concerted effort by both Plato and Aristotle to bring human reproductive capacities under the rule of the polis for the sake of ensuring the most excellent citizenry deserves comparison with the biopolitical manipulation of populations, see Ojakangas (2016). But the designation biopolitics, and the prefix bio- more generally, miss something about the ancient context, as Holmes (2019) draws out in detail. For this

Introduction  27

the framework that emerges from Aristotle’s development of the model of power as generativity, with its gendered aspect, and the aspiration to contain it via political structures. A more comprehensive review of zōē as such in Aristotle’s thought, then, opens up for us zōē’s implication in Greek thinking about power and politics, and Aristotle’s contribution to it. In particular, it would allow us to see better the implications of the implicit gender dynamics at work in the conception of power as generativity, whereby generativity is arrogated to a masculine project. The intellectual resources galvanized in this effort are considerable. In the case of Aristotle’s specific contribution to this dynamic, a reconsidered approach to zōē allows us to see that lying beneath and connecting Aristotle’s conception of property, his insistence on private ownership, and his eugenics legislation is a model of attachment that has a natal source. That is, we gain a clearer sense for the connection between and effects of alienated natality and structural misogyny in Aristotle’s political theory, and this, in turn, sharpens our eyes for discerning similar connections in more contemporary contexts.

0.3 Overview In substantiating its claims, this book adopts a strategic and dia­lect­ ic­al structure, delivering its central theses in three parts. Part I explicates the concept of shared life from out of Aristotle’s most sustained consideration of human ethical and political life. Chapter  1, Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics, is a detailed exposition of the role of the concept of shared life in Aristotle’s thinking about the nature of friendship in both his reason, and others I will argue presently, I see zōē-politics as distinct from biopolitics. My focus on the management of human generativity suggests that the transformation of all vital functions by the possession of reason posited by the transformative thesis is a political as­pir­ ation. That is, the possession of reason opens the possibility of aligning human reproductive, nutritive, and perceptual capacities with a rationally constituted form; the work of political life as Aristotle sees it is to actualize this possibility. But I maintain that, for Aristotle, in doing so humans are performing their animality, not “transcending” it. See also the discussion in section 3 of the Introduction in Keil and Kreft (2019) and Glock (2019).

28  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. At its most vivid, the concept of shared life illuminates the nature of the highest forms of human friendship by designating the intimacy that arises from the sharing of one’s most cherished actions. Moreover, in his handling of two interlinked questions—whether the virtuous person needs friends and whether it is possible to be a friend to oneself—the concept of shared life emerges as essential to Aristotle’s investigation of the political conditions necessary for the performance of noble deeds, deeds which provide the polis with its final cause. If Aristotle’s Ethics provides an account of the most intense form of shared life, the Politics gives us insight into its limits. Chapter 2, Shared Life and Politics, tracks the role of shared life in Aristotle’s account of the political bond, including its formation, maintenance, and the factors that bring about its dissolution. Here suzēn forms a spectrum, from the familial bond of those who cannot live without one another to the reciprocal affection of chosen friends, and includes both the hormē to live together that exists by merit of the kind of animal the human is (a political animal) and the exercise of the capacity for choice when it is directed to other human beings. Its inclusion of both human impulse and choice indicates that a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of shared life requires one to locate human political life within the context of Aristotle’s broader study of political animality. In its scrutiny of the role of zōē in Aristotle’s thinking about the city and the character of its citizens, Part I demonstrates that in both the ethics and his Politics, the centrality of the concept of shared life to Aristotle’s thinking about human action places zōē at the heart of the practical and aspirational strivings of human pol­it­ical life, and makes necessary a zoological frame for measuring zōē’s political valence. Part II, The Lives of Animals, focuses on drawing out the zoological lens through which Aristotle develops this account of human intimacy, attending to his account of the essential features of the character (ēthos) and manner of life (bios) of human and nonhuman animals in the History of Animals and the Politics. Chapter  3, Land-Dwellers and Water-Dwellers, charts in detail Aristotle’s discussion of bios and ēthos in the History of Animals (with

Introduction  29

a focus on Books 1 and 7–8).69 Here bios indicates the r­ elationship between capacities and actions that allows for a living being’s life to have a coherent and discernable manner or “way,” determined most often by how the living being takes up the nutritional demands and capacities it possesses and allowing for divisions of living beings along the categories of land-dwellers, water-dwellers, and those that dualize between the two. In determining an animal’s bios, then, one must identify and evaluate a complex whole: the environmental, anatomical, and social nexus of features and capacities within and by means of which the animal carves out its life. I argue that this nexus serves as the proper object of a philosophical study of living beings as such, and political animals especially. That is, Aristotle’s zoology is fundamentally ecological. This in turn tells us that an analysis of the forms of human bioi will open up to philosophic scrutiny not only the nature of the polis, but also its place among the environmental features with which all living beings must contend, a dimension of analysis ne­ces­sary in order to properly understand the animal that dwells not only on land but also in the city. Put another way, Aristotle’s investigation of human political life must include a study of those features of human life that tie it to the larger class of living beings. Those features comprise an amplification of animal intimacy, which Aristotle conceives as forming a spectrum from the radical an­tag­on­ism of solitary carnivores to the sharing of a common task indicative of political animals. Chapter  4, Polis-Dwellers, offers an account of the bios of the human animal in light of Aristotle’s treatment of the lives of nonhuman animal collectives. I anchor this discussion in Aristotle’s claim that the regime (the politeia) is the bios of the polis, and argue that attention to the zoological lens informing Aristotle’s Politics highlights Aristotle’s construction of the relation between human being and polis as an intensified form of the relation between any animal and its proper habitat. Its intensity is due precisely to the forms of intimacy and estrangement made possible by the possession of language. The Politics’s sustained meditation on how to 69  Following Balme’s ordering of books.

30  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

ensure the longevity of a city’s bios—its political ecology—must, then, be read as a necessary compliment to its account of human nature, its anthropology. For Aristotle, an adequate philosophic understanding of human political phenomena requires an analysis of the kind of unity that is the city as well as the kind of unity that is the human. Parts I and II suggest several fecund points of intersection between Aristotelian political thought and contemporary critical theory. Part III, Zōē-Politics, explores these intersections, following two broad trajectories. Chapter  5, The Commodification of Life, traces the connection between Aristotle’s conception of property (both animate and inanimate), his insistence on private ownership, and his eugenics legislation. For Aristotle, the ownership of property arises from a natal scene: the first “possession” is the sustenance one receives upon birth, e.g. the yolk of the egg or the milk of the breast, which Aristotle explicitly casts not as a product of maternal labor but as a gift of nature. In so doing, I argue, he both sets the stage for a hierarchy of life justified by appeal to the “natural” and sows the seeds for the very commodification of life that he will elsewhere diagnose as a function of the moral failure to discern how to live well and the evils of interest. This is especially clear in his account of the “natural slave,” a being whose bios has its end not in its own living but in the living of another. Aristotle’s conception of property, then, arises from an alienated natality which provides the source for the very problems that the private ownership of property and the moral cultivation of citizens are designed to avoid. Chapter 6, Natal Longing and the Maternal Bond, marks out an aspect of Aristotle’s thought that does resonate with the distinctions Agamben and Arendt see at play in contemporary political life, namely the tension between the physical details of the birth of animals, humans included, and the “birth” into human political life that occurs only with a certain form of maturation. Chapter 6 tracks this tension by exploring the complex and dual figure of the mother in Aristotle’s work, focusing on the agency granted to the mother in Aristotle’s account of the active nature of loving in the Nicomachean Ethics and its contrast to the limited causal efficacy granted the

Introduction  31

female elsewhere in Aristotle’s work. Understood both as an especially vivid indicator of the active character of loving and as distinct in the depth of her desire to share in the joy and suffering of her children, the mother serves to both instantiate and trouble the affective undercurrents of the political bond. What emerges from Aristotle’s comments about maternal attachment is a model of reflexive generativity, of a union between generator and generated, that resonates not only with the pinnacle of human friendship— the friend who is another self—but also with the perpetual selfactualization of a mind that thinks itself.

0.4  Reading Aristotle To write about Aristotle is to invoke a long and profoundly troub­ ling history of interpretation and enactment of power. The use of Aristotle, and “the Greeks” more broadly, to justify a handful of especially nefarious political positions and violent acts is longstanding, and has once again reached a particularly high pitch. It is my suspicion that for the vast majority of people who undertake to do so, whether by choice or compulsion, reading Aristotle is at best an ambivalent practice. For most of us, to read fully as oneself is to find whatever delight one may take in the text (and this is already a self-selecting effect) tempered with dismay and/or disgust. Not wanting to impute this particular effect to others, I can say my own experience of reading Aristotle consists of something like this: lengthy exhalations, much gazing into space, often followed by vigorous underlining, occasionally accompanied by jumping up, ­pacing around the room and nodding, until I come across something like this: “the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled” (Pol. 1254b13–14). And what follows is an interruption, sometimes slight, sometimes lengthy, sometimes mild, sometime paralyzing. On its own, a principle of interpretive charity should not require one to either ignore such a response or forfeit one’s right to the text. There are things that foreclose one’s access to the text, but chief

32  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

among them are the uncritical celebration of the text as truth and the refusal to engage with the historical conditions of its production. What remains is a critical engagement with the highest degree of historical sensitivity one can summon. This leaves room for correction where one perceives Aristotle has been misunderstood. But it is equally important to be clear about the purpose of the correction: not to exonerate Aristotle or defend him (what would these even mean?) or return him to the status of the emulate-able, but to submit one’s understanding of him to a larger audience and set of concerns, for correction, comment, revision. But why return at all? Why read Aristotle today? This is not a question that lends itself to a formulaic or universal answer. I can say that, in my opinion, not reading Aristotle does not allow one to escape the effects of Aristotelianism. And if it makes sense to acknowledge the polymorphous character of the reader, it is also necessary to acknowledge the polysemy of the text, and this not only in the interpretive possibilities opened by its textuality but also by the conditions of its composition and the history of its reception, that it is by “Aristotle,” that it is “philosophy,” and especially that the thinking it represents is “Greek.” To take up this last designator first, when we write about “ancient Greek” thought or culture or literature, we write, often sim­ul­tan­eous­ly, about some of the peoples and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean; the history of appropriating these peoples and cultures; and the fantasies of origin and purity that have so often given license to that appropriation. The burden, then, is to be cognizant of these overlapping and entangled forms of connection, to strive to instantiate the understanding that, as Brooke Holmes reminds us, nothing in antiquity is that simple, or natural, or pure.70 Something similar needs to be said about the other two designators of Aristotle’s text. “Aristotle” names a human who lived and worked in a particular time and place (or, better, several places); a value, an inaugural power that can bestow authority by its very invocation; a “cultural imaginary” formed around conceptions of antiquity, 70  Holmes (2019) 6; my tracing of the polysemy of “Greek” maps roughly on to Holmes’s three senses of “Greek” (12).

Introduction  33

authorship, and truth that give this value its force. “Philosophy,” too, names a loose set of cognitive, ethical, and pol­it­ical practices performed in particular times and places; a “discipline” given varying degrees of value and value-bestowal; a set of assumptions about the nature of human reason and its place in the cosmos. Working on Aristotle requires one to mark out one’s position with respect to these terms, and this is less a matter of disambiguating them than of being as clear as one can be about one’s own positions, assumptions, the limits of one’s perspective, etc. In the spirit of this kind of clarity, I do not hold that there is any ahistorical value to reading the works of Aristotle. They will either demonstrate their value or fail to do so, and that depends in large part on how they are taken up. In this book I make a case that there is value in tracing the manner in which an understanding of and stance toward zōē produces a model of politics whose purview extends from the institution of slavery, to the enforcement of private ownership, to the legislation of reproductive acts. My hope is that discerning the connection between them and the vision of life that gives this connection its force will sharpen our eyes for more con­tem­por­ary expressions of a similar nexus of concerns and interests. The sharpening of our eyes, in turn, is another way of asserting the value of a variety of forms of scholarship, including philosophy. Whether we approach it from the Socratic model formulated in Plato’s Apology as relentless self- and other-questioning and criticism, or from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reframing of this model as the shaming of ignorance, the array of philosophical practices share both an appreciation and suspicion of the power of ex­peri­en­cing something as true.71 Access to this experience is as much about self-transformation as it is about justified true belief. But I don’t mean to propose an opposition here. Rather, my point is that both formulations assert that knowing makes demands upon one’s life, whether one conceives of knowledge in the singular or the plural. Philosophy, then, has more than a passing relationship to the question of life; it is precisely around this question that it is at its most antagonistic with politics and that this antagonism is at its 71  Deleuze and Guattari (1994).

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most fruitful. Philosophy so understood entails the active exercise of its capacities for understanding and resisting oppression. And finally, I am a recipient of, and hope to contribute something to, a rich body of scholarship on the ancient Mediterranean, the peoples, texts, practices, rituals, forms of dress and address, structures of power, that shaped Aristotle’s thought. In doing so I am aided by a now substantial body of thinking about sex and gender in the ancient Greek world; about structural misogyny, racism, and violence; and about materiality, form, and embodiment. This book could not have come to be without this wide community of ­scholars. Its flaws, of course, are all my own.

PART I

SHARED LIFE IN ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND POLITICS Near the end of the first episode of his Suppliants, Aeschylus ­composes a question about public space that is vital to the life of any democracy. The question is asked by the leader of the Chorus, a group of Egyptian women who have fled to the city of Argos seeking protection from forced marriage to their cousins, and it is addressed to Pelasgos, king of the Argives. The stakes of this request for protection are high. The unwanted suitors are on their way, heavily armed and ready to take what they see as theirs by force if necessary. Unwilling to exercise his power as king without the consent of his people, Pelasgos sends the women’s father, Danaos, to supplicate the gods of Argos and agrees to attempt to persuade the people himself. While this is happening, he asks the women to move from the altar of Zeus, where they have assembled in the trad­ition­al gestures of supplication, to an open grove. This requested move from divinely protected, sacred space to public, shared space prompts the Chorus Leader to ask, “How can a space that is open to all protect me?”1 The women are right to be concerned. Within the power s­ tructure from which they are fleeing, a space open to all is a space in which all have access to each, a space of danger for some and an arena for the exercise of the power to seize for others. And it is freedom from seizure that the Danaids seek. But the Danaids themselves are deeply overdetermined characters. Much of the dramatic tension of the play stems from the Danaids’ claim not only to the right of the 1  Burian (1991) l. 488. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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suppliant, protected by Zeus, but also to a right of citizenry, to a right to Argive soil and protection on the basis of their genealogical connection with the Argive maiden Io. Thus, the Danaids claim the right of protection both as strangers supplicating Argos, and as of  Argive stock, a contradiction embodied, pleading, immediate, and wringing from Pelasgos the hapax legomenon designation of ­astoxenon, “citizen strangers” or “native strangers” or even “kin ­strangers.” Pelasgos’ resolution to the Danaids’ request provides Aeschylus with the opportunity to celebrate a fundamental institution of shared rule, which the playwright describes in terms that illuminate the nature of ancient investment in the practice: “Argos voted as one man, and bolted it clear through, like a hull, to hold it fast. This is not something scratched on tablets or sealed in scrolls; it is the plain speech of a free tongue.”2 But the Chorus Leader’s question—“How can a space that is open to all protect me?”—lays bare the conditions of democracy in an even more profound way. We can hear in it a deep awareness of the relation between how we bear the weight of symbolic life and the fragility of embodied existence. Will we be safe here, in this shared and open space created by human agreement? Aristotle too will spend quite a bit of thought and concern on the manner in which political community is constituted by the intimacies that arise from living together (suzēn), or as I will tend to translate it, from shared life.3 Stemming from the verb suzaō formed by adding the prefix su(n)- (“with” or “together”) to the verb zēn (to live) in order to indicate, most literally, “to live with or together,” suzēn appears frequently, and almost exclusively, in Aristotle’s ethical and political works.4 There, I will argue, it indicates the forms of intimacy (sunētheia) that arise from the possession of logos and the capacity for choice. In this, it serves the effort to identify the particular pol­it­ ical dimension of human intimacy and to explore its implications 2  Burian (1991) ll. 965–8. 3  In doing so, my aim is to capture the sense of an actively cultivated intimacy at work in the verbs that use the su(n) construction, what David Konstan describes as the “principle of mutual participation and cooperation” such verbs convey, particularly in the context of ­sharing pleasure or pain with close friends and family. See Konstan (2001) 57–60 and, on sullupeisthai in particular, Ferwarda (1984) 60. See also Sherman (1987). 4  It appears once in the Rhetoric at 1389b1.

Shared Life in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics  37

for human character and the character of political community. At its most vivid—the sharing of one’s most cherished activities—it illuminates the framework by means of which one could come to  apprehend a person as another self. It is thus indispensable to Aristotle’s discussion of friendship—which he will describe in the Politics as “the intentional choice of living together” (Pol. 1280b35)5— where it indicates the active awareness of one’s being that is made  possible by living together with others (see, e.g., EN 1171b32–1172a8). More specifically, in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics and Nicomachean Ethics, suzēn serves to mark out three aspects of human intimacy that arise from sharing one’s days together (sunēmereuein), and that are also formed using su(n)- constructions: first, the sharing in joy and sadness, and more broadly feeling-with (sugchairein, sunalgein, sunēdesthai, sunachthesthai, sullupeisthai), that is especially vivid in the relationship between mothers and their children and also exhibited in non-human animals like birds (e.g., EE 1240a35); second, the shared perception (sunaisthēsis) of just and unjust that forms the basis of political community (Pol. 1253a15); and third, the sharing in understanding (suggnōrizein, EE 1255b26) and c­ontemplation (suntheōrein, EE 1245b4) that emerge from phil­oso­phiz­ing together (sumphilosophein, EN 1172a5, see also EE 1245a22). In the Politics we see these three dimensions of shared life— shared affect, shared perception, and shared contemplation—at work in the political arena. Aristotle’s focus here is on charting the manner in which the erosion of these dimensions produces pol­it­ ical instability. When Aristotle writes of the resentments that arise when citizens do not feel as though they are getting their due, or the tyrant’s efforts to disband social clubs and silence frank speech, he identifies the psycho-political mechanisms that dissolve the bonds formed by living together. The concept of shared life is thus essential to both his account of friendship and his diagnosis of political pathology. In this, it is not only indispensable to Aristotle’s study of happiness (his ethics), but also to précising his understanding of 5  ἡ γὰρ τοῦ συζῆν προαίρεσις φιλία. Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics are my own.

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the capacities, actions, and passions that mark humans as especially political animals (i.e., to explaining why his ethics must also be a politics), and thus contributes to Aristotle’s efforts to locate the particular place of human beings within the larger category of living beings, efforts that will be charted in greater detail in Part II of the present study. In order to make good on these claims, I will begin with the most extensive discussion of human shared life in Aristotle’s ethical thought, in the investigation of whether the self-sufficient person needs friends, which occurs in the account of friendship (philia) in  Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics and Book 7 of the Eudemian Ethics.6 In charting the convergences and divergences of Aristotle’s treatment of this question in these two texts we will get the most comprehensive understanding of the meaning and relevance of shared life to Aristotle’s study of the nature of human happiness. We will then turn, in Chapter 2, to deepen our understanding of the concept by tracing the limits and erosion of shared life that Aristotle observes in the Politics.

6  In treating the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics together, I do not mean to elide their differences; rather, I take it as necessary to consider both in order to attain the fullest and deepest sense of Aristotle’s understanding of the phenomena in question, the sharing of life. Divergences will be discussed where they arise, as will relevant interpretative issues pertaining to particular passages within each text. But I will withhold addressing these until the fullest sense of suzēn emerges in order to make clear its contribution to the current state of debate. For instance, its role in the question of whether the self-sufficient person should have friends has clear relevance to the long-standing debate about whether Aristotle’s comments in EN 9.9 are consistent with his comments in EN 10 and to the larger question of what Aristotle means by self-sufficiency or even whether he has a single account (see, e.g., Heinaman (1988) and Brown (2014) as well as the rebuttal to Brown in Hitz (2011) note 9, 3–4). For reasons that will become clear, I am largely sympathetic with those who see Aristotle’s conception of selfsufficiency as devised out of, rather than in conflict with, his insistence on the political nature of human beings and their need to live with one another (e.g., Richardson Lear (2004), Nussbaum (2001), Kraut (1989)) but I will reserve more extended comment on the “inclusivist” debate until a more complete picture of what Aristotle means by saying that humans are of such a nature as to live together emerges (see Chapters 2 and 6).

1 Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics For Aristotle, the paradigm of human friendship occurs when two virtuous people, bound by the strength of their orientation toward the realization of the highest human good through virtuous actions, encounter one another as other selves. This form of friendship, what Aristotle will call complete or primary friendship, sets the standard by which the more derivative forms of use friendship and pleasure friendship are measured and highlights the experience from which they receive their meaning. It most perfectly exemplifies what follows when the human capacity for choice is directed, reciprocally, toward another human being, and most powerfully illuminates how and why humans come to hold other human beings dear. In explaining the mechanisms of this form of friendship, Aristotle will have to delve into the most fundamental dimensions of human attachment, to what makes one think of some thing, event, action, place, or person as one’s own. In order to do this, he brings to bear the full weight of his ethico-political thought—his acute awareness of the interpenetration of psychological and pol­it­ ical phenomena that is productive of both individual and collective character—for the sake of nothing less than a holistic vision of the nature of human political life. The concept of shared life proves useful to this endeavor by il­lu­ min­ at­ ing the nature of human intimacy, the conditions under which it arises, the factors that sustain it, and the things that impede its development. For, as Aristotle puts it, “those who approve of one another but do not live together seem to be good-willed rather than friends, since nothing is so characteristic of friends as living together Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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[ouden gar houtōs esti philōn hōs to suzēn]” (EN 1157b18–19).7 With these words, Aristotle inscribes suzēn within the heart of his account of philia. For while human friendship is not simply a matter of residing in the same place, and while “places do not dissolve friendship as such,” an inability to live together erodes the active state of friendship; if this distance endures for too long, forgetfulness will set in and the friendship will be broken (EN 1157b10–11).8 Indeed, Aristotle treats the impulse to share life, to live together, as an expression of human nature, “for a human being is meant for a  city and is of such a nature as to live with others [politikon gar ho  anthrōpos kai suzēn pephukos]” (EN 1169b18–19). Solitude, it seems, is unnatural even to the most blessed humans; or, as Aristotle puts it, “perhaps it is absurd to make the blessed person solitary” (EN 1169b18).9 But what characterizes the shared life of friends; in what does living together consist? In the final chapter of his study of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests an analogy between friends and lovers that presents in summary form his conclusions about whether or not the self-sufficient person should have friends: Is it then just as with lovers for whom seeing the beloved is their great­ est contentment and the perception they choose over others, since according to this their love most is and comes to be, so that for friends also sharing life [to suzēn] is the most choiceworthy thing? For friend­ ship is partnership [koinōnia], and as one is toward oneself, so one is toward a friend; and since as regards oneself the perception that one is is choiceworthy, so is it regarding a friend. The activity of this percep­ tion comes to be in living together [en tōi suzēn], and so, naturally they aim at this. And whatever being is for any sort, whatever it is for which they choose to live, they wish to engage in with their friends. And so some drink together [sumpinousin], some play dice together [sugkubeousin], others exercise together and hunt together [suggumnazontai kai 7  οἱ δ’ ἀποδεχόμενοι ἀλλήλους, μὴ συζῶντες δέ, εὔνοις ἐοίκασι μᾶλλον ἢ φίλοις. οὐδὲν γὰρ οὕτως ἐστὶ φίλων ὡς τὸ συζῆν. See also Pol 3.9.1280b38: “for affection [philia] is the intentional choice [proairesis] of living together [to suzēn].” 8  See also “distant friends are a heavy burden” at EE 1245a12. 9  ἄτοπον δ’ ἴσως καὶ τὸ μονώτην ποιεῖν τὸν μακάριον.

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  41 sugkunēgousin], or philosophize together [sumphilosophousin], each spending their days together in what most contents them in life [en tōi biō]. For in wishing to share life [suzēn] with their friends, they do those things and share in those things in which living together [suzēn] consists. (1171b29–1172a8)10

If we follow the terms of the analogy between lovers and friends closely, the value of shared life emerges in its provision of a kind of vision, akin to the sight of the beloved, by merit of which the lover experiences the most active form of loving and thus the greatest contentment. What, then, does shared life allow the friend to “see”? The most obvious answer is, the friend; that is, in living together one is allowed the opportunity for the greatest intimacy with one’s friend, to contemplate the friend’s actions and character. This resonates with comments Aristotle makes elsewhere about the need, in  the case of virtue friendships, for testing the character of one’s potential friends, for discerning the extent of their virtue, a discernment that comes about only through time and only in the conditions of living together.11 Living together, then, would allow for the most active form of loving, and this is the source of the pleasure one finds in it. But this answer needs to be complicated a bit. Because of the character of the intimacy between friends, because friendship is a sharing in common—a partnership (koinōnia)—one’s vision of one’s friend is also a vision of oneself. In seeing the friend, one sees the kind of things one would do and the kind of character one has. The sharing of one’s life, at its most vivid, is not simply a matter of spending one’s days side by side, but of collectively engaging in 10  Ἆρ’ οὖν, ὥσπερ τοῖς ἐρῶσι τὸ ὁρᾶν ἀγαπητότατόν ἐστι καὶ μᾶλλον αἱροῦνται ταύτην τὴν αἴσθησιν ἢ τὰς λοιπὰς ὡς κατὰ ταύτην μάλιστα τοῦ ἔρωτος ὄντος καὶ γινομένου, οὕτω καὶ τοῖς φίλοις αἱρετώτατόν ἐστι τὸ συζῆν; κοινωνία γὰρ ἡ φιλία, καὶ ὡς πρὸς ἑαυτὸν ἔχει, οὕτω καὶ πρὸς τὸν φίλον· περὶ αὑτὸν δ’ ἡ αἴσθησις ὅτι ἔστιν αἱρετή, καὶ περὶ τὸν φίλον δή· ἡ δ’ ἐνέργεια γίνεται αὐτῆς ἐν τῷ συζῆν, ὥστ’ εἰκότως τούτου ἐφίενται. καὶ ὅ ποτ’ ἐστὶν ἑκάστοις τὸ εἶναι ἢ οὗ χάριν αἱροῦνται τὸ ζῆν, ἐν τούτῳ μετὰ τῶν φίλων βούλονται διάγειν· διόπερ οἳ μὲν συμπίνουσιν, οἳ δὲ συγκυβεύουσιν, ἄλλοι δὲ συγγυμνάζονται καὶ συγκυνηγοῦσιν ἢ συμφιλοσοφοῦσιν, ἕκαστοι ἐν τούτῳ συνημερεύοντες ὅ τι περ μάλιστ’ ἀγαπῶσι τῶν ἐν τῷ βίῳ· συζῆν γὰρ βουλόμενοι μετὰ τῶν φίλων, ταῦτα ποιοῦσι καὶ τούτων κοινωνοῦσιν οἷς οἴονται συζῆν. 11 See EE 1237b10–1238a4.

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those activities that make one’s life meaningful, activities which include what Aristotle presents amongst the highest of human endeavors, and the sharing of which yields an active sense of oneself. In drinking with one’s friends, or hunting with them, or phil­ oso­phiz­ing together, one finds one’s own life and being affirmed. This is certainly borne out in part of Aristotle’s argument about the worth of friends, as we shall see; in contemplating their actions one is allowed the opportunity to contemplate one’s own. If we read this as the entirety of Aristotle’s account of why friends are im­port­ ant even to the self-sufficient, then we can see why scholars would treat this account as a kind of rational egoism, or, as Jennifer Whiting has put it, as positing a “colonizing ego” which finds the value of other people largely in the illumination they provide of oneself.12 But as Whiting and others have pointed out, this is not the full story.13 If it were, then Aristotle would indeed be providing a kind of instrumental account of virtue friendship, and it would be difficult to see how any friendship would escape what he presents as the derivative form of friendship for use. He would also be guilty of failing to provide a full explanation of the very phenomenon he himself identifies in the form of virtue friendship, namely the loving of a friend for the friend’s sake.14 Whatever else Aristotle might mean in claiming that one has the same relation to a friend as to oneself it seems he must be saying something more than that friendship provides the means for self-knowledge. In sharing one’s most cherished tasks with one another, in living together in this most vivid of senses, what one shares is not only action, but the vision of that action as a means of attaining the highest human good to which one can aspire, that is, one takes the real­ iza­tion of the highest human good as a common task.15 What is 12  See Whiting (1991), (2008), and (2012) 80 note 5. 13  E.g., Baracchi (2007), Whiting (2012), McCabe (2012). 14  See, e.g., EN 1156b10, and EE 1237b2 and 1240a24–30. 15  Baracchi (2007) Ch. 4 follows especially closely the implications of this connection between friendship and the good in Aristotle’s thought. For Baracchi, such a model of friendship attests to a constitutive openness and self-overcoming of human being, and invites the model of corporate selfhood I will develop presently. My primary interest here is in Aristotle’s treatment of this shared vision of the good as a sharing of life, of zōē, a trope to which Baraccchi gestures and that I would like to thematize more directly, particularly as regards its role in Aristotle’s conception of human politicality.

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  43

seen in shared life, then, would have to include not only my friend and myself but also a shared nexus of meaning and value, shared judgement about the attainment of the highest human good, and shared pleasure and contentment in its attainment. In short, what becomes visible in shared life is, for lack of a better word, a world as it is created through the sharing of pleasure, judgment, and action, and as it is maintained in the attachment these forms of sharing fosters. Friends hold one another in a world that they have helped to create, and in its generative, world-building aspect, friendship serves not only the benefit of the community of friends, but also the human community as such. But one cannot escape the concern of instrumentalism simply by replacing self-knowledge with world-building as the primary value of friendship. The difference between the two will come out more sharply in the course of the present study, but it is worth anticipating that argument a bit here. What a focus on the world-building aspect of friendship demands, an aspect that arises from the sharing of life, is a critical consideration of why the objection of instrumentalism arises in the first place. If I am right about Aristotle’s thinking about shared life, there is no self without a world; that is, the world provides the conditions in which one could be either egoistic or altruistic, could treat others as instruments or ends in themselves. And even this emphasis on selfhood risks missing something essential in Aristotle’s thinking. Aristotle’s focus in his discussion of virtue friendship is on the commonality that arises on the basis of a shared and profound orientation toward the good, and it is this col­ lect­ive striving that is self-building as well as world-building. What emerges in this collective striving, however, is a subjectivity that cannot be easily or simply conceived of as “mine.” It is also necessary to recognize the forms of conflict that can arise from differing efforts at world-building, the vulnerability of having one’s being and character depend upon others, and the various reactions to this vulnerability. And this, in turn, requires a consideration of the institutions of human political community as they are discussed in the Politics, the subject of Chapter 2. Indeed, this approach to what friends have in common hits upon some of Aristotle’s deepest convictions about human political life;

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that the forms of power are irreducibly heterogeneous, for instance; that a polis cannot have unity as its highest ideal, but rather must have and maintain certain forms of difference; that what a polis, as distinct from a family or a single human being, instantiates is the achievement of equality out of difference, from which the polis derives whatever stability it may have. The achievement of equality in the face of difference creates a bond that is neither foreign to the familial bond nor reducible to it, and strong enough to be capable, at times, of putting it in risk (overcoming or overshadowing it). Thus while Aristotle will view philia in a broad sense, and discern some form of the “other selves” phenomenon at work in the relation between parents and children, between brothers, and even between artisan and artifact, he must take into account the particular form of attachment that arises when human beings choose one another. He also broaches, as we shall see, a radical form of estrangement, a rejection not simply of this friend or that friend, but of attachment entire. That is, in theorizing the intimacies that emerge from sharing life, he encounters an estrangement not just from this world or that world but from the world as such, from shared endeavors, from common dealings, from collectively asserted and maintained meaning. In marking this estrangement, Aristotle is not voicing a suspicion about cosmopolitanism, about moving from one world to another—indeed, for Aristotle traveling can be especially good at imparting a love for humanity that counters other human impulses (EN 1155a21). Nor is he rejecting the value of trenchant political critique—Socrates, for instance, does not leave his political community but seeks to form an alternate community within it, as do Plato and, for a time, Aristotle. Rather, he is identifying a kind of psychopathy to which humans are particularly vulnerable. Even that seminal figure of barbarism, Polyphemus, has a world he shares with other living beings for whom he cares; he acts as a law unto himself but imposes law nonetheless. In considering even more radical forms of a rejection of attachment, it is tempting to cast about for a more repulsive character, or a more grotesque figure, and if we look carefully, we can find several in Aristotle, in his description of beast-like (thēriōdeis) conditions,

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  45

for instance (EN 1148b19–24), but we should not do so at the expense of attending to Aristotle’s persistent concern with more quotidian forms of world-rupture: the small resentments that can grow large; the petty insults and wounds to honor that fester; the desire to overreach, to take more than is one’s due; the myopia that makes measuring one’s worth difficult. For if what one sees in living together is not only the friend and oneself but the human world as such, if one approaches something like a vision of “the human,” one does so in tension with the human impulse to attach to what appears most similar to one (EN 1155a20), to clannishness and provincialism, to misrecognize and mis-measure one’s own worth and the worth of others (e.g., EN 1164b18; EE 1239a16–17). That is, we cannot overlook Aristotle’s acute awareness of the human capacity for self-ignorance. And what I take to be especially distinct about Aristotle’s thought (as well as Plato’s) is an emphasis on the ­col­lect­ive and communal construction of this ignorance. To the extent that human self-perception is a communal process, so too is human self-deception. Both human self-awareness and selfmisunderstanding arise from the condition of living together. It is worth marking out the ways in which a human world can accommodate and feed either and sometimes both simultaneously, in order to track and measure the vulnerability that arises from human in­tim­acy and the need humans have of one another. Perhaps the best way to see all of this unfold and deepen our understanding of the forms of intimacy to which shared life gives rise is to begin by focusing on the collective construction of selfperception as it emerges from out of Aristotle’s discussion of whether or not the self-sufficient person should have friends in the Nicomachean Ethics (Section  1.1) and the Eudemian Ethics (Section 1.2). We will then work outward to Aristotle’s account of friendship toward oneself (Section 1.3) and to the earliest references to shared life in his discussion of the so-called social virtues (Section  1.4) and will conclude with some observations about the vulnerability that attends this capacity for intimacy in order to lay the foundation for its function in the Politics, the subject of Chapter 2.

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1.1  Self-Sufficiency, Friendship, and Shared Life in the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle’s fullest account of the importance of shared life in the Nicomachean Ethics emerges in the course of his second, and more extensive, argument for why the happy person would still choose friends. The first argument hinges upon two main claims—that happiness is activity, and that one attains pleasure in the contemplation of what belongs to one—and presents the kind of argument that has fueled the rational egoism interpretation of Aristotle’s ­ethic­al thought: in living with others we are better able to contemplate ourselves and for this reason even the self-sufficient will need friends (1169b28–1170a13). But this is not Aristotle’s only argument. He follows it up with another, “more from a standpoint having to do with nature” (1170a13). Ostensibly, what makes this second argument more like an argument from nature is its em­phasis on the determining force of the exercise of one’s capacities, a force encountered when one focuses on zōē, on life itself, and on how living is accomplished in the case of human beings.16 In this, it resembles the earlier effort (1.7) to identify the human function through a process of elimination from other actions conducted by living beings. The argument hinges on identifying living as an action that is both good and pleasant in itself; because it is so, awareness that one is living is also good and pleasant, as is sharing in the awareness that one’s friend is living. This sharing of awareness is done through the sharing of life. Because a happy person has the things that are good by nature, they will have this awareness of themselves and their friends and thus choose to live with other good people.17 Because of its significance, we will deal with the argument in full.

16  This is so regardless of whether we take phusikōteron to refer narrowly to Aristotle’s conception of human nature (e.g., Gauthier and Jolif 1970) or more broadly to the distinction between an account that is logikōs and one that is phusikōs (on this distinction, see Burnyeat (2001) and references in Ross (1924)). 17  As Hitz (2011) has pointed out, this argument has vexed commentators, citing the criticisms of Gauthier and Jolif (1970), Cooper (1977a), and as regards its particular use of the friends as other selves trope, Stern-Gillet (1995), Stewart (1973) and Hardie (1980).

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  47

Aristotle begins with an observation about the nature of the good: “To those looking into it more from the standpoint of nature, it seems that a serious friend is choiceworthy by nature to the ­ser­ious person. For it was said that what is good by nature is good and pleasant in itself for the serious person” (1170a13–16).18 At the start of his investigation of friendship, when Aristotle is considering the reason why a human holds something to be dear, he draws a distinction between what is good and pleasant without qualification and what is good and pleasant for oneself, concluding that in the virtuous person the two coincide (1.2–3). Here he draws the further conclusion that, for the ethically mature person, other ethically mature people are good and pleasant in themselves and for one another. Aristotle then turns his attention to living: “Living [to zēn] is defined for animals by the capacity for perception, and in humans for perception or understanding; a capacity refers to its activity, and what is authoritative in it is its activity; so living in its authoritative sense seems to be perceiving or understanding” (1170a16–19).19 Here Aristotle is offering in summary form an argument about the nature of living that he develops in much greater detail in de Anima, where he asserts that the living of any particular living being occurs by way of the active operation of the capacities that distinguish that kind of living being. The sense perception and thinking that distinguish human beings are treated not as outside of zōē but precisely as the most authoritative expressions of zōē— to live, as a human being, is to both perceive and think. Further, the fact that Aristotle will not focus exclusively on thinking here, but will keep thinking coupled with perceiving, and also, presently, identify a very particular form of perceiving (perceiving that we perceive), is significant in its foregrounding of the capacity that humans share with all animals.

18  φυσικώτερον δ’ ἐπισκοποῦσιν ἔοικεν ὁ σπουδαῖος φίλος τῷ σπουδαίῳ τῇ φύσει αἱρετὸς εἶναι. τὸ γὰρ τῇ φύσει ἀγαθὸν εἴρηται ὅτι τῷ σπουδαίῳ ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἡδύ ἐστι καθ’ αὑτό. 19  τὸ δὲ ζῆν ὁρίζονται τοῖς ζῴοις δυνάμει αἰσθήσεως, ἀνθρώποις δ’ αἰσθήσεως ἢ νοήσεως· ἡ δὲ δύναμις εἰς τὴν ἐνέργειαν ἀνάγεται, τὸ δὲ κύριον ἐν τῇ ἐνεργείᾳ· ἔοικε δὴ τὸ ζῆν εἶναι κυρίως τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι ἢ νοεῖν.

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Aristotle then connects living with the good: “And living is among the things that are good and pleasant in themselves; for it is determinate [hōrismenon], and what is determinate belongs to the nature of the good; and what is good by nature is also good for the decent person, which is why life seems to be pleasant to everyone” (1170a19–22).20 The designation of “determinate” plays an im­port­ ant role in Aristotle’s account of substance in the Metaphysics, wherein Aristotle plays on the connection between being de­ter­min­ ate and being definable; both meanings are captured in the verb horizein, with its sense of delimiting and marking a boundary (horos). In the Eudemian Ethics we get a clearer sense for what Aristotle means by being determinate in the context of his ethical thought and so will reserve more extensive commentary for when we shift our attention to this text; however, some light is shed on what he might mean by calling zōē determinate by the caveat he gives immediately after these lines. For our understanding of zōē as determinate and thus as good and pleasant arises only if we focus on fully formed instantiations of human zōē: “we ought not to take a corrupt and vicious life, or a life in pain; for such a life is inde­ter­ min­ate [aoristos], as are its attributes” (1170a22–4).21 It would seem that indeterminacy with respect to living is a function of excess and deficiency, of failing to arrive at the mean and thus failing to operate within the limits of human flourishing, as this failure is what makes a life vicious and painful. Aristotle resumes the argument by observing what follows from the assertion that living is good and pleasant. This consists of a single long and complex argument, the logic of which is something like this: because living is good and pleasant, perceiving that we are living is also good and pleasant, and this perception can accompany our active perceiving and thinking; because good people are toward their friends as they are toward themselves, then perceiving their friend is also good and pleasant and they should share in their

20  τὸ δὲ ζῆν τῶν καθ’ αὑτὸ ἀγαθῶν καὶ ἡδέων· ὡρισμένον γάρ, τὸ δ’ ὡρισμένον τῆς τἀγαθοῦ φύσεως· τὸ δὲ τῇ φύσει ἀγαθὸν καὶ τῷ ἐπιεικεῖ· διόπερ ἔοικε πᾶσιν ἡδὺ εἶναι. 21  οὐ δεῖ δὲ λαμβάνειν μοχθηρὰν ζωὴν καὶ διεφθαρμένην, οὐδ’ ἐν λύπαις· ἀόριστος γὰρ ἡ τοιαύτη, καθάπερ τὰ ὑπάρχοντα αὐτῇ.

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  49

friend’s perception of their living and thus should choose to share life with friends: For if living is good and pleasant in itself (and it seems to be from the fact that everyone desires it, and especially those who are decent and blessed; since their manner of life is most choiceworthy and their living most blessed), and if one who sees perceives that he sees and one who hears that he hears and one who walks that he walks and similarly with all of the other cases there is something which perceives that we are active, so that if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive and if we think, that we think, and if to perceive that we are perceiving or think­ ing is to perceive that we are (for to be is perceiving or thinking), and if to perceive that one lives [to d’ aisthanesthai hoti zēi] is among the things that are pleasant in themselves (for life is good by nature, and to perceive the good that is present in oneself is pleasant [phusie gar agathon zōē to d’ agathon huparchon en heautoi aisthanesthai hēdu]), living is choiceworthy and especially so for those who are good, because their being is good and pleasant for them (for they are pleased by the shared perception [sunaisthanomenoi] of what is good in itself), and if as the serious person is toward himself, so he is toward his friend (for the friend is another self [heteros gar autos ho philos estin]); then just as one’s own being is choiceworthy for each, so, or nearly so is that of a friend. For being is choiceworthy on account of the perception of one­ self as being good, and such a perception is pleasant in itself. Therefore one also ought to share in the perception [sunaisthanesthai] of a friend that he is, and this would come about in living together [en tō suzēn] and sharing in [koinōnein] words and thoughts; for this would seem to be what shared life [to suzēn] means for humans, and not feeding in the same place as is the case with cattle.  (1170a25–1170b14)22 22  εἰ δ’ αὐτὸ τὸ ζῆν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἡδύ (ἔοικε δὲ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ πάντας ὀρέγεσθαι αὐτοῦ, καὶ μάλιστα τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς καὶ μακαρίους· τούτοις γὰρ ὁ βίος αἱρετώτατος, καὶ ἡ τούτων μακαριωτάτη ζωή), ὁ δ’ ὁρῶν ὅτι ὁρᾷ αἰσθάνεται καὶ ὁ ἀκούων ὅτι ἀκούει καὶ ὁ βαδίζων ὅτι βαδίζει, καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων ὁμοίως ἔστι τι τὸ αἰσθανόμενον ὅτι ἐνεργοῦμεν, ὥστε ἂν αἰσθανώμεθ’, ὅτι αἰσθανόμεθα, κἂν νοῶμεν, ὅτι νοοῦμεν, τὸ δ’ ὅτι αἰσθανόμεθα ἢ νοοῦμεν, ὅτι ἐσμέν (τὸ γὰρ εἶναι ἦν αἰσθάνεσθαι ἢ νοεῖν), τὸ δ’ αἰσθάνεσθαι ὅτι ζῇ, τῶν ἡδέων καθ’ αὑτό (φύσει γὰρ ἀγαθὸν ζωή, τὸ δ’ ἀγαθὸν ὑπάρχον ἐν ἑαυτῷ αἰσθάνεσθαι ἡδύ), αἱρετὸν δὲ τὸ ζῆν καὶ μάλιστα τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς, ὅτι τὸ εἶναι ἀγαθόν ἐστιν αὐτοῖς καὶ ἡδύ (συναισθανόμενοι γὰρ τοῦ καθ’ αὑτὸ ἀγαθοῦ ἥδονται), ὡς δὲ πρὸς ἑαυτὸν ἔχει ὁ σπουδαῖος, καὶ πρὸς τὸν φίλον (ἕτερος γὰρ αὐτὸς ὁ φίλος ἐστίν)· καθάπερ οὖν τὸ αὐτὸν εἶναι αἱρετόν ἐστιν ἑκάστῳ, οὕτω καὶ τὸ τὸν φίλον, ἢ παραπλησίως. τὸ δ’

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There are several important points to observe here. What Aristotle is after in this passage is the very particular perception of a very particular action, namely, the perception of living. In what does this perception consist? That is, when do we notice that we are alive? For humans, this sense consists in the perception of what makes us human: perception and thinking. Thus, human sense of self is presented as the perception that one is perceiving, a doubling of perception that can be missed if we sometimes translate aisthēsis as “perception” and sometimes as “awareness.” To be sure, in his fuller treatment of this aspect of perception in de Anima Aristotle’s commentators will find it necessary to distinguish between different orders of perception, but at this juncture, in the context of an argument that opens with the nature of life and living as such, the human ability to understand itself as alive is presented as arising out of a sophisticated operation of the very capacity that marks humans as animals. Second, Aristotle emphasizes the superior choiceworthiness of the life and being of the decent person. While, as Aristotle says, all people desire life, the decent and blessed desire it more than others because they lead the most choiceworthy life. Aristotle thus asserts a difference with respect to the worth and meaning of different kinds of lives and, perhaps more significantly, asserts that whatever value a life has is tied to perception of its goodness: one’s being is choiceworthy on account of the perception of oneself as being good. While all people may believe themselves to be good, some are deeply deluded about this, and whatever pleasure they may take in their lives is compromised by their inferior state. Put differently, one of the effects of moral corruption is a diminishment to the value, meaning, and choiceworthiness of one’s life. Third, it is possible to perceive together (sunaisthanesthai), and this possibility of sharing in another’s perception (sunaisthēsis) is not treated here as a form of consciousness (as Ross translates it) so much as a participatory process of affirming one’s being as good εἶναι ἦν αἱρετὸν διὰ τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι αὑτοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ὄντος, ἡ δὲ τοιαύτη αἴσθησις ἡδεῖα καθ’ ἑαυτήν. συναισθάνεσθαι ἄρα δεῖ καὶ τοῦ φίλου ὅτι ἔστιν, τοῦτο δὲ γίνοιτ’ ἂν ἐν τῷ συζῆν καὶ κοινωνεῖν λόγων καὶ διανοίας· οὕτω γὰρ ἂν δόξειε τὸ συζῆν ἐπὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων λέγεσθαι, καὶ οὐχ ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τῶν βοσκημάτων τὸ ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ νέμεσθαι.

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and choiceworthy. While in later commentators on Aristotle, sunaisthēsis will be taken to indicate the perception of perception that will eventually prove influential in developing a theory of consciousness, here sunaisthēsis emerges with heavy inflection on the sun-, on perceiving together, and it is worth bearing in mind the possibility that whatever we might mean by “consciousness” would have to include this sense of the collective affirmation of being if it is to adequately take into account Aristotle’s meaning here.23 We should note too the political significance of this sharing; in the Politics it is the partnership in the perception of advantage and disadvantage, of just and unjust, that forms the basis of political communities, a sharing that is aligned with the capacity for logos (see Pol. 1253a15), and so we will also have to explore further how the possession of logos is bound up with the sharing of perception, the perception of oneself, and the collective formation of identity. As we will see, a parallel argument in the Eudemian Ethics makes even more pressing the part shared perception plays in shared life and its sense of the collective affirmation of being, and I will reserve further discussion until then (Section 1.2). Fourth, the specification that Aristotle gives to what shared life consists of for these friends is noteworthy: sharing conversation and thinking. Indeed, this distinguishes human shared life from the spanning of days together of cattle. Shared life, in its most vivid sense, makes full use of the human rational faculties, and, again, serves to present the possession of logos not as outside zōē but precisely as one of the most vivid indicators of the kind of zōē that is had by humans. It also presents these rational faculties as most fully operative when done with others; the solitary thinker would thus be lacking in the full exercise of their capacities and the full pleasure they afford. To be sure, this must be read in conjunction with Aristotle’s account of the self-sufficiency of the contemplative life in Book 10 and with the difficulty this discussion holds for his conclusion in 9.9 that even the self-sufficient have friends in mind. But to properly contend with this difficulty, we will need to consider in 23 On the history of the term, see Heller-Roazen (2009). For further discussion, see Section 1.2. On the medical condition of synaesthesia, see Butler and Purves (2013).

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greater detail just what Aristotle means by being solitary, and not assume in advance that the person who does not have other human beings physically present is solitary in the relevant sense here, without first attending to the presence of others that is marked by the concretization of their thoughts and values in human pol­it­ical community. Thus, I will return to this difficulty, and the dense body of scholarship it has engendered, once we have had a chance to review the operation of shared life in Aristotle’s Politics. To return to the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle concludes his discussion of self-sufficiency and friendship by observing that if being is choiceworthy in itself to a happy person and that of one’s friend is nearly the same as one’s own, the friend’s being is also choiceworthy, and the happy person should have the things that are choiceworthy in themselves present to him; thus, he should have friends: “So if being is choiceworthy in itself for the blessed, since it is good and pleasant by nature, and that of the friend is very nearly the same, then a friend would be one of the choiceworthy things. But that which is choiceworthy ought also to be present to him, or else he would be deficient in that respect. Therefore the happy person will need to have serious friends” (1170b14–19). Thus, in the discussion of whether or not the self-sufficient person should have friends in EN 9, zōē, life, emerges as an object of perception in the exercise of one’s perceiving and thinking capacities, as choiceworthy in its being determinate, and as pleasurable. Human self-perception includes not only perceiving that one is perceiving, but also perceiving that one is good, and this too is tied to being determinate. Because living in its authoritative sense is perceiving and thinking, sharing one’s life is sharing in perception and sharing in thinking. Shared life is thus most vivid in the sharing of the actualization of one’s perceiving and one’s thinking (in actively perceiving together and thinking together), and these forms of sharing have both political and philosophical implications. Political, insofar as the sharing of perception, or perceiving together, is in the Politics connected to the partnership in perceiving what is just and unjust that forms the political bond. Philosophical, because it appears that even philosophy is best done with others.

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All of these issues are taken up and given further elaboration in the parallel discussion of the Eudemian Ethics and it is to this that we now turn.

1.2  Self-Sufficiency, Friendship, and Shared Life in the Eudemian Ethics The parallel argument in the Eudemian Ethics is similarly complex and oriented toward zōē, although differently inflected, bearing as it does the standard of a very particular living being (zōion), the divine. Indeed, it is in Aristotle’s acknowledgement of the limit of the analogy between human and divine that we learn the most about the pleasure of human friendship and the significance of shared life. Aristotle draws the analogy by considering the position of one who would claim that the self-sufficient person does not need friends: “For the self-sufficient person does not need useful people, nor people to give him enjoyment, nor people to live with; for his own company is good enough. This is especially apparent in the case of a god; for it is clear that since he needs nothing he will not need a friend, nor will there be anything he is in need of ” (1244b5-10). Aristotle’s response to this aporia is, as M. M. McCabe has demonstrated, dialectical, seeking to discern the truth in each side as it works through the puzzle to arrive at the conclusion: “It is clear that one ought to share life [suzēn], and that everyone very much wishes to do so, and that the happiest and the best are especially in this condition” (1245b9–11). And, as with the Nicomachean Ethics, this response takes the form of considering what it means to be alive in the case of humans and why living is an object of wish, desire, and choice. However, the use of the divine model, and Aristotle’s sense of its limits, dictates more detailed inquiry into what it means for life to be determinate and demands greater emphasis on the sharing of the most vivid aspects of human life. Aristotle begins thus: “We must investigate this difficulty, and perhaps there is something finely put, and something that escapes notice because of the comparison. This is clear if we grasp what

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living is according to activity, and as an end” (1244b21–3). Aristotle’s specification that we consider life as activity, in the context of determining how a comparison between human and divine is or is not helpful, calls to mind the claim in the Metaphysics that the life of the divine is “in itself activity, best and eternal” (Met. 12.7.1072b28) and resonates with the study of living in Book 2 of de Anima. The point here is that we must consider life (zōē) from the perspective of the performance of the most vivid activities that make up the complex act of living (zēn) which, in turn, is the action for the sake of which the living being is. If we do so, Aristotle suggests, that is, if we investigate zōē as energeia and telos, we will see not only why even the self-sufficient would choose to have friends, but also the relevant divergence between human life and that of the divine. Aristotle will eventually observe that, if followed through, such a comparison would require that the self-sufficient person also not think, “For this is not god’s good condition, but in being superior, such that he does not think of anything beside himself. The reason is that for us being in a good condition requires something other, but the god is his own good condition” (1245b16–19). While it is the most complete and self-sufficient, happiness still depends upon something other than itself; human well-being is not granted by being human, it must be accomplished. And it would appear that its accomplishment requires the presence of other human beings. But to arrive at this conclusion he must say more about human thinking and the nature of human intimacy, and this, too, will tell us quite a bit about the nature of shared life and its role in friendship. To return to the immediate argument, then, Aristotle treats it as clear what life as activity means: “Obviously it is perceiving and knowing, so that shared life is shared perceiving and shared knowing [hōste kai to suzēn to sunaisthanesthai kai to suggnōrizein]” (1244b24–6).24 Shared life, then, consists in shared perception and shared understanding, and in foregrounding these two forms of sharing in a way he does not do in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle 24  φανερὸν οὖν ὅτι τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι καὶ τὸ γνωρίζειν, ὥστε καὶ τὸ συζῆν τὸ συναισθάνεσθαι καὶ τὸ συγγνωρίζειν ἐστίν. To my knowledge, this is the only appearance of suggnōrizein in Aristotle.

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makes more pressing for our understanding of shared life some clear determination of just what this shared perceiving and knowing entails. Are we to take this to mean that shared life consists of perceiving the same things, or of perceiving as another perceives, or of perceiving myself in another’s perceiving? And given the connection we noted earlier between shared perception and political life, these questions have bearing on the nature of political community as well: is it the work of the polis to produce citizens with the same perceptions, to create citizens capable of seeing as another, or to provide citizens with the opportunity to see themselves through another’s seeing?25 The subsequent argument hinges on Aristotle’s observation that what is most choiceworthy is one’s own perceiving and one’s own knowing because one’s own perceiving and knowing are de­ter­min­ ate, taking as their proper objects the determinate objects of ­perception and knowledge. To ignore the determinate nature of knowing and perceiving is to broach the possibility that it makes no difference whether one or another is perceiving and knowing, and this, Aristotle seems to think, is obviously problematic: “For each person, what is most choiceworthy is one’s own perceiving and one’s own knowing, and because of this the desire to live is innate in all [kai dia touto tou zēn pasin emphutos hē orexis]; for living must be regarded as some kind of knowing” (1244b26–9). I follow Inwood and Woolf (and diverge from Susemihl) in accepting Aryeh Kosman’s argument that, given the context, the text specifies oneself as the subject of the perceiving, not the object, and so accept too his suggested emendation to the Greek text; that is, it is not perceiving oneself that is at stake but that the perceiving is one’s own.26 25  Scholars are right to draw attention to a connection between Aristotle’s line of inquiry here and Plato’s Alcibiades, but I think we also need to see these lines as an engagement with Plato’s emphasis on unity in the community of pleasure and pain in Republic 5, for instance, and in the degree of intimacy between law and citizen asserted by the Laws’s poetics of citizenship. As we shall see presently, this same set of questions emerges in how we evaluate Aristotle’s description of friends as other selves. 26  Kosman (2004). The issue hangs on the ambiguity of the received “auto” here; it could be intensive pronoun (perceiving itself), adjective (the same perceiving), or reflexive pronoun (perceiving oneself). See also Whiting’s (2012) discussion and reason for opting for the intensive (as she is also interested in placing the focus on the subject rather than the object of perceiving and knowing).

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We  should read Aristotle’s assertion that living is perceiving and ­know­ledge as a specification of what he takes to be the activities that most vividly exemplify the sense of life as activity in the human context, and, more immediately, its relation to the divine. Aristotle then connects the claim that the most choiceworthy thing is one’s own perceiving and knowing with the claim that living is a type of knowing by insisting on the determinate and particular character of knowing (the sense in which knowing is conducted by a knower). He does so by denying the reasonableness of considering knowing without considering its determinant subject and object: “So if one were to sever it and treat knowledge all on its own and not as someone knowing something (but this is not noticeable in the way we’ve written it up in the argument, although in fact it is possible that it might be noticed), it would be no different than someone else knowing instead of oneself; and that is like someone else living instead of oneself. But it is plausible that perceiving and knowing oneself is more choiceworthy” (1244b29–34).27 My sense is that in this very difficult passage Aristotle is challenging the usefulness of considering knowing as activity without considering who is doing the knowing or what they are knowing. He identifies the indifference to particularity such a position implies, and considers what would happen if one extended this indifference to living. He does so in order to cast light on the problem of looking at knowledge in this way, with the assumption that no one, barring pathology or trauma, would really take seriously that it is in fact insignificant whether they or another are living.28 It would seem, then, that Aristotle’s argument hinges here on an assumption about the operation of self-investment, in what makes one take oneself to be choiceworthy. One cannot both maintain that one finds one’s

27  εἰ οὖν τις ἀποτέμοι καὶ ποιήσειε τὸ γινώσκειν αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτὸ καὶ μὴ ** (ἀλλὰ τοῦτο μὲν λανθάνει, ὥσπερ ἐν τῷ λόγῳ γέγραπται, τῷ μέντοι πράγματι ἔστι μὴ λανθάνειν), οὐθὲν ἂν διαφέροι ἢ τὸ γινώσκειν ἄλλον ἀνθ’ αὑτοῦ· τὸ δ’ ὅμοιον τοῦ ζῆν ἀνθ’ αὑτοῦ ἄλλον. εὐλόγως δὴ τὸ ἑαυτοῦ αἰσθάνεσθαι καὶ γνωρίζειν αἱρετώτερον. Here I simply accept Inwood and Woolf ’s supplement for the lacuna in the text and cite their translation. 28 Although presently we will encounter the possibility of just such an indifference, accompanied, however, by a significantly transformed sense of self. Similarly, his construction of the maternal bond broaches an indifference towards one’s own life which we explore in detail in Chapter 6.

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perceiving and knowing to be most choiceworthy and that it makes no difference who is doing the perceiving and the knowing, and yet this latter claim arises out of considering know­ledge alone by itself. This means that the target of the claim is an approach to knowing that overlooks it as a determinate and determining activity, that is, an activity undertaken by particular knowers in particular places. In its complete independence from contingency, the case for the divine knower is different, but this may very well then broach the limitations of the example of the divine in assessing the lives of selfsufficient humans and whether or not they would choose to share their lives with others.29 In any event, it is precisely the connection between knowing and living as determinate that is asserted in the complex and difficult passage that follows: One must combine two points in the argument, that living is choicewor­ thy and the good is [hoti te to zēn [kai] haireton kai hoti to agathon], and on this basis they must possess the same thing, i.e., this kind of nature. So if it is always the case that, when there is a pair of columns of this sort, one of them is always lined up with the choiceworthy; and the object of knowledge and the object of perception are there because, to put it generally, they participate in the nature of the determinate, so that wishing to perceive oneself just is wishing that oneself be de­ter­min­ ate—since, then, we are not an object of knowledge or perception just in our own right but rather by participation in the capacities that are involved in knowing and perceiving (for, when perceiving, one becomes the object of perception in this way and to this extent, insofar as one is antecedently perceiving and in the manner and place in which one is perceiving; and when knowing one becomes the object of knowledge); consequently one wishes always to live because one wishes always to know and this is because one wishes oneself to be the object of know­ledge. 

(1244b34–1245a10)30

29  This is Whiting’s argument—that the example of the divine overlooks an essential feature of specifically human knowing, namely that our pleasure in knowing is increased when we do it with others. 30  δεῖ γὰρ ἅμα συνθεῖναι δύο ἐν τῷ λόγῳ, ὅτι τε τὸ ζῆν [καὶ] αἱρετόν, καὶ ὅτι τὸ ἀγαθόν, καὶ ἐκ τούτων ὅτι τὸ αὐτὸ τοῖς ὑπάρχειν τὴν τοιαύτην φύσιν. εἰ οὖν ἐστιν ἀεὶ τῆς τοιαύτης

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Aristotle here asserts the strongest connection between living and knowing, between being alive and the exercise of rational capacities. What this argument seems to be claiming is that in wishing to live, one wishes to exercise the highest capacity of which one is capable; in humans this is the rational capacity. The reason why the exercise of one’s highest capacity is so desired is because it is the activity in which one most is as this determinate being, that is, in which one’s being is asserted and affirmed. The  transition between being the subject of perception and knowledge and being the object of perception and knowledge is accomplished by asserting the determining nature of the actions of perceiving and knowing—it is only by actively perceiving and knowing that one becomes, also, an object of perceiving and knowing.31 As determinate, one then becomes not only an agent of knowledge, but also an object of knowledge, that is, one becomes intelligible, a bearer of meaning, something to be known, i.e., possessing sufficient internal coherence and integrity as to be knowable. Having established why one wishes to live, Aristotle turns to establish why one wishes to live with others: The choice to share life might seem silly from a certain point of view (first, in the case of things we share with other animals, as with eating together or drinking together, what difference does it make, if we set aside conversation, if we do these together or apart? But even to share in conversation about just anything is a similar situation. At the same time, it is not possible for friends who are self-sufficient either to teach or to συστοιχίας ἡ ἑτέρα ἐν τῇ τοῦ αἱρετοῦ τάξει, καὶ τὸ γνωστὸν καὶ τὸ αἰσθητόν ἐστιν ὡς ὅλως εἰπεῖν τῷ κοινωνεῖν τῆς ὡρισμένης φύσεως· ὥστε τὸ αὑτοῦ βούλεσθαι αἰσθάνεσθαι τὸ αὑτὸν εἶναι τοιονδὶ βούλεσθαι ἐστίν. ἐπεὶ οὖν οὐ κατ’ αὐτούς ἐσμεν ἕκαστον τούτων, ἀλλὰ κατὰ μετάληψιν τῶν δυνάμεων ἐν τῷ αἰσθάνεσθαι ἢ γνωρίζειν (αἰσθανόμενος μὲν γὰρ αἰσθητὸς γίνεται ταύτῃ κατὰ τοῦτο, καθὰ πρότερον αἰσθάνεται, καὶ ᾗ καὶ οὗ, γνωστὸς δὲ γινώσκων)· ὥστε διὰ τοῦτο καὶ ζῆν ἀεὶ βούλεται, ὅτι βούλεται ἀεὶ γνωρίζειν, τοῦτο δὲ ὅτι αὐτὸς εἶναι τὸ γνωστόν. Here again I rely heavily on Inwood and Woolf ’s admirable translation of this ­difficult passage. 31  As several scholars have observed, this account of the determinate nature of perceiving and knowing is consistent with the account of substance in the Metaphysics, with its em­phasis on the determinate nature of substance residing in a thing’s ability to be determined, and further determined, that is, to undergo change. See Kosman (2004), Whiting (2012), and McCabe (2012).

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  59 learn; for if one is learning, one is not in the proper condition, and if one is teaching, one’s friend is not, and friendship is likeness [homoiotēs]). (1245a11–18)32

The burden this argument places on Aristotle is to demonstrate the unique character of human shared life, that what living together means in the human context cannot be reduced to taking meals together nor to idle chitchat, nor even to conversation oriented toward learning. That is, according to this argument, the capacity for language alone does not fully explain human living with one another, and Aristotle cannot hang a justification of shared life on the possession of logos. Nor does he do so, preferring instead to argue that one ought to live with others by focusing on the pleasure that accompanies doing what one loves with one’s friends: We all take greater pleasure in sharing good things with friends, insofar as it falls to each to share in as good an object as possible; but some share in bodily pleasures, others in contemplating music, others in phil­ oso­phy. A friend should have the experience at the same time; whence the saying “distant friends are a burden”; consequently they should not be apart when it is going on. This is why sexual passion is thought to be like friendship; for lovers desire to live together [tou gar suzēn oregetai ho erōn], but not as they should, rather, according to perception. (1245a19–26)33

What the previous examples of dining together and learning together miss is precisely the pleasure that arises from the sharing of those activities that most allow one to attain the human good. It is attending to the intimacy from which this pleasure arises that 32  τὸ δὴ συζῆν αἱρεῖσθαι δόξειε μὲν ἂν εἶναι σκοπουμένοις πως εὔηθες (ἐπὶ τῶν κοινῶν πρῶτον καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ζῴοις, οἷον τοῦ συνεσθίειν ἢ τοῦ συμπίνειν· τί γὰρ διαφέρει τὸ πλησίον οὖσι ταῦτα συμβαίνειν ἢ χωρίς, ἂν ἀφέλῃς τὸν λόγον; ἀλλὰ μὴν καὶ τοῦ λόγου κοινωνεῖν τοῦ τυχόντος ἕτερον τοιοῦτον· ἅμα τε οὔτε διδάσκειν οὔτε μανθάνειν τοῖς αὐταρκέσι φίλοις οἷόν τε· μανθάνων μὲν γὰρ αὐτὸς οὐκ ἔχει ὡς δεῖ, διδάσκοντος δ’ ὁ φίλος, ἡ δ’ ὁμοιότης φιλία). 33  πάντες ἥδιον τῶν ἀγαθῶν μετὰ τῶν φίλων κοινωνοῦμεν, καθ’ ὅσον ἐπιβάλλει ἕκαστον καὶ οὗ δύναται ἀρίστου, ἀλλὰ τούτων τῷ μὲν ἡδονῆς σωματικῆς, τῷ δὲ θεωρίας μουσικῆς, τῷ δὲ φιλοσοφίας. καὶ τὸ ἅμα δεῖ εἶναι τῷ φίλῳ. διό φησι “μόχθος οἱ τηλοῦ φίλοι”, ὥστ’ οὐ δεῖ γενέσθαι ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων τούτου γινομένου. ὅθεν καὶ ὁ ἔρως δοκεῖ φιλίᾳ ὅμοιον εἶναι· τοῦ γὰρ συζῆν ὀρέγεται ὁ ἐρῶν, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ᾗ μάλιστα δεῖ, ἀλλὰ κατ’ αἴσθησιν.

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allows Aristotle to discern what in the comparison between divine and human is true and what leads one off course. Aristotle describes this intimacy in the following manner: A friend wants to be, just as the proverb says, “another Heracles, another self.” But they are sundered and it is hard for them to come to be in one. By nature a friend is most akin [suggenestaton], but one is similar in body, another in soul, and among these one is similar with respect to one part, another to another. But nevertheless a friend wishes to be, as it were, a separate self. So, necessarily, the perception of a friend is perception of oneself, in a way, and knowing oneself, in a way. So that it makes sense that sharing vulgar pleasures and living with a friend would be pleasant (for at the same time there is always a perception of him), but it is even more so with the more divine pleas­ ures. The reason for this is that it is always more pleasurable to contem­ plate oneself engaged with a better good. Sometimes this is a passion, sometimes an action, and sometimes something else. If one contem­ plates oneself living well, and one’s friend also living well, and together being active in shared life [en de tōi suzēn sunergein], then it is a sharing of that which belongs to the end in the highest degree. Therefore it is contemplating together and feasting together [suntheōrein kai suneuōcheisthai], for these associations seem not to be on account of sustenance and necessity, but on account of enjoyments [apolauseis]. But each wishes to share life engaged in the end for which one happens to be capable. If not, then one most wishes to benefit and be benefited by friends. Thus it is clear that one really should share life [suzēn], and that everyone wishes for this, and especially so for the happiest and best person.  (1245a29–1245b11)34 34  ὁ γὰρ φίλος βούλεται εἶναι, ὥσπερ ἡ παροιμία φησίν, ἄλλος Ἡρακλῆς, ἄλλος αὐτός. διέσπασται δὲ καὶ χαλεπὸν τὰ ἐφ’ ἑνὸς γενέσθαι· ἀλλὰ κατὰ μὲν τὴν φύσιν τὸ συγγενέστατον, κατὰ δὲ τὸ σῶμα ὅμοιος ἕτερος, ἄλλος δὲ κατὰ τὴν ψυχήν, καὶ τούτων κατὰ μόριον ἕτερος ἕτερον. ἀλλ’ οὐθέν τε ἧττον βούλεται ὥσπερ αὐτὸς διαιρετὸς εἶναι ὁ φίλος. τὸ οὖν τοῦ φίλου αἰσθάνεσθαι τὸ αὑτοῦ πως ἀνάγκη αἰσθάνεσθαι εἶναι, καὶ τὸ αὑτόν πως γνωρίζειν. ὥστε καὶ τὰ φορτικὰ μὲν συνήδεσθαι καὶ συζῆν τῷ φίλῳ ἡδὺ εὐλόγως (συμβαίνει γὰρ ἐκείνου ἅμα αἴσθησις ἀεί), μᾶλλον δὲ τὰς θειοτέρας ἡδονάς. αἴτιον δ’ ὅτι ἀεὶ ἥδιον ἑαυτὸν θεωρεῖν ἐν τῷ βελτίονι ἀγαθῷ. τοῦτο δ’ ἐστὶν ὁτὲ μὲν πάθος, ὁτὲ δὲ πρᾶξις, ὁτὲ δὲ ἕτερόν τι. εἰ δ’ αὐτὸν εὖ ζῆν, καὶ οὕτω καὶ τὸν φίλον, ἐν δὲ τῷ συζῆν συνεργεῖν, ἡ κοινωνία τῶν ἐν τέλει μάλιστά γε. διὸ συνθεωρεῖν καὶ συνευωχεῖσθαι, οὐ τὰ διὰ τροφὴν καὶ τὰ ἀναγκαῖα· αἱ τοιαῦται ** ὁμιλίαι δοκοῦσιν εἶναι, ἀλλὰ ἀπολαύσεις. ἀλλ’ ἕκαστος οὗ δύναται

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The image of friendship Aristotle offers here—the bringing together of what has been sundered—governs both the necessity of asserting that in perceiving a friend one perceives oneself and the need for qualifying this very assertion. Aristotle envisions a total subjectivity that is fragmented in such a way as to have parts that contain elem­ ents of the whole, but in distorted and partial form, some resembling the whole in body, some in soul; encounters between the parts entail a sense of natural kinship but include also a sense of distortion, one sees oneself “in a way,” as though one is looking at oneself through a fun-house mirror. In one friend one sees one’s eyes, in another one’s strength, in another one’s courage. It is not for nothing that McCabe takes Aristotle to be engaging here, in spirit if not in letter, with Aristophanes’ great speech from Plato’s Symposium. And McCabe is right to call attention to Aristotle’s emphasis on the frailty of human nature here, on the degrees by which one aims to attain, and falls short of, the good within one’s reach.35 In shared contemplation and feasting one comes as close as is humanly possible to the realization of the human good, that is, one “shares in the elements of the goal to the highest degree” and graces both one’s life and that of one’s friends. It is only when this sharing isn’t possible that one falls back on the more economic model of benefiting and being benefited. The model of contemplating together and feasting together imply something outside of this economy, a collective action that is irreducible to the functions of each “part” and that instead generates, momentarily, the subjectivity from which each has been sundered. In envisioning this kind of unity, Aristotle connects the perceiving of another to the perceiving of oneself; the presence of other selves provides the spectacle in which one can encounter the kinds of things one oneself would see and do, and thus enables one to make an object of oneself, viewing the friend as another self. Whence the long-held interpretation that this possibility of τυγχάνειν τέλους, ἐν τούτῳ βούλεται συζῆν· εἰ δὲ μή, καὶ ποιεῖν εὖ καὶ πάσχειν ὑπὸ τῶν φίλων αἱροῦνται μάλιστα.—ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν καὶ δεῖ συζῆν, καὶ ὅτι μάλιστα βούλονται πάντες, καὶ ὅτι ὁ εὐδαιμονέστατος καὶ ἄριστος μάλιστα τοιοῦτος, φανερόν. 35  McCabe (2012).

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self-awareness is the reason why even a self-sufficient person would want to have friends36 and the objection that this instrumentalizes the friend in a manner that does not do justice to Aristotle’s insistence elsewhere that one care for the friend for the friend’s sake and not one’s own.37 If we take Aristotle’s complete argument into account, however, we must acknowledge that it is not only a matter of perceiving myself when perceiving my friend, or of perceiving my friend as myself, but of perceiving together and knowing together, of sunaisthanesthai and suggnōrizein. And, as Aryeh Kosman puts it, “being conscious together does not indicate being conscious, as it were, side by side, but forming together a partnership of consciousness, a community characterized by the common perception that is sunaisthēsis.”38 We need to take this observation one step further, however, and observe that the interpretation in question does not take sufficiently into account the shared quality of the perceptions, thought, and life at issue. In other words, the tendency to treat sunaisthēsis as indicating “consciousness” or even “self-awareness” risks evacuating from the phenomena Aristotle is describing the embodied, cor­por­ eal dimensions of perception that makes the idea of perceiving together particularly provocative and, in this, does not get at the sense of the su(n)- constructions in this argument.39 As Daniel Heller-Roazen documents, the technical philosophical sense of sunaisthēsis as “consciousness” arose after Aristotle, amongst his commentators; Aristotle himself still maintains the sense of “feeling in common,” “a perception shared by more than one” and “applied to the communal life of many.”40 This sharing does more than simply affirm for me that I perceive and think, but also alters what I perceive and think,41 and it is this alteration that is missed by the 36  See, e.g., Cooper (1998), Stern-Gillet (1995), Kahn (1979), and Sorabji (2006) 234–9. 37  E.g., Whiting (2012) and McCabe (2012). 38  Kosman (2004) 148. 39 See, for instance, the objection in Osborne (2009) 365 and Kosman (2004). Even Pakaluk’s emphasis on the value of sunaisthēsis—“Sharing in perception is analogous to reflexive perception”—does not get at this more embodied sense, see Pakaluk (1998) 215. 40  Heller-Roazen (2009) 81, see references in 310 note 1. 41  This possibility of alteration is what makes friends who are good especially useful to the good, for “they seem to become even better people by putting the friendship to work and by straightening one another out, for they have their rough edges knocked off by the things they like in one another” (EN 1172a13).

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proponents of the self-knowledge reading of this argument, as McCabe suggests by means of a pair of charged questions: “Why should we not be able to think of a rich perceptual life together, just as we might have a rich shared intellectual life? . . . Is it the mischief of skeptical arguments that prevent us from seeing Aristotle’s point in EE—that we can have a genuinely shared life of the eye and the ear?”42 An emphasis on the sharing of experiences affects the sense of the friend as another self. There are a variety of ways of characterizing this sharing. Kosman, for instance, places the emphasis on shared action in the world: “Living together, then involves a cor­ por­ ate life properly called political, the life of comrades engaged in shared projects of language, thought, action and culture,”43 while Catherine Osborne focuses on shared observation of the world—“your friend will not be someone who looks at you in particular, nor someone who looks at himself in particular, but someone who looks out with you on the same shared world of things and people”44—but both argue that Aristotle’s text calls for a more robust sense of sharing than the “self-knowledge” interpretation puts forth, and with this I am in agreement. They both also call attention to the way in which this sharing troubles any sense in which there is a self, for Aristotle, prior to the determinate and determining action of perceiving and thinking. For both, the 42  McCabe (2012) 72. Of course, the notion of a shared eye and ear also have problematic possibilities, see, e.g., Brill (forthcoming). 43  Kosman (2004) 150. This reading broaches the political dimension I want to inject into the discussion. See History of Animals for the claim that it is the pursuit of a common good that distinguishes political animals from other forms of gregarious animals: not all gregarious creatures are political, but those that are are such as to act toward one common thing; humans are political creatures as are the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane (488a9–10). On the collaborative character of virtue friendships, see also Cooper (1977b) and Hitz (2011), the importance of which, as Hitz observes, has otherwise been largely neglected by commentators of the Nicomachean Ethics (see, e.g., Pangle (2002)); the same cannot be said of the Eudemian Ethics, e.g., Osborne (2009), Whiting (2012), and McCabe (2012). Whiting’s emphasis on the role of pleasure in Aristotle’s account in the EE goes a long way in explaining why friends do not diminish the happy person’s self-sufficiency. The distinction Hitz (2011) asserts between collaborative activity and similarity between friends obscures an important tension in Aristotle, namely, that the collaboration both arises from and furthers a similarity of character. 44  Osborne (2009) 362. See also 352 (especially her translation of gnorizein as “observation” rather than “knowing” pointed out in note 9) and 356 for this emphasis on shared observation.

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sharing of perception, thought, and life expands, augments, enhances the self. At the same time, Kosman’s and Osborne’s insistence on the having of friends for the sake of the maintenance and integrity of a discreet and individual self opens them both to Whiting’s criticism that their readings still fail to take into account the value of the friend for him or herself and not simply for the expansion, augmentation, and enhancement of my self. That is, both read the friend as another self with the inflection on the self, whereas Whiting would like to read it as the friend is an other self. This is perhaps most apropos of Kosman, for whom the stakes of his analysis of friendship in the Eudemian Ethics include the question of whether we can say that “the subject” appears in ancient philosophy or is a more modern invention of Augustinian and Cartesian philosophy.45 Thus, while he will provocatively conclude that his analysis of subjectivity in Aristotle “may require us to abandon myths of the rad­ ical privacy and interiority of subjective consciousness” and require “that we come to see consciousness more on the model of collective psychic phenomena such as language,” he nevertheless concludes that “the self is not abrogated in social life, but amplified.”46 I follow Whiting in insisting that what is missed in this reading is Aristotle’s emphasis on the uniquely human pleasure that is taken in the presence of other humans, a pleasure that is all the more intense when humans perform their most cherished tasks with ­others. Those activities themselves are chosen on the basis of the person’s sense that they are the highest good to which the person can aspire, and the fact that others view them that way attests to the kindred character of the two people. What is shared between the best friends, then, is a vision of how to attain the human good; the pleasure that arises from this shared vision, this experience of alignment between one’s judgment and actions regarding the good and that of others, just is the unique pleasure humans take in one another. A life bereft of this pleasure could not be happy. But I would add to Whiting’s account that Aristotle is not only concerned with the pleasure I take in sharing favored activities with 45  Kosman (2004) 154.

46  Kosman (2004) 154.

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another, but in the sharing of pleasure with another. This would not only include taking pleasure in my friend’s doing well and being pleased, but also being pleased along with my friend, and, as we shall see, Aristotle will take the sense of being-pleased-along-with quite far. That is, I would like to inject a more explicitly political perspective into this debate and wonder in what sense one could come to consider selfhood (or subjectivity) as one’s own at all.47 The question that remains in Kosman’s otherwise quite persuasive reading is less whether there is a self, than to whom does the self belong? Over what is selfhood, or subjectivity, authoritative? Kosman’s claim about the focus of Aristotle’s argument here—“It is thus a question not about the nature of personal identity, but about the nature of the self, not about being one particular person rather than another, but about being a first person subject”—broaches my question but rejects it in telling terms: “It is subjectivity that I am suggesting is for Aristotle not a transferrable commodity that can be passed from one person to another.”48 I wonder about this. In the vision of the total subjectivity from which friends have been sundered, is Aristotle not presenting a corporate, or communal, first-person subject? Is he not presenting a self, that, to borrow from McCabe, “is a composite entity, made up of the two of us”?49 And these questions open up several others: Are the noble deeds for which shared life is the sake the property of an individual or a collective agent? Are they what is worked or what is working through an individual doer? Put differently, to the extent that friends who are sundered are brought back together in the performance of those deeds that give them the greatest sense of the meaning of their lives—i.e., in the performance of the highest human good of which they are 47  Whiting, too, evinces some unease at the language of ownership, suggesting instead that we look to the epistemic value of the experiences under question (see Whiting (2012) 81 note 6). But I want to tarry with why the language of ownership appears natural here, and with what Aristotle might be suggesting about the sense in which the experiences and pleasures under consideration can or cannot be considered “mine.” See also the engagement with Parfit in Sorabji (2006). 48  Kosman (2004) 140. 49  McCabe (2012). In essence, I am asking whether we find in Aristotle the “inter­sub­ject­ ive creature who is plural and decorporealized” that Farenga (2006) 437 sees in Thucydides, or an anticipation of the shared intentionality hypothesis posed in Tomasello (2014) and anticipated in Tomasello and Rakoczy (2003).

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capable—is the determinate character of their lives epiphenomenal to the good they are collectively trying to realize? These questions, I maintain, are native to Aristotle’s argument, and made particularly pressing by it if one delves a bit deeper into why humans come to view one another as other selves in the first place, what the basis for this encounter is, such that it results in this kind of pleasure. And for this, we have to shift our focus from one’s relations to one’s friends to one’s relation to oneself. For if the friend can appear as another self, this is because the self can appear as an other, as an object, and, perhaps surprisingly, not only as an object of perception but also as an object of desire.

1.3  Love of Self Aristotle’s investigation in the Eudemian Ethics into whether or not one can be a friend to oneself is resolved within just a few lines: “In a sense it is friendship by analogy, but not simply” (1240a13–14). Aristotle immediately turns to lay out the structure of the analogy. Because “being loved and loving occur between two separate ­people” (EE 1240a14–15) one cannot simply be a friend to oneself. But one can be like a friend to oneself, and the basis for the analogy resides in the structure of the human soul, “insofar as the soul too is in a sense two things” (EE 1240a20). Whereas in his discussion of whether the self-sufficient person has friends, human beings are treated as sundered from one another, here the individual human being is constitutively sundered into aspects or parts, and we can imagine more and less friendly and acrimonious relations between these soul parts. But, again, this analogy is limited, and the majority of his investigation into this aporia is with laying out why even the analogy does not hold without qualification. Aristotle’s elaboration on this point has profound implications for his account of human friendship. He begins by observing the extent to which his own and his contemporaries’ common understanding of friendship is determined by one’s relation to oneself. For instance, several of the markers of friendship that can come to be sources of conflict stem from this

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relation: “For we believe that a friend is one who wishes good things, or the kinds of things one thinks are good, not for one’s own sake but for the person’s sake; in another way one would seem most to love someone if one wishes for the person to be and not for one’s own sake, even if one does not distribute good things to the person; in another way it is the one with whom one chooses to live [hōi suzēn haireitai] on account of their own company and not for something else” (1240a24–9). Moreover, “we will take it as a sign of affection to share in the sorrow [sunalgein] of one who is suffering, not for something else (as slaves toward their masters who, in suffering, are harsh) but for their sake, just as mothers with their children and the birds who share each others’ sorrow [sunōdinontes]” (1240a33–6). And, broaching the friends as other selves construction, it is customary to hold that “equality is friendship” and that “true friends are one soul”—all of these, claims Aristotle, refer back to the individual (1240b2–4). “Most of all, living together and sharing in joy and pain [to suzēn kai to sugchairein kai to sunalgein], and being one soul, and not being able to live without one another, but dying together [sunapothnēskein]: this is how it is for one person, and perhaps he even associates [homilei] with himself ” (1240b8–11). In envisioning the extension of sociality to oneself, Aristotle pushes to the furthest degree the sense in which one can be a friend to oneself. This is to say, most of the ways of interacting with another human are also, and in some cases primarily, ways of interacting with oneself. So, it is for good reason that one would investigate the relationship between friendship and how one relates to oneself. However, their proximity is not without qualification. For while “all of these things are features of the good person’s relationship to himself ” in the person who is base or dissipated, “there is disharmony” (1240b11–13). This disharmony interferes with one’s ability and desire to spend time with oneself, to be of one mind as regards one’s pleasures and pains, to live without regret. Thus, one’s affection for oneself, while natural, is neither unmediated nor absolute— that is, one is not a friend to oneself for one’s own sake; rather, one is a friend to oneself to the extent that one is good. Or, as Aristotle puts it,

68  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life Insofar as a person is one and not divided, he is an object of desire for himself [orektos autos hautou]. This is what the good person and the friend according to virtue are like, while the corrupt person is not one but many, and in the same day other than himself and impulsive. Therefore, one’s friendship to oneself is referred to one’s friendship to the good [hōste kai hē autou pros hauton philia anagetai pros tēn tou agathou]. It is because one is in a way the same as oneself, and one, and good to oneself, that one is a friend to oneself and an object of desire for oneself [tautēi autos hautōi philos kai orektos]. This is what one is like by nature, but the base person is unnatural [para phusin]. (1240b14–21)

In another idiom we could say, then, that human self-love is ­li­bid­in­al—we can be our own object of desire. But it is also mediated. That is, it is predicated upon human goodness, and while this goodness is natural, and Aristotle will emphasize several times that there is goodness in everyone (e.g., 1238b12 and 14), one’s goodness may become so profoundly compromised as to severely undermine the basis of one’s self-affection. To add to the difficulties of the base person, the compromised source of their self-affection does not necessarily impinge upon their sense of their own self-worth, for, Aristotle claims, “everyone believes that he himself is good” (1240b27, see also EN 1168a5). The base person is wrong, then, in his estimation of himself, or, better, insofar as everyone has some good in them, the base person is more likely to overestimate his goodness, and, in fact, this skewed judgment pertaining to oneself is an aspect of being base, and is something to which most humans are vulnerable, as Aristotle observes in his discussion of the conflict that arises among unequal friendships when the degree of superiority of one is slight: “But people are bad judges of what is small; their own good points appear big because they are close at hand but someone else’s seem small because they are far off ” (1239a15–17). Virtuous people, on the other hand, are more likely to have an accurate understanding of themselves. Thus, it is “the person who is good simply” who seeks to be a friend to himself, “because he has two things in himself which naturally wish to be friendly and cannot be separated from each other” (1240b28–30). I take this to refer

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back to Aristotle’s point that the analogy between friendship and one’s affection for oneself holds to the extent that the human soul is, in a sense, two things. What these two things are receives some specification in the subsequent claim Aristotle makes, one which draws out sharply the importance seeming to be good has for our understanding of human self-awareness: “Hence, in the case of human beings, each person seems to be a friend to himself, but in the case of other animals this is not so; for example, a horse does not seem good to itself, and so is not a friend. But this is also not the case for children, until they become capable of decision, since only then does their mind disagree with their appetite” (1240b30–4). What distinguishes the human from the horse in this passage is less a simple awareness of one’s being than an awareness of one’s goodness, less a matter of self-consciousness than a matter of self-regard. Or, perhaps better, whatever awareness of one’s being one comes to attain arises because one is aware of one’s goodness. It would seem, further, that human friendship toward oneself, or affection for oneself, is based upon psychic complexity, and, more interestingly, on the possession of two parts that, while naturally friendly to one another, are also such as to be at odds with another, productive of a self-estrangement that seems to have two sides, a positive side insofar as it provides the basis for one to become an object to oneself, to seem to be something to oneself, that is, to seem to be good; and a negative side, insofar as their divergence can yield a conflict that opens the possibility for the disharmonious and fractured self. There are, of course, limits to the degree of fragmentation one can suffer, limits drawn more clearly when Aristotle marks the similarity between being a friend to oneself and friendships between family members: “And friendship with oneself is like friendship among kin. In neither case is it up to them to dissolve the friendship, but even if there is disharmony they, in one case, still have to be kin to each other, and in the other case the person still has to be one individual as long as he lives” (1240b34–7). This marks a limit to the degree of disharmony and disintegration in even the base—psychic disharmony does not unmake the individual until it kills him (which it certainly may do), but also observes a

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limit to the extent to which we can create ourselves. We may choose to act, but we do not choose or invent the inner necessity that determines the effect of those actions. According to Aristotle, I can choose to do a just thing, but the elevating function of just deeds, as with the degenerating function of unjust deeds, is not up to me. The operation of character formation is not a matter of choice. Thus, it would seem that for Aristotle human self-awareness arises out of human self-regard, that is, one’s perception that one is follows from one’s perception that one is good, a perception that can be more or less accurate, and that provides the basis for the similarity, real or imagined, between people on the basis of which they could come to esteem another as they esteem themselves. The capacity for self-perception, then, arises from the possession of a complex soul that is able to grasp what is good. The actualization of this capacity, however, requires the presence of others; as McCabe puts it, for Aristotle, human nature is “such as to actualize in communion.”50 Or, as Claudia Baracchi observes, in a slightly different idiom, Aristotle’s account of complete friendship asserts that “I am toward others and the other pervades me ab origine.”51 It is this communal actualization that distinguishes humans from the divine in EE 7. Unlike the divine, humans are in need of something external (1245b18). I take this something external to include not only the presence of other people, but the concretization of their presence in a world, in the sphere of shared value and meaning produced by the intimacies not only of shared perception but also of shared affect. In this regard, it is worth lingering a bit longer with the degree of intimacy envisioned by the sharing of affect. In a passage we have already seen a portion of, shared affect provides not only the basis for a comparison with non-human animals, but also broaches perhaps the deepest melding of selves. I cite the entire passage below: Again, we will take it as a sign of affection to share in the sorrow [sunalgein] of one who is suffering, not for something else (as slaves toward their masters who, in suffering, are harsh) but for their sake, 50  McCabe (2012) 64.

51  Baracchi (2007) 274.

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics  71 just as mothers with their children and the birds who share each ­others’ sorrow [sunōdinontes]. A friend especially wishes not just to share in the pain [sullupeisthai] of a friend, but to share the same pain, such as sharing thirst [sundipsēn] when he is thirsty, if possible, and if not then as nearly as possible. The same account applies to joy; it is a sign of friendship that one feels joy not for something else but because the other feels joy.  (1240a33–1240b1)52

With respect to the sharing of affect, to feeling-with, what the presence of other people adds is not only the spectacle of noble action, but also the shared nexus of affect that imbues the world with meaning and significance. It is not logos alone, then, that creates the shared space of meaning, but also both a shared perception of what is pleasurable and what is painful, and shared experiences of joy and grief.53 For if, to borrow from Elaine Scarry, pain is worlddestroying, the sharing of pain is world-building, insofar as it helps form the web of shared affect and evaluation that imbues one’s habitat with meaning and into which one is born and acculturated.54 That is, it serves as an essential part of the bond that forms on the basis of the human impulse for political community and the human inclination for shared life. And it is worth noting, while reserving more extensive discussion for Chapter 6, that the care of the mother has stood out in several places as an exemplary form of loving, a point all the more striking in that it grants to the mother a paradigmatic form of action rather than passion because, as Aristotle insists, loving is a form of action and for this reason it is more noble

52  ἔτι τὸ ἀλγοῦντι συναλγεῖν μὴ δι’ ἕτερόν τι [ἀγαπᾶν θήσομεν], οἷον οἱ δοῦλοι πρὸς τοὺς δεσπότας, ὅτι χαλεποὶ ἀλγοῦντες, ἀλλ’ οὐ δι’ αὐτούς, * ὥσπερ αἱ μητέρες τοῖς τέκνοις καὶ οἱ συνωδίνοντες ὄρνιθες. βούλεται γὰρ μάλιστά γε οὐ μόνον συλλυπεῖσθαι ὁ φίλος τῷ φίλῳ, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὴν αὐτὴν λύπην, οἷον διψῶντι συνδιψῆν, εἰ ἐνεδέχετο, ὅτι [μὴ] ἐγγύτατα. ὁ δ’ αὐτὸς λόγος καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ χαίρειν· μὴ δι’ ἕτερόν τι, ἀλλὰ δι’ ἐκεῖνον, ὅτι χαίρει, φιλικόν. 53  We could observe here Homer’s ambivalence toward logos: Because individual heroes can speak to one another across Achaean and Trojan lines, it is in the collective of Trojan and epikouroi forces that the effects of linguistic heterogeneity are felt. “Now when the men of both sides were set in order by their leaders, the Trojans came on with clamor and shouting, like wildfowl . . . But the Achaian men went silently, breathing valor, stubbornly minded each in his heart to stand by the others” (3.1–9). Perhaps ironically, what the possession of a single “tongue” affords the Achaeans is silent deployment. 54  Scarry (1987).

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to love than to be loved.55 The mother’s love is an especially vivid indicator of this activity (see, e.g., 1241b1–9) insofar as she is able and willing to give up her child if it is in the child’s best interest (1239a36 and 1245b30). At the same time, Aristotle is careful to mark the limit of our capacity for shared affect—in the Nicomachean Ethics it is this limit that makes particularly clear the boundary that shared life creates for the size of one’s community of friends: “it becomes difficult to share joy and pain [to sugchairein kai to sunalgein] intimately with many people, for it is likely to fall to one to rejoice with [sunēdesthai] one and grieve with [sunachthesthai] another at the same time. Probably it is better not to seek to be friends with many people, but however many as are sufficient for sharing life” (EN 1171a6–10).56 Nevertheless, he will insist in the Eudemian Ethics that, were it possible to share life with many people, this would be best (EE 1245b22). We could then ask of our affective life what McCabe asks of our perceptive life: why should we not be able to think of a rich affective life together?57 Aristotle’s answer appears to be simply that we can, but only within certain limits that pertain to us insofar as we are mortal, insufficient, flawed, and fragile. In looking forward a bit, the provocation Aristotle opens here that is marked by McCabe’s question, the provocation to think of human self-perception as arising from human intimacy, and human intimacy, in turn, in terms of shared life, and the shared action, perception, and affect this entails, is anticipated by Plato. In his outline of what is required to bring about the unity his Socrates suggests is the source of the city’s flourishing, namely the radical refiguring of citizen’s desiderative life (the community of pleasure and pain) and the creation of a total cultural environment (the supervision not only of poets but of all craftspeople), we see the lengths Plato will go to produce McCabe’s “shared life of eye and ear.”58 Of course, Plato’s 55  See, e.g., EE 1237a35ff.; EE1241b1ff. with reference to other animals as well. 56  χαλεπὸν δὲ γίνεται καὶ τὸ συγχαίρειν καὶ τὸ συναλγεῖν οἰκείως πολλοῖς· εἰκὸς γὰρ συμπίπτειν ἅμα τῷ μὲν συνήδεσθαι τῷ δὲ συνάχθεσθαι. ἴσως οὖν εὖ ἔχει μὴ ζητεῖν ὡς πολυφιλώτατον εἶναι, ἀλλὰ τοσούτους ὅσοι εἰς τὸ συζῆν ἱκανοί. 57  Osborne (2009) 365 broaches this question as well, but does not develop it further. 58  This is the case for the Laws as well.

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Socrates’ demand for unity is precisely the demand Aristotle criticizes in his assessment of the Republic in the Politics; nevertheless there is reason to see a deeper sympathy between the two thinkers here.59 In the Republic, the community of pleasure and pain is described as the condition that results when citizens say “mine” and “my own” about the same. Plato’s emphasis on what citizens say is not incidental to the phenomenon he is describing—I think the idea here is, in part, to draw attention to the manner in which claims of ownership are enacted on both affective and discursive registers, and that it is this melding of language and attachment that undergirds all political institutions and cultural artifice. We are seeing something similar, I maintain, in Aristotle’s description of the degree of intimacy desired by friends. I will explore this further in Chapters 5 and 6. For now, we return to observe what this attention to Aristotle’s discussion of love of self has brought to our understanding of shared life. One’s relation to oneself brings out in greater detail a number of aspects of friendship that shared life helps to create and maintain: wishing for good things, wishing for existence, sharing in pleasure and pain and joy and grief to the most intimate degree, being one soul, “all of these refer back to the individual [hapanta tauta epanapheretai pros ton hena]” (1240b3–4) and all of them make it easier to see how viewing another as oneself arises. If, for instance, one desires to share in the pleasure and pain of another to such a degree as to share the same pain and pleasure (to the extent possible) then their very efforts at feeling-with blur the boundary between the two selves. The intimacy attained when one views another person as another self, then, resonates with one’s relation to oneself. But this relation is itself not simple, it is mediated through something else, namely one’s sense of the good. To the extent that one is good, one can be and seeks to be a friend to oneself. And while all people believe themselves to be good, not everyone is right about themselves. The 59 A sympathy recognized by Robert Price, in his observation of their grounding of friendship in the structure of human desire: In its exploration of what humans hold dear and see as most their own, Aristotle’s account of human philia, like Plato’s, views friendship “against the general backdrop of the structure of human desire.” Price (1989) 9.

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truly base are so fractured and dissolute that they do not seek to be friends to themselves but rather run away from themselves and in their fragmented state seek the company of others, not for the sake of those others, but in order to avoid themselves. The pleasure that arises from oneself, then, is a pleasure in one’s own capacity to realize the human good, and one’s pleasure in others is a pleasure in their ability to realize the human good. It is this similarity with respect to the good that provides the basis for their likeness, for their being each other’s own (to oikeion, EN 1169b33), and thus, in those who are really good, this similarity is sufficiently profound as to blur the boundary between self and other. As both are deeply good-oriented and right about how to attain that good and also deeply committed to this attainment, the life of one is an af­fi rm­ ation of the other, and the pleasure one takes in the contemplation of their actions is the pleasure one takes in the kind of actions one would also perform; however, and I take this to be decisive, not primarily because one would also perform them, but because they are good. Because one’s affection for oneself is a function of one’s love of the good, one’s love of the friend is not instrumental to one’s love of oneself, rather, both forms of love are expressions of one’s love of the good, and the better one is, the greater one’s love for oneself and one’s friends. The intimacy of the good is such that even their selfhood is shared, and the subjectivity that emerges is reducible to neither one nor the other.60 Here we see Aristotle broaching an in­tim­acy that flirts with an indifference toward who is doing the acting and living, oneself or one’s friend, and expressed in the pinnacle of active virtue friendship, the virtuous person’s willingness to give up the performance of a noble deed so that a friend may perform it instead (EN 1169a32–4). Sharing life allows one the 60  This is my response to Whiting’s characterization of the difference between herself and McCabe on friendship in the EE, see Whiting (2012) 78. The intimacy Aristotle envisions here challenges the sense in which the self at stake could be said to belong to either party, and in this I am in agreement with McCabe (2012) 79 that “the self is a composite entity, made up of the two of us.” Whiting goes on to wonder if it is necessary to posit a shared self or if there is some other way to explain how one might take an interest and pleasure in the activities of another like the ones she takes in her own. My response to this is that it is unnecessary to posit another way if we take sufficiently into account the capacity for shared affect; that is, it is not only pleasure that must be attended to more carefully, but the capacity to share pleasure.

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conditions for this contemplation of the human good, and in this, Aristotle aligns it in particular with primary friendship: the best most reward others and themselves by living with those to whom they are akin, and the base are most detrimental to themselves and others in so living (EN 1172a8–15). Thus, to return to the debate about friends as other selves, while Kosman and Osborne posit a friend as another self; and Whiting posits a friend as an other self; McCabe posits a friendship that opens the possibility of an other self, a model of subjectivity that is reducible to neither party. I am most sympathetic to McCabe’s approach, but want to also direct our attention to what makes this entire encounter possible, namely the world of shared affect, perception, and actions (including contemplation) and to ask what this collectively constructed world tells us not only about subjectivity but about the realization of the highest human good. And in the spirit of this query, we must note that we have also seen some pressing questions opened about this world and the processes that make and unmake it. The relation between human self-perception and human in­tim­acy suggests that humans are animals who are especially able to pursue a common task, that is, who are especially political. And throughout both ethics we encounter assertions of human exceptionality: humans are unique amongst animals because they form virtue friendships (EE 1236b6), because they possess that capacity for decision (e.g., EE 1236b6), and because their pairings fulfill not only a reproductive mandate but also a political impulse, they are especially averse to solitude, and especially “prone to forming a community with those with whom they have a natural kinship [phusei suggeneia]” (EE 1242a).61 And yet, while Aristotle marks self-regard off as uniquely human—horses do not seem good to themselves, and so are not friends—it is not automatically human, as neither do children (EE 1240b30–4). In marking out humans as especially political in this sense, Aristotle does not make them differently political from other animals, just more intensely so, as though the ability to

61  ἀλλὰ κοινωνικὸν ἄνθρωπος ζῷον πρὸς οὓς φύσει συγγένεια ἐστίν.

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perceive differences with respect to value is a more vivid form of the political animal’s impulse to achieve a common task. This is all to say that Aristotle’s markers of human exceptionality must be read within the broader context of philia in nature, a context that requires a zoological frame. And it is worth noting the degree of continuity between humans and non-human animals Aristotle envisions within this frame. We have already encountered the similarity between mothers and birds with respect to the sharing of suffering. But a similar continuity can be found between all animal parents, as Aristotle observes at the opening of his study of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics: “and friendship seems to be present by nature in a parent for a child and in a child for a parent, not only in humans but also in birds and most other animals, and among those of the same kind [homoethnesi] toward one another, and especially among human beings, whence we praise those who are friends of humanity [tous philanthrōpous]” (EN 1155a16–21).62 I follow Jennifer Whiting in reading these lines as marking out humans as especially clannish, especially prone to provincialism and insularity, and so as following this pattern of identifying a salient difference within a larger continuity.63 The friend of humanity is praised precisely for overcoming this impulse. Such a friend is in the best position to assert that “similar things automatically enjoy each other and a human being is the most pleasant thing for another human being” (EE 1237a28–9). This rare capacity to be a friend to humanity stands in tension with the tendency to affirm that “the voices, conditions, and pastimes of kindred people [tois homogenesin] are most pleasant to each other, and the same goes for other animals” (EE 1239b18–19). We should see Aristotle’s use of this zoological frame, then, as giving us an important marker for what is orienting his thought here—the point seems to be to locate human friendship within, and as an instance of, animal attachment, and to identify what makes it distinct within (not outside of) this sphere. That is, his efforts are 62  φύσει τ’ ἐνυπάρχειν ἔοικε πρὸς τὸ γεγεννημένον τῷ γεννήσαντι καὶ πρὸς τὸ γεννῆσαν τῷ γεννηθέντι, οὐ μόνον ἐν ἀνθρώποις ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν ὄρνισι καὶ τοῖς πλείστοις τῶν ζῴων, καὶ τοῖς ὁμοεθνέσι πρὸς ἄλληλα, καὶ μάλιστα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ὅθεν τοὺς φιλανθρώπους ἐπαινοῦμεν. 63  Whiting (2008).

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aimed at identifying the salient differences within a larger continuity. Here, the relevant differences make of human political life and impulses an intensification, rather than a rejection, of animal sociality, e.g., human clannishness is an extreme form of an animal impulse to have affection for what is “alike in kind.” At the same time, this orientation toward animality requires us to consider carefully what the basis for natural kinship is. Does it reside simply in my judgment and perception that something is like me? Or does it reside in reproductive life, in family lineage? As we will discuss in subsequent chapters, Aristotle does indeed extend the friends as other selves construction to family members, but in his discussion of whether the self-sufficient person will have friends the greatest form of human intimacy appears to be between two decent people on the basis of their decency. What brings people together in the most enduring form of philia is similarity with respect to the good. It is this similarity that provides the basis for their likeness, and thus, in those who are really good, this similarity is sufficiently profound as to blur the boundary between self and other. It is in the context of the assertion of the naturalness of friendship that we need to examine the significance of friendship as an act of choice and decision. This is fundamental to Aristotle’s understanding of primary friendship, which he defines in the Eudemian Ethics as “the reciprocal friendship and reciprocal decision among good people” (EE 1236b3).64 Aristotle’s invocation of decision in a form, antiproairesis, that only appears here in the Eudemian Ethics has important implications that he immediately turns to make explicit: “This kind of friendship is found only among humans (for they alone perceive decision [monon gar aisthanetai proaireseōs]), but the other kinds are also found among wild beasts; and 64  ἡ πρώτη φιλία ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἐστιν ἀντιφιλία καὶ ἀντιπροαίρεσις πρὸς ἀλλήλους. That this decision is reciprocated opens up the possibility for a collective form of proairesis with powerful political implications (and evokes the political sense of likemindedness). That we can exercise a distinguishing mark of human being together, indeed, that the fullest expression of the phenomenon of human friendship requires such a deciding about one another, grants a shared character to what might otherwise appear as one of the most individuating of human capacities. The possibility of a non-transactional model of this shared choosing is developed in Konstan (2018).

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usefulness is even apparent to some small degree between tame animals and humans and between tame animals and each other, as Herodotus says that the plover is useful to the crocodile and as diviners talk about the gatherings and separations of birds” (EE 1236b5–10). Here again, we encounter the assertion of a difference within the context of a continuity: while virtue friendship serves as a distinguishing mark of human beings, the most common kind of human friendship is also found amongst non-human animals and can even provide a form of attachment between humans and nonhuman animals. This passage invites consideration of the ethico-political significance of the very notion of choosing a human being. To choose a friend, to encounter another whose being and life are choiceworthy, extends the phenomenon of choice to the very conditions of existence themselves, conditions that elude the exercise of choice on the part of the individual whose life and being is at issue here. For while it is an object of choice to some (although, as we shall see, we should not make assumptions too quickly about who chooses the birth of others, so far as Aristotle is concerned), one’s birth is not an object of choice to oneself. Contending with the material conditions of human coming-to-be occupies a central role in the ancient Greek literary imagination. Reciprocal affection and reciprocal decision respond to a certain anxiety about the meaning of one’s life that is confronted whenever one considers those material conditions, to the egoic wound of not being in control of one’s birth. In the act of choosing another, in viewing another’s life and being as choiceworthy, and, in turn, in being the kind of person whom others choose, one affirms one’s being and comes as close as humanly possible to choosing one’s birth. This choosing of another is essential in building a human en­vir­ on­ment, one which includes not only family members but communities charged with collective decision-making about the just and the unjust, decisions concretized into institutions, cultural objects, and a particular way of life, i.e., into the essential features of the polis. And it is in the context of this effort to build a human habitat that we encounter also the vulnerability that arises from human intimacy as we have been tracing it, from choosing to share one’s

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life with others, a vulnerability marked in Aristotle’s earliest ­reference in the Nicomachean Ethics to shared life, in his account of the social virtues.

1.4  Shared Life and the Social Virtues In the gloss of the virtues of character that Aristotle provides near the end of the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics he includes three mean conditions which do not have common names but whose demonstration of the character of virtue as a mean still makes them worth exploring in some detail. These virtues are considered together because they all pertain to what Aristotle describes as the partnership (koinōnia) in words and deeds (1108a12), and are numbered as three because they differ with respect to the particular aspect of the social sphere they mark out: one pertains to those social contexts in which one speaks the truth about oneself or fails to do so (truthfulness, the vices of which are bragging and being ironic); the other two pertain to those social contexts in which one shares in the actions, pleasures, and pains of others or refuses to do so (friendliness, which concerns itself with pleasure in general daily interactions, the vices of which are obsequiousness and flattery; and charm, which pertains to leisured social contexts that are explicitly playful, the vices of which are buffoonery and boorishness).65 In his more extended discussion of these virtues in Book 4, the two virtues pertaining to the sharing of action, pleasure, and pain serve to mark out a kind of leisured decision-making with respect to one’s social activities, to what one does and with whom one does it, a decision-making that would seem to require some distance from one’s associates and their activities.66 65  In its demarcation of the working of truth and pleasure in the social arena, this community of words and deeds evokes a Platonic formulation that Aristotle will elsewhere treat quite critically, the community of pleasure and pain so necessary for the guardian class. 66  There is some discrepancy here between the EN and EE. For while in the EE these conditions are treated as mean conditions, Aristotle explicitly characterizes them as not virtues because they occur without decision (aneu proairesis, EE 1234a25), whereas in the EN not only are they treated as means states but as including decision—the braggart, for instance, is not a braggart in his capacity (en tē dunamai), but in his choice (all’ en tē proairesei, EN

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Recognizing oneself not only as a source of action but also as a source of pleasure and pain to others, one determines how and when to dole these out in the course of considering what activities should be shared and what shouldn’t. Moreover, one does so with an eye toward what is beautiful and advantageous, and here I think we must read this as what is beautiful and advantageous for the social milieu as well as one’s own character—that is, such a person must have some sense of the good of the community of words and actions in which he or she participates. Citizens do not choose the polis into which they are born, but at least some of them may choose the level, degree, and kind of engagement they undertake with those with whom they have been born to live. Finally, one must decide not only what actions to take part in but, and in some ways this is just an elaboration of this point, what pleasures one will share. The kind of intimacy that arises from participating in some deed with others is in its own right a powerful source of pleasure, one which hinges upon a decision made with an eye toward the advantage of the whole. They are thus not only coconspirators, sharing in action, but also sharing in passion, sharing in the pleasure and pain of their comrades. That their decision to do so is not motivated by a feeling of affection, this being what distinguishes this virtue from friendship proper, speaks directly to what is most essential about this virtue: one determines one’s participation in action, pleasure, and pain not according to what one likes or dislikes but according to the beautiful and the advantageous. To be an excessive source of pleasure, that is, to refuse to exempt oneself from anything and to refuse to give pain, marks one as obsequious if one does it without any ulterior motive, and a flatterer if one does it for one’s own gain. Indeed, the problem with obsequiousness is precisely its giving up of the distance required for decision-making, that is, its operating with a stance of perpetual assent, while the

1127b16)—and as virtues. Given the relatively minor treatment these receive in the EN it is not difficult to see why they might be treated more as affections than the results of decision in EE; nevertheless, for my purposes, the issue is more about the context in which they arise, and in both texts this context is the pleasure, pain, and truthfulness or lack thereof that arises in one’s daily intercourse with people.

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problem with flattery is its assenting not for the advantage of the social body but for the advantage of oneself. Aristotle then moves from the pleasures that arise from daily life with others to the truthfulness and lack thereof that can arise in those same contexts, that is, he turns to discuss “those who are truthful and those who are deceitful in words and deeds alike, and in the way they present themselves” (1127a19–20). While the braggart overestimates his worth and the ironic person disowns or understates “the things he has incurred [ta huparchonta],” “the person at the mean, being someone who calls each thing by its right name [authekastos], is apt to be truthful in his life as well as in speech, acknowledging the things he has incurred, and nothing greater or less, as his own” (1127a23–6). The virtue of truthfulness, then, arises in the context in which one makes claims, in word and deed, about what is one’s own. Like greatness of soul, this virtue seems to be closely bound up with one’s sense of one self and one’s merits within the larger social milieu, but whereas greatness of soul pertains to the accuracy with which one assesses oneself and the extent to which this assessment determines those actions of which one thinks oneself worthy, the emphasis here falls on how one presents this estimation of self to others and on one’s commitment to the truth. For truthful people are not so-called because of their fidelity to contractual obligations or their behavior regarding the things with which justice and injustice have to do, as these contexts have virtues of their own. Rather, what distinguishes the truthful person is precisely their truthfulness outside of these contexts, as this truthfulness would stem from being a lover of truth (philalēthēs, 1127b4), made all the more evident by there being little at stake in these cases about telling the truth. Thus, Aristotle seems to be marking out here a virtue that pertains to the extent to which one’s presentation of self is driven by one’s sense of what is true about oneself; that is, what one claims as one’s own, as belonging to oneself because of the kind of person one is, is determined by one’s sense of what is true about oneself and one’s social standing. As with friendliness, this would seem to require some sense for one’s standing in the larger social context, but while friendliness pertains to oneself as a source of pleasure and

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pain to others, truthfulness pertains to one’s ability to accurately acknowledge one’s worth and to present this worth accordingly. Its connection to justice and injustice resides here, in its relevance to one’s sense of what is one’s due, a sense that, as we learn from the Politics, is both foundational to the political bond and fragile (prone to inaccuracy) and thus a sense that is a source of instability—oligarchies and democracies fail because they fail to navigate properly what belongs to whom and to produce citizens with an accurate sense of their self-worth (a task Aristotle admits most humans perform poorly). Throughout Aristotle’s discussion of the social virtues, what is designated by shared life, by sharing in words and deeds, is a sphere of human life in which pleasure and pain, truth and falsehood, arise precisely in the manner in which people interact with one another. It thus indicates a sphere in which both shared pleasure and selfknowledge (or the lack thereof) become evident. The conception of human intimacy that arises out of Aristotle’s discussion of the virtues pertaining to the sharing of words and deeds (the community of words and deeds) hinges upon the pleasure and pain that arises from assessment of the beauty and advantage of the actions of ­others and oneself. The social milieu emerges as the arena in which this nexus of pleasure, pain, and self-understanding comes to expression. In living together, we are bound by the desire to have our actions affirmed by those around us and the need this community has for safeguarding its beauty and advantage. Vulnerable to the flawed ability to calculate the worth of things, actions, pleasures and pains, and oneself, this sphere of life, this sharing of life, rises and falls with the careful cultivation of its participants’ ability to measure worth, to determine advantage and disadvantage. We encounter here in outline Aristotle’s vision of human community and the tense dynamic of forces that make for its preservation or destruction. We also encounter, in its emphasis on the fragility of human calculation of worth, an ambivalence at the very heart of one of the clearest differentiators of human life, the possession of logos. The fact that humans can fail to navigate correctly what actions are worthy of them and what are not, or when to give another pleasure or pain, suggests a powerful gap between the

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capacity to draw distinctions between advantage and disadvantage and its good use. It also marks in outline the danger to which human life, individual and collective, is subject in the misuse of its capacity for logos, in the many ways in which humans fail to call each thing by its right name. In the braggart’s overloud and overconfident assessment of self, in the flatterer’s placing of self-gain over what is advantageous to the whole, in the buffoon’s inability to resist a joke, and in the resentment such actions cause, we encounter intimations of pathologies of logos that will come to take on much larger proportions.67

1.5 Conclusion At its most vivid, suzēn realizes a natural human impulse to form community via the sharing of one’s most treasured activities, and results in the awareness of the goodness and choiceworthiness of both one’s own being and life and that of one’s friend. Because one’s relation to oneself is referred to one’s love of the good, this is just another way of saying that suzēn results in an awareness of the good as it is realizable in human life. And, because humans are meant for a city and are of such a nature as to share life, the pleasure that accompanies suzēn simply is the fullest form of the pleasure that accompanies zēn; that is, the pleasure one takes in one’s living would be incomplete without the presence of others with whom to do that living. Thus, the sharing of life illuminates the fundamentally political nature of human life, the sense in which all aspects of human living (not only the human ability to form communities but also the human ability to assure sustenance, to deploy a division of labor, to generate households, to reproduce, etc.) are oriented toward political community. 67  It is thus necessary to mark a greater degree of ambivalence toward logos in Aristotle’s work than is normally observed in the scholarship, although this is changing, See, for instance, Aristotle’s justification for banishing “foul speech” (aischrologia) from the city, “for by speaking readily about some foul matter one comes closer to doing it” (7.17.1336b4, compare with the critique of mimesis in the Republic) and the discussion of Aristotle’s critique of empty talk (kenologia) in Kelsey (2015). We will explore this ambivalence further in Chapter 6.

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Charting the significance of shared life for Aristotle’s conception of human happiness has also allowed us a more detailed vision of the inner workings of human political community-building, il­lu­ min­at­ing the forms of intimacy that make such communities possible. We have encountered the sharing of affect, exemplified by mothers toward their children and by non-human animals toward one another, as an essential feature of human intimacy. We have encountered the sharing of perception that enables not only the building of political communities around a shared vision of the just and the unjust but also a human’s very sense of self, making of human self-perception a collective process. And we have encountered the possibility of sharing in contemplation that suggests even the most distinct and highest human activity comes to fullest completion when it is performed with others in some form of community. We have also seen, more controversially, that human political nature is viewed within a zoological context, in which both its continuity with and intensification of animal sociality is emphasized. This aspect will be drawn out in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4. And further, we have seen that the naturalness of human philia is asserted not only by adopting a zoological scale, but also by insisting on the paradigmatic character of maternal love. That is, we have seen Aristotle broach the grounding of human intimacy in the material and social conditions of human birth, and we will explore what light suzēn sheds on Aristotle’s approach to human natality, and its relation to his attitude toward human acquisitiveness, in Chapters 5 and 6. But for now, we must notice one further aspect of our exploration of suzēn. Because the pleasure human beings take in one another is, in part, a function of a natural tendency to find not only themselves but what is akin to them good, in fact, because humans especially exhibit this kind of provincialism, human political community seems bound within the limits of a recognition of similarity with a deep affective undercurrent, limits drawn on the basis of the number of people with whom one can share a life. That is, human pol­it­ ical community-building is fundamentally exclusive, bounded by the limited human capacity to share life. What the Danaids know all

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too well, to return to Aeschylus’ Suppliants for a moment, is that the success of their request for asylum hinges on the degree of attachment the Argives have to them, and they will use whatever forms of connection at their disposal (piety to Zeus, care for kin) to create this attachment. Thus, shared life marks out also the vulnerability that attends the most intense forms of human intimacy; for while humans may be extreme amongst other animals in the pleasure they take in one another, so are they also extreme in the pain they inflict upon one another.68 Indeed, perhaps the greatest testament to the significance (both individual and communal) of the intimacies of shared life is found in the alienation and estrangement that arises from its dis­so­ lu­tion. Thus, before we can consider the questions raised thus far in our investigation of suzēn, we need to flesh out the concept a bit further by marking the effects of its erosion and the breaking of bonds such erosion make possible. And for this, we need to turn to the Politics, a text whose first reference to shared life highlights precisely this challenge: “In general, to live together [to suzēn] and be partners in any human matter is difficult” (Pol. 1263a15–16).

68  See, e.g., EN 1150a 7: “for a vicious human being can do ten thousand times as much evil as a beast [thēriou].”

2 Shared Life and Politics In the preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx famously compares the analysis contained therein to the work of the ­anatomist, focused upon what he calls the “economic cell-form,” that is, the commodity.1 But if this is so, Marx is equally clear—in justifying his concentration on the economy of a very specific time and place—that his analysis will not proceed like a general path­ ology, offering a description of ideal or universal structures bereft of individual identifying features. The commodity is a “cell with a history.”2 Its proper philosophic treatment will require a level of abstraction, but abstraction employed as a microscope, that is, abstraction turned toward “the minutiae” of actual economic forms and relations.3 Marx’s approach, both immersed in the particularities of political life and sufficiently estranged from them to see them as questions and as objects of analysis, is anticipated by Plato and Aristotle, whose analyses of the polis and politeiai hinge on an abstraction of the microscopic, on an assessment of the political minutiae. Such an analysis requires the cultivation of a double gaze, looking both toward existing regimes and toward what each thinker takes to be best in human nature. This is a shared endeavor, even granting the real and radical differences between the two thinkers on the subject of the polis. For if Aristotle’s Politics can be said to combine, following Pierre Pellegrin’s construction, “a ‘realist’ analysis of social and political reality with a reaffirmation of the ethical destination of human beings,” Plato’s Republic is often read as combining an “ideal­ist” analysis of social and political reality with a reaffirmation 1  Marx (1867) 6.

2  Mansfield (1980) 352.

3  Marx (1867) 6.

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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of the trans-political destination of human beings.4 I do not think this is quite right with respect to Plato, but here I would like to pause for a moment over a few of their convergences and divergences in order to pave the way for a study of the role of suzēn in Aristotle’s Politics.5 For while there are significant differences in their political theories, both devote quite a bit of time and energy to providing a psychopathology of political life, one which has direct bearing on the intimacies to which shared life gives rise. The insight that structures the entirety of Aristotle’s Politics, and that, on the surface at least, distinguishes its analysis of the polis from that offered by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic, is the heterogeneous nature of power.6 Because the forms of rule are irreducibly many, it is incumbent upon the political analyst to attend to the unique features of each form. To the extent that political rule itself can be enacted in a variety of forms of regimes, these too must be looked at individually. The Socrates of the Republic, on the other hand, like the Stranger of the Statesman, treats rule as single. What shapes Socrates’ analysis of the different politeia, then, is less the demarcation of kinds of rule than the effort to illuminate the complex psycho-political framework that gives both polis and psuchē their character. This effort requires careful attention to family dynamic and the passions it engenders as providing an essential feature of the character of a regime and as the ground in which the seeds of its transformation are sown. The various kinds of regimes, then, do not name differing forms of rule itself (and still less differing organizations of offices) so much as differing forms of desiring. While Socrates will locate the regimes under question within his and his interlocutors’ realm of experience (although he goes on to coin a name for one of them: timocracy), what those names signify is less a spatially and historically specific site than a specific or­gan­ iza­tion of psychic capacities. What timocracy, for instance, names is 4  Pellegrin (2012) 582–3. 5  On Plato’s development of this psychopathology, see Brill (2013). 6  A point made especially clearly in Saxonhouse (1992) and, more recently, Rogan (2018). See also Yack (1985).

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an integration of citizens’ desires, actions, and beliefs for the sake of a perceived good, in this case honor. Aristotle is more interested in offering an analysis of authority (of what is kurios), the offices that hold it, the passions and actions that alter its distribution, and the conceptions of justice around which these passions coalesce. And because the forms of rule are many, so will be the ways of establishing authority. Aristotle’s focus on authority gives the Politics a particularly meta-political hue, such that its inquiry into how to do political science is bound up with the question of how to demarcate human political phenomena. In analyzing, for instance, democracy and oligarchy, in attempting to discern their coming into being and the forces that preserve and destroy them, Aristotle moves with some ease between describing the ordering and populating of offices, the model of justice at work in each kind of regime, and the experiences of citizens—the causes of their joy, but more often of their anger and contempt, and, especially, the significance of their assessment of their worth to the destruction or preservation of the regime. Rather than read this as a confusion of political and psychological phenomena, I think we need to take this range of phenomena—arrangement of office, model of justice, assessment of self-worth—as all contained within the broader category of political phenomena for Aristotle, and to trace his efforts to discern the emergence of modes of citizen life from their collusion. We are better able to do this if we locate the formation of office— the analysis of which will occupy so much of Aristotle’s attention in the Politics—within the broader context of a history of thinking about politics as a response to sovereign power, where it emerges as the institutional inheritance of the foundational scene in which Achilles confronts Agamemnon before the Achaean generals and troops.7 As such, the creation of office marks an attempt to concret­ ize a collectively held perception of justice. The capacity for such a shared perception is embedded within the human possession of logos and is an essential aspect of human political life as Aristotle sees it; it is, in fact, what makes humans especially political: “For it 7  Vernant (2000) 89.

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is peculiar to humans as compared to the other animals that they alone have a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other such things; partnership in these things makes a household and a city” (1253a15–18).8 The political partnership, then, rests on attaining a shared perception of justice and preserving it across generations. Office (archē) functions to assure the intergenerational project that is the city by attempting to hold stable a shared perception of justice. And yet, for this very reason it is subject to change and alteration; the very lability of shared perception threatens the stable distribution of power. There is more than one regime because there is more than one perception of justice, and stronger and weaker degrees of sharing in it; that is, it is in their different ways of hunting for happiness, conceived as the realization of virtue, that regimes differ (1328b1), and Politics 5 is devoted to tracking the ways in which differences of opinion with respect to justice and to what one is owed (differences often expressed in the outrageous behavior of rulers) spark stasis and revolution. The formation of office also opens up a distinction between person and office, such that, for instance, Aristotle can distinguish between attacks on kings and tyrants that are against the office and those that are against the person (e.g., 1311a31–2), or distinguish between the office one holds and the style with which one rules (e.g., one can hold the office of tyrant but rule in a tyrannical or kingly fashion, see1314b40). And in those cases in which citizens are so alike in their nature that it would be unjust to elevate one or a few to rule over the others, and thus in cases in which one cannot allow the same citizens to rule always, the sharing of rule approximates the constant rule of the best: “For some rule and some are ruled in turn [kata meros], as if becoming other persons. And in the same manner among the rulers different persons hold different offices” (1261b4–6).9 Under these conditions, citizens are sufficiently similar as to make it a matter of less importance who, exactly, 8  τοῦτο γὰρ πρὸς τὰ ἄλλα ζῷα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἴδιον, τὸ μόνον ἀγαθοῦ καὶ κακοῦ καὶ δικαίου καὶ ἀδίκου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων αἴσθησιν ἔχειν· ἡ δὲ τούτων κοινωνία ποιεῖ οἰκίαν καὶ πόλιν. 9  οἱ μὲν γὰρ ἄρχουσιν οἱ δ’ ἄρχονται κατὰ μέρος ὥσπερ ἂν ἄλλοι γενόμενοι. τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ τρόπον ἀρχόντων ἕτεροι ἑτέρας ἄρχουσιν ἀρχάς.

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is ruling. Or, perhaps more radically, the operative “who” here is not person but office, that is, the office serves to hold the constancy of the regime’s character, such that when citizens move from ruling to being ruled, it is not so much that the office has changed as that they have changed, “as if becoming others.” Distribution of offices, then, serves as the means through which shared rule approximates rule of the same. Office as such, in turn, is the mechanism by which constancy of rule is assured, to the greatest extent possible. And here it is worth considering that Aristotle may be an iconoclast in his approach; that is, to follow Vernant’s language, he may be more interested in assuring sovereignty than in neutralizing it. At the very least, we can observe a tension central to the Politics. On the one hand, Aristotle assumes the need to contain sovereign power within the most common political structures: he will examine, for instance, the necessity of ostracism for certain regimes, he will insist on the balancing of authority between the parts necessary for the city (the wealthy, the multitude of free peoples, and the well-born/virtuous), his understanding of the ­ political partnership and the bond on which it relies is attuned to its fragility and the many forces that threaten to pull it apart. On the other, he develops a vision of a human political community capable of capturing even the most extreme expressions of human virtue, an excess he concedes is unnatural (1288a27), and yet nevertheless insists should be followed were it ever to appear in an individual and should be approximated by shared rule whenever possible. Under the best of circumstances (for Aristotle) shared rule instantiates a vision of a corporate sovereign self, different from, and above, all others. The endurance that must be maintained, then, is less endurance of individual citizens than endurance of office, and it is precisely when office is transformed either by who gets to share in it or by the forms of office that a politeia transforms from one to another. In short, the creation of office attempts to assure the constancy of a power dynamic and of modes of citizen life, both of which are underwritten by a shared perception of justice. The office enshrines the perception. The object that gives Aristotle access to these modes of life (to the political minutiae), within the Politics at least, is the politeia, the

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“arrangement of a city with respect to its offices, particularly the  one that is authoritative over all matters” (1278b8–10).10 When Aristotle describes the politeia as the bios of the polis (1295a40–1295b1) he highlights precisely this promise of a study of politeia—its ability to illuminate the contingent and volatile forms of life that emerge within the city. Unfortunately, this sense of politeia, as ­conveying the ways of life that the polis fosters, is obscured if we translate politeia solely as “constitution.” Of the meanings alive to Aristotle recently catalogued by J. J. Mulhern— citizenship, citizen body, constitution or arrangement of offices, and regime—half of them are insufficiently present to the reader if this course of translation is adopted.11 Collapsing this array of senses risks overlooking Aristotle’s acute awareness of the relationship between individual and structure, and obscuring his efforts to highlight the manner in which institutions are animated by their citizens, defined by the delineation of the citizen body, and preserved or destroyed by the partnership in power-sharing and the individual’s sense of place within that partnership.12 Put differently, this risks overlooking, as one translator succinctly puts it, the fact that “a constitution tends to be laws to us, but men to [Aristotle].”13 It is their interpenetration that an analysis of politeia provides. Throughout Aristotle’s politeia-analysis, suzēn supports the pol­it­ical bond by means of which the character of a politeia gains expression— is embodied—in the lives and actions of citizens. In turn, I will argue, by giving us access to the bios, the way of life, of the polis, politeia-analysis allows us to see the political institutions, practices, and forms of office that can either support or destroy the sharing of life. Such an analysis brings to light the ways political institutions can foster or hinder humans in following their impulse to live together and to develop the deepest forms of intimacy. Indeed, as we shall see, much of the Politics is about the impediments to 10  ἔστι δὲ πολιτεία πόλεως τάξις τῶν τε ἄλλων ἀρχῶν καὶ μάλιστα τῆς κυρίας πάντων. 11  Mulhern (2015). 12  Mulhern (2015). Strauss also emphasizes this sense, as Mulhern cites Strauss (1959) 33–4. But this is not an exclusively Straussian insight; see, for instance, Robinson (1995) xvi–xvii. 13  Robinson (1995) xvi–xvii.

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sharing life, the sources of its decay and decline, and even the limits of its role in the polis. On this Aristotle is very clear: the ultimate aim of the polis is not suzēn but noble deeds (1280b39). However, as we saw in Chapter  1, the presence of that most complete form of shared life realized in virtue friendship is a powerful vehicle for the per­form­ance of noble deeds.14 And what Aristotle’s limit here tells us is that, when bereft of an active sharing of life, the political partnership dissolves into nothing more than the dwelling side by side which Aristotle elsewhere disparages as like the life of cattle (EN 1170b10–14). Thus, if Aristotle’s ethics show us the most vivid form of shared life, his Politics shows us the conditions of its destruction. In particular, when he turns to discuss what preserves a tyranny, Aristotle illuminates in the negative the political aspects essential to shared life by providing a model of a polis without suzēn in any but the most rudimentary of senses, a city without human friendship and intimacy, ultimately a city that cannot pursue a common good because it has none. That is, in Aristotle’s account of tyranny we see the outline of a community that is so in name only, of a living together that occurs without sharing life, an impoverished human living.

2.1  Shared Life and the Political Bond Aristotle opens the Politics with a concise reflection on the nature of the political partnership, the heterogeneous character of rule, and the need for an analytic approach to the polis.15 It is here that he 14 It is thus necessary to distinguish between the political valence of friendship and ­ ol­it­ical friendships, about which Aristotle also has quite a bit to say. I am interested in the p former, and am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for pointing out the need for this clarification. 15  To be sure, his analytic approach is also a genetic approach. Whether Aristotle’s genetic account is logical or historical has been the source of much controversy, related to the controversy surrounding Plato’s account of degenerate regimes and souls in Republic 8 and 9 (see Brill (2015a)). Here I can only note that this does not appear to be a problem for Aristotle, who moves rather seamlessly from an abstract consideration of the formation of necessary partnerships, as the “conjunction of persons who cannot exist without one another” (1252a25), to observations about forms of living and ruling “in ancient times” (1252b23 and 25).

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makes the now (in)famous claims that the polis is by nature (1252b30), that humans are by nature political (1253a1–3), and that humans have an innate impulse (hormē) for partnership (1253a29–30).16 Nevertheless, this hormē may be thwarted by a number of factors, and humans are susceptible to a variety of estrangements from their political nature; as we shall see in Chapter  3, the possibility of estrangement from one’s political nature is in fact part of what it means to be human. This is thus also where we encounter Aristotle lifting up the founder of cities in particular—“And yet the one who first set together [a city] is the cause of the greatest goods” (1253a30–1)—and making one of the clearest statements of “negative exceptionalism”: “For just as the human is the best of all animals when completed, when separated from law and what is right it is the worst of all. For injustice is harshest when it is armed; and the human is born naturally possessing arms for prudence and virtue which are nevertheless very susceptible to being used for their opposites. This is why, without virtue, it is the most unholy and the most savage, and the worst with respect to sex and food” (1253a31–7).17 It is precisely because humans are capable of the most extreme aberrations of behavior that the cultivation of virtue and noble deeds is necessary and, ultimately, it is in these very deeds that the city finds its end. But not without profound impediment. And it is in considering the various forms this impediment may take that Aristotle observes the difficulty of living together (2.5.1263a15–16). 16  In this passage, Aristotle considers separations both from the city and from oneself as a political animal, that is, separations by chance, when one happens to not be born “in the city,” and separation by nature, as being a lover of war and thus as incapable of participating in a political life or as being perfectly self-sufficient and thus in need of nothing; in either case, one is not human but either a beast or a god (1253a9), respectively. But one can also be sep­ar­ ated from law and adjudication, and I take this to be possible even within a city, that is, one can be born in a city and yet still grow into a lawless and vicious life, becoming a threat to the very city in which, under different circumstances, one would have met one’s completion. The very need to produce a book for the political expert speaks to the ever-present possibility of a failure of the political project. See also Frede (2019) on the fragility of human social interactions. 17  ὥσπερ γὰρ καὶ τελεωθεὶς βέλτιστον τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν, οὕτω καὶ χωρισθεὶς νόμου καὶ δίκης χείριστον πάντων. χαλεπωτάτη γὰρ ἀδικία ἔχουσα ὅπλα· ὁ δὲ ἄνθρωπος ὅπλα ἔχων φύεται φρονήσει καὶ ἀρετῇ, οἷς ἐπὶ τἀναντία ἔστι χρῆσθαι μάλιστα. διὸ ἀνοσιώτατον καὶ ἀγριώτατον ἄνευ ἀρετῆς, καὶ πρὸς ἀφροδίσια καὶ ἐδωδὴν χείριστον. See Holmes (2013) on the logic of negative exceptionalism as it is at work in Lucretius.

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The obstructions to suzēn that Aristotle points to in the ­immediate context—all associated with how humans negotiate the ownership of possessions—open upon much larger considerations of the nature of the political partnership and the role of suzēn in establishing and maintaining it. Interpreting these lines requires us to take a step back and survey Aristotle’s conception of the political partnership more broadly. Taking as our guide Aristotle’s specification of animals that are political in the History of Animals, i.e., those animals are political that share a common deed (488a8–9), we could begin by asking: In what shared doing does the polis consist? In the human context, the properly political partnership is the partnership that arises from a shared perception of justice and injustice, made possible by the possession of logos (1253a15); it is this partnership in the virtue of justice that comprises the polis, and marks it as distinct from the alliance or the nation. Aristotle characterizes the end toward which this common doing aims variously as living well (e.g., 1252b30), the administration of justice (1253a37), the realization of virtue (1328a35), and the commission of noble deeds (1281a3). Much of the Politics is devoted to showing us how these formulations serve as aspects of the good that is most authoritative of all (tou kuriōtatou pantōn), aimed at by the partnership that is most authoritative of all (pasōn kuriōtatē), as “this is what is called the city and the political partnership” (1252a6–7). By identifying the aim of the polis as a quality of living, Aristotle casts justice, virtue, and the commission of noble deeds as expressions of this quality, as aspects of a zōē, a living, most vivid and vigorous, a zōē that is done well, eu. Sharing in the perception of justice creates the political bond, holding the city together sufficiently for it to act as a whole. It is a bond between those who are, on the one hand, irreducibly different (1261a17) and decidedly not similar—“a city does not arise from persons who are similar [ou gar ginetai polis ex homoiōn]” (1261a24)—but who can, through the instantiation of what Aristotle calls “reciprocal equality [to ison to antipeponthos]” (1261a30), become similar, such that Aristotle will write, later in the Politics, “the city is a partnership of similar persons [tōn homoiōn], for the sake of a life [zōēs] that is the best possible” (1328a35–7). There is no contradiction here; rather, in pointing to the gap

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between the origin of the city and its end, Aristotle has simply ­identified the work of politics, that is, to assist nature in bringing about its end with respect to the political character of human being. Much of the work of the polis, undertaken primarily by the holder of political expertise but shared in by all parts of the polis, is in simultaneously maintaining the relevant differences against the forces of homogenization and in creating and sustaining this equality against the countervailing forces of idiosyncrasy—in short, in administering justice.18 I take this to include both senses of justice, that is, administering justice both in the narrow sense of assuring that citizens follow the law, and in the broader sense of creating the conditions for the cultivation of all virtue and for its performance in noble deeds for the sake of others. If this sounds like a difficult job, it is. Differences in the perception of justice, and virtue more broadly, are the very thing that account for different forms of regime—the very existence of different politeiai which admit of classification and ranking attest to the sense in which politeia bears both human political plurality (there are more than one) and human political fragility (some are better than others, i.e., humans may fail in the political project). When these differences arise within a regime, they are the main source of stasis and revolution. The work of establishing and maintaining the political bond requires the thoughtful development and use of the human capacities for friendship and self-knowledge, both of which need institutional supports because of a variety of intra- and extra-individual factors that pull in other directions. Humans tend to be bad judges of themselves and their worth (1280a14), for instance, often overestimating themselves and underestimating others (EE 1239a15–17); humans also mistake living for living well and erroneously aim for the former (1257b40); even those who are able to perceive that the aim is living well misunderstand it as bodily gratification and are overwhelmed by the excessive character of desire (1258a2). 18  See also 3.4.1276b27–31: “Similarly, although citizens are dissimilar, preservation of the partnership is their work, and the regime is [this] partnership; hence the virtue of the citizen must necessarily be with a view to the regime [ὁμοίως τοίνυν καὶ τῶν πολιτῶν, καίπερ ἀνομοίων ὄντων, ἡ σωτηρία τῆς κοινωνίας ἔργον ἐστί, κοινωνία δ’ ἐστὶν ἡ πολιτεία· διὸ τὴν ἀρετὴν ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι τοῦ πολίτου πρὸς τὴν πολιτείαν].”

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In short, the political bond is fragile. A variety of forces stand in between the hormē toward political partnership (1253a27) and its successful instantiation. Hence the vast legislative apparatus required to attain the city of one’s prayers that is outlined in Books 7 and 8, with its particular emphasis on the production of decent citizens and the mode of education that would best check human tendencies toward self-deception, clouded judgment, and the indulgence of overpowering desires. For all of his criticism of Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle operates here with a shared moral psychology that emphasizes the interconnected and mutually reinforcing operations of the excessive nature of epithumia, the deleterious effects of an obsession with bodily gratification, and the limitations of human selfunderstanding. Political expertise requires a nuanced understanding of the nature of the political bond and the conditions under which it thrives or wilts. Aristotle’s account of the polis in Books 1–3, from the early analytic/genetic account of Book 1, through the endoxic discussion of Book 2, to the analysis of parts in Book 3, traces the development of the political partnership, and the bond on which it relies, by charting a series of jointures or connections and the affects and conditions that make them possible. That is, in his discussion of the “emergence” of the polis in relation to the household and the village, Aristotle employs a nascent theory of attachment, of the connective tissue between peoples and things, and it is instructive to follow the language he employs to do so. When we look closely at the forms of connection out of which the political bond arises, we see that Aristotle seems to have in mind more of a difference in intensity rather than kind, one brought about by a difference in capacity. Aristotle is also acutely aware that new capacities present the possibility of new vices as well as virtues (that is, the capacity can be exercised well or poorly). He begins with those relations that arise out of some necessity, or, as he puts it: First, then, there must of necessity be a coupling [sunduazesthai] of those who cannot be without one another: on the one hand, male and

Shared Life and Politics  97 female, for the sake of reproduction (which occurs not from intentional choice [kai touto ouk ek proaireseōs] but, just as is the case with the other animals and plants, from a natural striving to leave behind another one like oneself); on the other, the naturally ruling and ruled, on account of preservation.  (1252a26-31)

The household, “the partnership constituted by nature for [the needs of] daily life” (1252b13) comes to be from these two partnerships (duo koinōniōn) (1252b10), these two forms of the “coupling of those who cannot exist without one another.” The lawgiver Charondas, Aristotle observes, calls its members homosipuous, “sharing the same meal tub,” “messmate,” from sipuē, “meal tub,” “meal jar,” “flour bin”; Epimenedes of Crete calls them homokapous, “eating at the same manger,” “messmates,” from kapē, “manger” (1252b14–15). As households combine, another partnership arises: “The first partnership arising from several households and for the sake of non-daily needs [mē ephēmerou] is the village” (1252b15–16). Some call its members homogalaktas, “persons suckled with the same milk,” “foster brothers or sisters,” from gala (gen. galaktos), “milk”; and “children and the children’s children [paidas te kai paidōn paidas]” (1252b17–18). The expansion of this model to cities produces cities under a kingship, as an extension of the familial rule by the eldest, and Aristotle locates such cities in an ancient past, referencing Homer’s “each acts as a law to his children and his wives” (1252b22–3), for people were scattered (sporades) and dwelled in that manner long ago (1252b23–4).19 The account of the polis that 19  This connection between kingly rule and the household is one that Aristotle maintains throughout the Politics and the ethics. In Politics 1.12 it also presents the possibility of a kind of sameness within difference or difference within sameness that would be attractive to someone who thought of the city as the achieved equality of the irreducibly different: “But the rule over the children is kingly. For the one who generates is ruler on the basis of both affection and age, which is the very mark of kingly rule. Homer thus spoke rightly of Zeus when he addressed as ‘father of men and gods’ the king of them all. For the nature of the king should be different, but he should be of the same stock; and this is the case of the elder in relation to the younger and the one who generates to the child [ἡ δὲ τῶν τέκνων ἀρχὴ βασιλική· τὸ γὰρ γεννῆσαν καὶ κατὰ φιλίαν ἄρχον καὶ κατὰ πρεσβείαν ἐστίν, ὅπερ ἐστὶ βασιλικῆς εἶδος ἀρχῆς. διὸ καλῶς Ὅμηρος τὸν Δία προσηγόρευσεν εἰπὼν ‘πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε’ τὸν βασιλέα τούτων ἁπάντων. φύσει γὰρ τὸν βασιλέα διαφέρειν μὲν δεῖ, τῷ γένει δ’ εἶναι τὸν αὐτόν· ὅπερ πέπονθε τὸ πρεσβύτερον πρὸς τὸ νεώτερον καὶ ὁ γεννήσας πρὸς τὸ τέκνον]”(1259b9–17).

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comes out of this survey of household and village partnerships treats it as a natural expression of the end toward which those partnerships aim: “The partnership arising from many villages that is complete is the city. It has full self-sufficiency, so to speak; and while coming into being for the sake of living, it is for the sake of living well [ginomenē men tou zēn heneken, ousa de tou eu zēn]” (1252b27–30). Thus, in his early account of the polis, Aristotle takes as his task the identification of forms of partnership that begin with the coup­ ling of those who need one another, producing those who partake of the same meal/mess/milk, in order, eventually, to arrive at the political partnership, the community of common perception arising from the human capacity for perception of just and unjust. We must move then, somehow, from the bond of homosipuous and homogalkatas, the bond of the same, to the bond of koinōnia, the bond of what is common or shared, a bond that must maintain differences rather than collapse them.20 It does seem as though Aristotle is charting here a movement from necessity/need to choice, marked by the effort to attain sustenance and assure it in the longer term in order to aim at living well, and plotting human community along this trajectory. And yet, Aristotle is equally insistent that the city is the end toward which both household and village aim; its partnership, I read, is the fullest expression of that collectivity formed within the household and village. That is, the bond that holds the political partnership together is not alien to the bonds of household and village, to homosipuous and homogalaktas, but rather their end. Aristotle thus marks out a spectrum of attachment keyed to different modes of shared life, to different ways in which humans live together. And on this point we can observe, even within the bond of homogalaktas, a difference emerging. When we move from the household to the village, members of which are still under the yoke of the same, we move from the partnership that aims to assure the 20  See also Aristotle’s claim that exchange does not exist within the household, for there it is just a circulation of goods within what is one’s own (1257a20); it is only when it becomes necessary/possible to trade with those outside of the sphere of one’s own that exchange occurs.

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needs of daily life to the partnership that arises to assure “­non-daily,” mē ephēmerou, needs. That is, the transition here is marked not as a kind of exceeding but as a kind of negating, from focus on daily needs to focus on something other than daily needs, as though the point was to combat necessity not by exceeding it but by negating it. The polis arises out of this negation, and it is with its partnership that we see most clearly a divergence between its source—its ­genesis, its coming-to-be—and its existence, its enactment of that being. Or, more precisely, a fissure opens between the aim (the for the sake of) of its genesis and the aim of its existence/being. But the gap that Aristotle observes here between living and living well does not so much assert a radical divide between reproductive life and political life, for instance, or between animal and human life, than it identifies the human conditions that make failure to thrive possible, the gap that produces the possibility of atrophy and of the worst forms of viciousness, and thus identifies the need for action in order to assure that one’s living is conducted well (a need to which the capacity for choice responds, or corresponds). The city can always fall back on and fail to assure daily needs. (Aristotle’s teleological commitments may very well require this concern, may demand an account of the source of failure to thrive.) And so while the capacity to choose, or, as Aristotle will describe it in the Eudemian Ethics, the capacity to perceive choice (1236b5–10), may belong to the human animal alone, the human is not, for this reason, no longer an animal, but rather the kind of animal whose end is also an object that it may understand or misunderstand. That is, to be able to choose is to find oneself open to failure. The possession of this capacity makes humans animals who are capable of failing, and particularly noteworthy, who can even fail at living, animals whose living is at stake; that is, animals who may or may not live well. The transition from not possessing choice to possessing it is less a matter of interest for Aristotle than the qualities that make one choose well or poorly, or even to reject the exercise of choice altogether. To be able to choose does not constitute a radical break with animality as such, but rather adds a layer of complexity and intensity to the very action by means of which all living beings are connected, namely, living.

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As we shall see in greater detail, the continuity between what chooses and what cannot choose is assured by the affective sources of attachment, by philia in particular, and by suzēn, both of which arise naturally and can be chosen and which are treated in close proximity in the Politics as well as in the ethics. In fact, it is in the Politics that Aristotle identifies the source of our capacity to feel philia for another: “spirit is the cause of affectionateness; for it is the capacity of soul by which we love [ho thumos estin ho poiōn to philētikon; hautē gar estin hē tēs psuchēs dunamis hēi philoumen] (1327b40–1328a1).21 While we will look more carefully at the relation between philia and suzēn, and at the dual motivating effects of a hormē for political partnership and the capacity for prohairesis, I want to take a moment here to simply sketch out a few possible implications of this alignment of thumos and philia before returning to our first reference to suzēn and the difficulties that attend the human political partnership.22 When Aristotle cites thumos as the source of our capacity for philia, he is making explicit what is implied by the moral phenomenology of the “other selves” model of friendship we identified in Chapter 1, namely, that one’s connection to other people is in­ex­tric­ ably tied to one’s connection to oneself (a point he makes directly in the discussions of friendship in both ethics). In the Politics, this observation serves to cast friendship as the expansion of the envelope of self-regard. To hold something dear is to see it as one’s own, as an extension of one’s self, and that includes coming to its defense when it has been insulted. Already, then, affection is entangled with ownership (and hopelessly so). Even more than this, justice comes to be conceived as getting things right with respect to the apportionment and, when necessary, the return of what one is owed. Both

21  ὁ θυμός ἐστιν ὁ ποιῶν τὸ φιλητικόν· αὕτη γάρ ἐστιν ἡ τῆς ψυχῆς δύναμις ᾗ φιλοῦμεν. To be sure, Aristotle distinguishes philia from philēsis, see EN 8.7.1157b29–32. But Aristotle’s point in this passage is that philia is an active condition, a hexis, while philēsis is a pathos, and what is at stake in the Politics passage is the capacity for the act of loving, philein. Thumos is the source of our capacity to actively love. For recent discussion of the political implications of such an understanding of thumos, especially as regards the gendered dynamic at stake here, see Deslauriers (2019). 22  At 7.7 thumos, intelligence, mastery, and political rule are keyed to climate; see discussion in Chapter 4, Section 4.3.

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justice and friendship, then, are understood in terms of ownership, and honor too (another aspect associated with thumos), a point Plato’s Socrates makes explicit when, in Republic 8, he observes the rapid slide from the thumotic regime’s love of honor to the oli­ garch­ic regime’s love of money, a relationship Adeimantus affirms in striking terms: “There is no other transformation so quick and so sure from a young man who loves honor to one who loves money” (Rep. 553d). To be sure, we could just as easily say that we must trace how a model of ownership arises out of certain conceptions of justice and friendship, and then try and determine whether one came before the other. But my point here is that the language of ownership is used to convey a model of attachment, of how one experiences one’s connection to others, and so melds “economic” and “affective” models. As such, we see the language of ownership infiltrate every aspect of human intimacy, from familial bonds, to civic duty, to erotic couplings, to the deepest friendships. And it is precisely as an effort to introduce difference into this model, different senses of what is owed or due, that Aristotle spends so much time distinguishing between household management and business expertise, for instance, or friendships of virtue and friendships of use, or claims that rather than see the city as one’s possession, citizens should see themselves as possessions of the city. Moreover, Aristotle views the risks and inadequacies of this language as expressing something essential about the very nature of a possession, which, he observes, has always a double existence: as an object of use and an object of exchange (1257a7). The same could be said, it would seem, of human intimacy, that it includes the perpetual possibility and risk of the falling away of the deepest of bonds into bonds of use and pleasure, into a “monetization” of friendship. In this, Aristotle anticipates Marx’s formulation of the commodity as the fetishization of human relations. To return to the passage at hand, when Aristotle observes the difficulties of sharing life and human partnerships, he has in mind, in part, the structural fragility of the human political partnership. Having discussed the political partnership more generally, we should attend to the specific forms of partnership that cause

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Aristotle to observe the difficulty of suzēn in Book 2 in their immediate context: Aristotle’s consideration of whether it is better for citizens to own possessions in common or individually, as subsequent to his review of whether the holding of women and children is done better in common or in private. In both cases, Aristotle argues for the latter, and his reasons for doing so shed further light on his understanding of the human attachments arising from suzēn and the role it plays in his political theory.

2.2  Shared Life in the Politics 2.2.1  Shared Life and Private Ownership In Book 2 of the Politics Aristotle turns to examine those politeiai, either actually existing or in theory, that are well thought of, in order to both discern what about them might lend itself to the best political partnership and also to identify their failings, and thus support the claim that it is not mere sophistry to consider an alternative design. The question guiding Aristotle’s critical engagement with politeia here is about the nature of the political partnership, namely, in what citizens should be partners. And the first target of his critique is the community of women and children Plato’s Socrates describes in the Republic, a community in which all would say “mine” of the same. As a model of political partnership, such a community is flawed, according to Aristotle, in both the ideal that it is designed to support—unity—and as a means of attaining this ideal. It is in the first prong of this attack that Aristotle makes especially clear the fundamental principles guiding his political theory: the city is a partnership of a multitude of irreducibly different people, and the job of the legislator is to maintain the essential differences while also creating reciprocal equality. If treated as the highest end toward which a city could aim, unity would destroy the city by collapsing its essential differences and turning it into something that more resembles a household or a single human being. Thus, even if  one could make a city a complete unity, one shouldn’t. But the

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impediments to doing so are also profound, and Aristotle’s critique of the efficacy of a community of women and children in producing unity presents us with an account of the vulnerability of even human beings’ deepest attachments and the institutional supports necessary to nourish and support them. That is, in his discussion of the community of women and children Aristotle identifies the political basis of human intimacy, and the forms of sharing life that are necessary to sustain and support human attachment; for this reason we will follow his critique closely. Chapter 3 of Book 2 offers a three-part criticism of the ability of the community of women and children to produce unity, all parts of which hinge on the nature of human attachment. The first identifies an ambiguity in the meaning of the word “all” between individual and collective senses that, in Aristotle’s opinion, proves fatal to the very enterprise. While Socrates may intend that “all,” in the sense of each individually, say “mine” and “not mine” at the same time, this is impossible; what would happen instead is that “all,” collectively, would say mine and not mine, and this is “not even productive of agreement [hōdi d’ ouden homonoētikon]” (1261b32). The impossibility of the individual sense of “all” is well illustrated by the challenge that reproductive life poses to any attempt to hide whose offspring “belongs” to whom, a challenge that connects human reproduction with that of other animals: “There are some women and other animals such as horses and cattle that are nat­ur­ al­ly inclined to produce offspring similar to the parents, like the mare at Pharsalus called the Just” (1262a21–4). The discord of the collective sense of “all” is given greater development in Aristotle’s second claim, namely that “what belongs in common to the most people is accorded the least care: they take thought for their own things above all, and less about things in common, or only so much as falls to each” (1261b33–5). That is, according to Aristotle human attachment is such that it requires some sense or perception that something is one’s own, and this sense of one’s “own-ness” requires, in turn, political support in the form of institutional recognition and institutionally protected modes of living-with that would be abrogated by holding women and children collectively. Under such circumstances, when a citizen

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has not one son individually but a thousand sons collectively, “all will slight them in similar fashion” (1261b40). That is, Aristotle asserts, human attachment is fundamentally, naturally, idiosyncratic, and requires communal support; any attempt to deny this will result in the breaking of human bonds and the dissolution of human intimacy. To be sure, Aristotle is acutely aware that the forces of idiosyncrasy can also be destructive, as we will see presently; the impulse to identify only with what is one’s own is one of the human tendencies with which the legislator must contend. But for Aristotle, effective contending requires bending those tendencies and harnessing them for the city, not denying them, in part because they are ambivalent, and hold also politically salutary possibilities, as he makes clear in his third claim, namely: to deny attachment to individuals in favor of attachment to segments of the population, such that everyone under a certain age is a son or daughter, everyone above a certain age is mother or father, is to collapse the variety of social roles any one person may play—as aunt or uncle, cousin, etc.—and to disrupt the very differences that are ne­ces­sary for the city to exist. The current system of attachment is far better, asserts Aristotle: “For now the same person is greeted as a son by one, by another as a brother, by another as a cousin, or according to some other sort of kinship, whether of blood or of relation and connection by marriage—in the first instance of himself, then of his own; and further, another describes him as clansman and tribesman. It is better, indeed, to have a cousin of one’s own than a son in this way” (1262a9–14). In collapsing the multiple forms of address and variety of social roles, in homogenizing the variety of levels and kinds of human attachment toward family members and others, the Socratic model waters down human attachment, according to Aristotle. But more than this, it also threatens what seems to be emerging as the heart of human attachment for Aristotle, attachment to oneself, as the role of self-address in this passage suggests. We address and first attach to ourselves, Aristotle seems to be saying, and then to our own, by which I read and then our immediate family members, and then we become attached to clansmen and tribesmen in an expanding—and weakening—envelope of regard. But self-regard, it

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seems, is first. And if all of these attachments are, ultimately, aiming toward the political partnership, we must also see self-regard as a kind of political project, that is, as regard for the political project that is the self, the partnership of rule between rational and irrational psychic aspects. And this partnership, if we are to incorporate what we have seen of selfhood and of the possibility of a corporate consciousness irreducible to “mine” or “yours” in Chapter 1, requires the political community. The thinness or thickness, strength or weakness, of attachment is exactly the concern in Aristotle’s development of the critique of the community of women and children in Book 2 Chapter 4. The discussion opens and closes by observing that the Socratic model allows for all kinds of outrages, but the real thrust of the argument is in the claim that the community of women and children produces the opposite of what it was intended: “for there will be less friendship [philia] where children and women are common” (1262b1–2). This diminishment assures the fundamental failure of the Socratic model to attain the very unity it seeks: “For we suppose friendship [philian] to be the greatest of good things for cities (for in this way they would least of all engage in factional conflict) and Socrates praises above all the city’s being one, which is held to be, and which he asserts to be, the work of friendship [tēs philias ergon]” (1262b7–10). Aristotle illustrates the challenge that the community of women and children poses to the work of philia by reference to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, in which lovers, “who from an excess of affection [dia to sphodra philein] ‘desire to grow together,’ the two of them becoming one” (1262b12–13). The problem with this model, for Aristotle, is that, while it makes sense in the erotic context, it is devastating for the polis. In the erotic context, “it must necessarily happen that both, or one of them, is destroyed; in the city, however, friendship necessarily becomes diluted [tēn philian anangkaion hudarē ginesthai] through this sort of partnership, and the fact that a father least of all says ‘mine’ of his son, or the son of his father” (1262b14–17). Just as a lot of water added to a little wine makes the wine imperceptible (anaisthēton), “so too does this result with respect to the intimacy [oikeiotēta] with one another based on these terms, it being least of

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all necessary in a regime of this sort for a father to take thought for [diaphrontizein] his sons as sons, or a son for his father as a father, or brothers for one another” (1262b18–22). Aristotle continues: “For there are two things above all which make human beings cherish [kēdesthai] and love [philein], what is one’s own and what is dear [to te idion kai to agapēton]; and neither of these can belong to those who govern themselves in this way” (1262b22–4). Aristotle’s point here is that the community of women and children actually destroys the bonds that civic unity requires, that it severs the connection by means of which philia develops. But this connection would seem to be some extension of self-regard to ­others, in this case to one’s children, with the suggestion being that if I cannot say of my child that it is my own, I will have less care for it and take less thought for it. Indifference toward the particularity of one’s child would, according to Aristotle, prove devastating to the attachment between father and son, the implication being that this relationship requires the maintenance of particularity, the recognition of oneself as the father of this child and the other as son of this father, and vice versa. One’s attachment to one’s children, Aristotle suggests, in some way hangs on one’s ability to see oneself as affirmed in the being of the other: they are a not me that still affirms me, they are a “mine,” a difference but also a sameness of stock. And this seeing of oneself, in turn, requires the support of a community. And so here again we encounter Aristotle’s assertion of the in­erad­ ic­able nature of the human tendency toward idiosyncrasy, as well as his emphasis on the need for institutional support of human attachments. For it would seem that, for Aristotle, parental love, stergein, on its own is not sufficient to motivate the highest human capacity for care (or most intense expression of human care); for this, recognition is needed as well. At least for the father. For the mother, as we shall discuss in Chapter  6, there is a different story; indeed, the mother’s willingness to forgo recognition of her status and even to give up her child if the child’s well-being calls for it, is a sign of the active nature of friendship (EN 1159a27). Throughout Aristotle’s discussion of the community of women and children, what is at stake is a manner of living together, a way of comporting oneself toward those others who most inspire a sense

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of oneself as extended beyond oneself, a sense of what is not one but yet one’s own. It is with this context of the nature of human attachment in mind that Aristotle turns, in the next chapter, to discern how regimes should handle possessions, with an eye to the affection of adult citizens for one another, and it is here that we encounter the first reference to suzēn. Aristotle opens his consideration of whether or not possessions should be held in common by considering that possession ne­ces­ sary for the production of sustenance, namely farmland, which could be held individually but the crops put to common use, or held commonly and the crops put to individual use, or all held c­ ommonly (I take Aristotle’s justification in not entertaining the possibility that all could be held individually to be tied to his understanding of the political partnership—in such a circumstance there is not partnership to speak of, just a collection of relatively autonomous households). If there is not a farming class separate from the citizens, if, instead, the citizens themselves will also undertake to farm, “the arrangements concerning possessions would give rise to many resentments” (1263a10–11). Aristotle continues: “For if they turn out to be unequal rather than equal in the work and in the enjoyments deriving from it, accusations against those who can gratify themselves or take much [lambanontas polla] while exerting themselves little [oliga ponountas] must necessarily arise on the part of those who take less and exert themselves more. In general, to live together and be partners [to suzēn kai koinōnein] in any human matter is difficult, and particularly things of this sort” (1263a11–16). This first reference to suzēn in the Politics is also where Aristotle first broaches in any detail the pathologies of self-regard that will come to hold a significant place in this text, i.e., the challenges posed to living together by over-grasping, and by exercising a certain power to withhold one’s capacities without checking one’s consumption, taking much while doing little. What is at issue here is an extreme expression of human idiosyncratic tendencies, resulting in an error in judgment, a forgetting of the communal construction of the self, an unwillingness to resist the temptation to put oneself above others. If the source of one’s “other regard” is one’s self-regard, we can see how this would become particularly pressing, we can see

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how one might be tempted to withhold extension of one’s ­self-regard. If, as we suggested in Chapter  1, both self-regard and other-regard are predicated on one’s orientation toward the good, we encounter here the outlines of a divergence between the perceived good and the common good. That is, we have here a preliminary model for the tendency to pull away from the political bond, to veer away from the common good and common deeds, to avoid political partnership. These problems are particularly evident “in the partnerships of fellow travelers” who quarrel over “everyday and small matters” (1263a17–19). These quarrels are allowed to take on larger proportions when they become unavoidable, when the absence of a separate farming class is not balanced with the p ­ rivate ownership of property. Consequently, Aristotle asserts that having possessions in common is difficult and that private ownership, “the mode that holds now,” would be better, provided, and I take this to be crucial, there is “the adornment of habits and an arrangement of correct laws [epikosmēthen ethesi kai taxei nomōn orthōn]” (1263a22–4). For under such circumstances, the good of both private and common ownership is realized and human idiosyncratic tendencies are harnessed and put in the service of human community: “dividing the care” of possessions will result in their proper care and improvement, “as each applies himself to his own,” while the possession of good habits and decent laws will guarantee that they make their possessions available to others as needed, that is, it will be through virtue (di’ aretēn) that, to follow the old adage, “the things of friends are common [koina to philōn]” (1263a30). Ethics and legislation emerge, then, as the means by which human overreaching, antisociality, refusal of political partnership, are overcome. Aristotle is clear that securing both good character and good laws is a political enterprise: “It is evident, then, that it is better for possessions to be private, but to make them common in use. That they become such is a task peculiar [idion] to the legislator” (1263a37–40). Part of the work of legislation is to assure, to the extent of the possible, an excellent citizenry. Being an excellent citizen, in turn, means not only being such as to make the things that are one’s own common for one’s friends but also knowing how to use the things that have

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been made commonly available. If friendship here functions as the affection by means of which one becomes capable of extending the use of one’s things to others and using others’ things well, it requires a polis that offers the institutional support for asserting that something is “mine.” In addition to avoiding the many difficulties of sharing the ownership of possessions, Aristotle asserts, private ownership also enhances one’s life with pleasure, and in order to argue for this he again appeals to self-regard: “Further, it makes an untold difference with respect to pleasure to consider something one’s own. It is surely not in vain that everyone has affection for himself; this is something natural. Selfishness [to philauton] is justly blamed; but this is not having affection for oneself [to philein heauton], but rather having more affection than one should—just as in the case of the greedy person [to philochrēmaton]; for practically every person has affection for things of this sort” (1263a40–1263b5). Moreover, the pleasure of considering something to be one’s own, and having institutional/cultural recognition of this ownership, is joined by the pleasure of doing good things for one’s friends, guests, and clubmates (philois ē zenois ē hetairois); “those who make the city too much of a unity” forfeit these things and “eliminate the tasks of two of the virtues,” moderation about women and liberality about possessions, both of which require private ownership (1263b7–9). Aristotle rounds out his critique of the Socratic model in the Republic by first considering why anyone would think common ownership was a good idea: “he who hears it accepts it gladly, thinking it will produce some marvelous friendship [philian tina thaumastēn] in all for each other, especially when it is charged that the ills that now exist in regimes come about through property not being in common” (1263b16–20). Nevertheless, “none of these things comes about because of the lack of partnership [dia tēn akoinōnēsian] but through depravity [alla dia tēn mochthērian]” (1263b22–3)—and yet, such people should not only observe the ills they would escape in such a model of ownership, but also the goods that they would be denied. If one does so, one must conclude, asserts Aristotle, that common ownership “is a way of life that appears to be altogether impossible” (1263b28).

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He concludes by focusing on the specific cause of Socrates’ ­specific error; namely, again, his excessive privileging of unity: “Both the household and the city should be one in a sense, but not in every sense” (1263b31–2); “rather, as was said before, being a multitude [the city] must be made one and common through education” (1263b36–7). Here again, homogeneity and idiosyncrasy are the twin enemies of the city, enemies that can neither be completely eradicated nor limitlessly indulged. The job of the legislator is to accomplish some degree of unity and commonality in what must also be held to be different. Education is the means by which the legislator does so, and “it is odd that one who plans to introduce education and who holds that it is through this that the city will be excellent should suppose it can be corrected by things of that sort, and not by habits, philosophy, and laws” (1263b37–40). This seems an especially uncharitable criticism of the Socrates of the Republic, whose recommendations regarding ownership are seen as ne­ces­ sary in order to attain a citizen body capable of being educated, cultivating the right habits, and following good laws. Socrates might respond that it is naive to think that you can maintain private ownership and hope to educate properly or instill good habits; this is especially so for philosophy, which he suggests requires freedom from ownership. At the very least, Aristotle seems to be making Socrates’ larger point, even as he has followed a different route. In any case, when Aristotle specifies the means through which education makes a city excellent—habits, philosophy, and laws—he specifies the thoughtful structuring of shared life built upon legislation regarding ownership that is designed with an eye to the ­promotion of philia.

2.2.2  Shared Life as Both Impulse and Choice There are four remaining references to suzēn in the Politics, all of which appear in Book 3. In this book Aristotle pivots from the survey of what is fine and what is worthy of critique in existing and theoretical politeiai to a focus on the nature of the polis itself, a study he undertakes in an analytic mode, identifying citizens as the

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primary components of the polis and discussing what makes one a citizen. By Chapter 6 he has cleared the field to turn to discuss “the arrangement of those who inhabit the city” (1274b38), the politeia. And in order to do this he first “sets down a presupposition” (hupotheteon) regarding “what it is for the sake of which the city is established, and how many kinds of rule are connected with the human and the partnership in life [tēn koinōnian tēs zōēs]” (1278b15–17).23 Aristotle reminds his readers of his earlier assertion that humans are by nature political animals, and carries this observation further: “Hence [humans] strive to live together [oregontai tou suzēn] even when they have no need of assistance from one another, though it is also the case that the common advantage brings them together [to koinēi sumpheron sunagei], to the extent that it falls to each to live finely [zēn kalōs]” (1278b20–3). And this reference to living beautifully strikes upon that for which the sake of which the city is: “It is this above all, then, which is the end for all both in common and separately; but they also come together [sunerchontai], and maintain [sunechousi] the political partnership, for the sake of living itself [zēn heneken autou]. For there is perhaps something fine in living just by itself [kata to zēn auto monon], provided there is no great excess of the hardships of life [kata ton bion]. It is clear that most humans will endure much harsh treatment in their longing for life [glichomenoi tou zēn], so that there is some joy in it itself [en autōi] and a natural sweetness” (1278b23–30). As we observed in the Introduction, as an object of desire and longing, life, zōē, attracts all of the attachment and ambivalence of the erotic ideal, about which we will say more presently. But we should also connect this longing with Aristotle’s presentation of one’s desire for oneself in his discussion of friendship, discussed in some detail in Chapter 1. To desire oneself, as a living being, is to desire one’s living. And we can now fill this in further and add that the longing for life, in a political animal, is a longing for shared life; both the desire to live and the desire to live well motivate sharing 23  ὑποθετέον δὴ πρῶτον τίνος χάριν συνέστηκε πόλις, καὶ τῆς ἀρχῆς εἴδη πόσα τῆς περὶ ἄνθρωπον καὶ τὴν κοινωνίαν τῆς ζωῆς.

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life. Indeed, the double valence of suzēn here is striking: humans strive to share life both when they have no need for one another and when common advantage brings them together. Aristotle thus attributes dual motivations for coming together in the sharing of life: the first mentioned grows out of the hormē for political life, a hormē that would be present even in the condition of self-sufficiency because of the very kind of animal the human is (political)—that is, a zoological impulse. But, second, people are also brought together to share life by common advantage, to the extent that it falls to each to live beautifully. That is, people share life both because of an impulse inherent in the kind of animal they are (which would seem to operate independently of choice) and also because they desire to live beautifully and discern that this will likely require ­others and so choose to share life with them. Shared life thus operates both within and without the envelope of choice, and its centrality to his understanding of the political partnership suggests that we cannot simply treat this dual motivation as indicating a gap between human political life and animal sociality; quite the op­pos­ite, suzēn suggests rather the continuity between the political impulse and the capacity for choice. To see the full implications of this dual motivation we should look at the final cluster of references to suzēn in Politics 3.9.

2.2.3  Shared Life as Both Limited and Limiting In the final three references to suzēn, Aristotle observes the limits of the role shared life plays in the polis. In Chapter 9 Aristotle has deepened his examination of politeia to consider the essential features of its various kinds, with a particular focus on democracy and oligarchy, each of which could be understood by their respective, and erroneous, conceptions of justice: “For all grasp a certain sort of justice, but advance only to a certain point, and do not speak of the whole of justice in its authoritative sense. For example, justice seems to be equality, and it is, but for equals and not for all; and inequality seems to be just and is indeed, but for unequals and not for all; but they disregard this element of persons and judge badly.

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The cause of this is that the judgment concerns themselves [peri  hautōn], and most people are bad judges about their own things [peri tōn oikeiōn]” (1280a9–16). In this case, their error in judgment about themselves implicates them in an error about justice: “by speaking to a point of a kind of justice, [they] consider ­themselves to be speaking of justice simply” (1280a21–2). Aristotle con­tinues, observing that their error in judgment consists in falsely generalizing from one aspect of their condition, such that if they are unequal in one thing, they see themselves as unequal in all, and the same for those who are equal in some one way. “But of the most authoritative, they say nothing” (1280a25). This last point returns Aristotle to a consideration of the political bond. If the city were for the sake of possessions, the oligarchs might be right that they deserve greater honor. “But if [the city exists] not for the sake of living alone but rather primarily for the sake of living well [ei de mēte tou zēn monon heneken alla mallon tou eu zēn] (for otherwise there could be a city of slaves or of other animals—as things are, there is not, since they do not share in happiness or in living in accordance with intentional choice [tou zēn kata proairesin])” (1280a31–4), then the possession of wealth on its own does not merit being given the greatest authority. Nor is the city for the sake of alliances that aim at preservation. Rather, what holds a city together is some agreement about virtue: “virtue must be a care for every city, or at least every one to which the term applies truly and not merely in a manner of speaking” (1280b6–8);24 without this, “the partnership becomes an alliance which differs from others— from [alliances of] remote allies—only by location” (1280b8–9). Aristotle’s juxtaposition of living on its own and living well in the same breath with which he invokes the capacity to live according to choice reminds us that when we are dealing with the living of humans, we are dealing with a living that could go well or poorly, a living that requires the good use of the capacity for choice. Living 24  ᾗ καὶ φανερὸν ὅτι δεῖ περὶ ἀρετῆς ἐπιμελὲς εἶναι τῇ γ’ ὡς ἀληθῶς ὀνομαζομένῃ πόλει, μὴ λόγου χάριν. See also the reference to hunting for virtue as that which differentiates regimes in Book 7: “For it is through hunting for [happiness in the sense of the actualization of virtue] in a different manner and by means of different things that people create ways of life and regimes that differ” (1328a41–1328b2).

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well is a project because failing to live is a possibility. And this ­project requires the presence of others with whom to share life. The political bond, Aristotle here reminds us, is the partnership that is formed by a shared approach to virtue. Thus, even if one could connect two cities by a wall, they would not become one, nor would they through intermarriage, nor would those who dwell in different places but nearby and had recognized laws not to be unjust to one another in their transactions—none of these hits upon the political bond, that is, none of them on their own are a partnership in virtue. “It is evident, therefore, that the city is not a partnership in a location and for the sake of not committing injustice against each other and of transacting business. These things must necessarily be present if there is to be a city, but not even when all of them are present is it yet a city, but [the city is] the partnership in living well both of households and families for the sake of a complete and self-sufficient life [zōēs teleias charin kai autapkous]” (1280b29–35). And yet, Aristotle immediately adds that this would not be possible without inhabiting the same location and intermarriage (1280b35–6). And here again, suzēn appears, and again in a double form, in this case one that connects reproductive and political life: “It was on this account that marriage connections arose in cities, as well as clans, festivals, and the pastimes of living together [kai diagōgai tou suzēn]. This sort of thing is the work of friendship [philias]; for friendship is the intentional choice of living together [hē gar tou suzēn proairesis philia]” (1280b36–9). Aristotle con­ tinues: “Living well, then, is the end of the city, and these things are for the sake of this end. A city is the partnership of families and villages in a complete and self-sufficient life. This, we assert is living happily and finely. The political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions [tōn kalōn praxeōn], not for the sake of living together [all’ ou tou suzēn]. Hence those who contribute most to a partnership of this sort have a greater part in the city than those who are equal or greater in freedom and family but unequal in political virtue, or those who outdo them in wealth but are outdone in virtue” (1280b39–1281a7). This final sentence reminds us of the context, that is, the models of justice

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operative in democracies and oligarchies, models that are limited and fraught because they inadequately discern what is due to whom. An adequate discernment, one that could yield a proper administration of justice, would acknowledge that the highest honor is due to those who perform the noblest deeds. This passage again locates suzēn in two spheres of life, with philia serving as a hinge connecting reproductive life with the project of living well via the intentional choice of sharing life. In this, it serves to mark out a spectrum of more and less intense modes of suzēn. Suzēn occurs in any political partnership as an expression of the impulse toward human community; to the extent that the human renews these bonds, we could describe it as also loosely chosen, that is, chosen insofar as partnership is chosen. But in friendship it is more deeply chosen and thus moves from a general attachment on the basis of shared political nature to a more intense attachment on the basis of a more profound sharing. The limitation of shared life tells us that shared life alone does not distinguish a city from the households and families that make it up—for a polis to be a polis, this shared life must itself be for the sake of something else, and the specific thing the city brings out or adds or makes possible is the noble deed. And yet, if we remind ourselves of the role of suzēn in the ethics, in particular its connection to virtue friendship, we see that the noble actions for which the city is the sake are fostered by the intense form of shared life that occurs in certain kinds of friendships. Moreover, even the most self-sufficient still choose friends and choose to share life. To not do so would be to leave the political impulse unfulfilled.25 In negotiating between the various moments of this spectrum and the dual motivations for suzēn, it would be helpful to dig a bit deeper into what it would mean to leave the political impulse unfulfilled. And in this we are in luck, as it is precisely such a lack of fulfillment that the tyrant courts. We can thus round out our study of suzēn in the Politics by attending to its erosion in the tyranny.

25 On hormē for political partnership, see 1253a29.

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2.3  Tyranny and the Dissolution of Shared Life In the list of differences between the king and the tyrant that Aristotle offers in the later chapters of Book 5 of the Politics, one in particular stands out for its succinct indication of the tyrant’s attack on the political bond. While kings are guardians of both the elite and the people, “tyranny, as has often been said, looks to nothing common, unless it is for the sake of private benefit” (1311a2–4).26 The tyrant’s desire to serve only his own pleasure, and to make all whom he rules servants of his pleasure, requires that he destroy the common good and replace it with his own private good (as he perceives it). As Aristotle’s subsequent account of what preserves tyrannies details, to do this he must also dissolve the bond between friends, citizens, and family members, destroy citizens’ capacity, and divest their hope. In their place he must construct ignorance and fear of intimates, institute mass impoverishment, and eliminate leisure and leisured discourse. And to do this he must encroach upon all aspects of the perceptual and intellectual lives of his citizens: he must make sure that citizens are denied the means to know their neighbors, to come together to share their thoughts freely, in fact, to have the time to come together at all. He must sow distrust where friendship and familial love already existed. He must squash frank speech and encourage flattery. At its most radical, the agenda of the tyrant is to divest all private existence other than his own, to create a city of tools (organs) for his own pleasure, to make those tools available to his every whim and ready to hand at any time for any purpose, to be his eyes, his hands, his mouth, his nose, his ears, his flesh, a perverse mirror image of the king’s extension of sunarchia to those who place their eyes, ears, and hands in service to him (1287b31). And to do this he must destroy the bodily, psychic, and 26  “A king tends to be a guardian, seeing to it that those possessing property suffer no injustice, and that the people are not treated with arrogance. Tyranny, as has often been said, looks to nothing common, unless it is for the sake of private benefit. The tyrant’s goal is pleasure; the goal of a king is noble [ἡ δὲ τυραννίς, ὥσπερ εἴρηταιπολλάκις, πρὸς οὐδὲν ἀποβλέπει  κοινόν, εἰ μὴ τῆς ἰδίας ὠφελείας χάριν. ἔστι δὲ σκοπὸς τυραννικὸς μὲν τὸ ἡδύ, βασιλικὸς δὲ τὸ  καλόν]” (1311a2–5).

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social integrity of his citizens, and reduce their self-regard to ­nothing. We will thus follow Aristotle’s account of the sources of the tyranny’s preservation closely. There are two ways to preserve a tyranny. The second one that Aristotle discusses exploits the difference between office and style of rule that we identified earlier: a tyrant may prolong his rule by least resembling in all ways but one the real character of the tyrant, that is, by becoming more kingly, provided “one thing only is preserved—his power” (1314a35–6). So long as his power to rule over the unwilling as well as the willing is assured, then, “in whatever else he does or is held to do he should give a fine performance of the part of the kingly ruler” (1314a39–40). He should refrain from every sort of arrogance, especially two: “that involving bodily abuse, and that involving [taking sexual advantage of] youth” (1315a14–16). Aristotle had documented the dangers of physical abuse and sexual humiliation earlier in his survey of a few examples of “disgraceful behavior [aischunai]” of certain monarchs and the danger to their power that these behaviors pose as especially en­raging expressions of hubris. This was the case, for example, with Hellanocrates of Larisa’s attack on Archelaus. The king had promised to return Hellanocrates to his home in exchange for sexual favors; when Archelaus did not keep this promise Hellanocrates “supposed the relationship had come about as a result of arrogance rather than erotic desire [di’ hubrin kai ou di’ erōtikēn epithumian]” (1311b19–20) and joined Crateus in attacking Archelaus.27 To enact one’s power by violating another’s bodily integrity is to break political bonds in a decisive way and to spark the most intense resistance, that is, it enflames the very source of one’s capacity for philia, thumos. To violate humans in this way is to galvanize an impulse that takes such violation as an affront to the deepest ties one has to others and to oneself. Thus, Aristotle writes, “Of those who make attempts at assassination, the ones who are most to be feared and require the most precautions are those who deliberately choose not to try and save their lives once they have carried out the 27  This distinction between acting out of erōs and acting out of hubris is also made in the description of what a kingly tyrant should most avoid; see 1315a23.

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assassination. Hence he must beware particularly of those who believe him to have behaved arrogantly either toward themselves or toward those they care for; for those who undertake [such a deed] out of spirit are not sparing of themselves. As Heraclitus said, ‘it is hard to fight with spirit,’ for it ‘pays the price of soul’ ” (1315a24–31).28 In order to avoid enflaming his citizens’ thumos, the tyrant “should appear to the ruled not as a tyrannical sort [mē turannikon] but as an administrator and a kingly sort [all’ oikonomon kai basilikon], not as an appropriator but as a steward [kai mē spheteristēn all’ epitropon]. He should pursue moderateness in life [kai tas metriotētas tou biou diōkein], not the extremes; further, he should seek the company of notables, but seek popularity with the many” (1315a41–1315b4). Such a tyrant will be assured of better and longer rule and better character. But Aristotle’s account of what is characteristic of the tyrant as such, the enactment of which stands as the first way to preserve a tyranny, serves as a primer in the destruction of shared life. These are the long-standing tools of tyranny, most of which, states Aristotle, were established by Periander of Corinth and were also apparent in the rule of the Persians. They include cutting down the preeminent and killing those with high thoughts (to tous huper echontas kolouein kai tous phronēmatias anairein) (1313a40–1) but also cutting off the relationships that tend to foster high thoughts and trust: “common messes, clubs, education, or anything else of this sort [kai mēte sussitia ean mēte hetairian mēte paideian mēte allo mēthen toiouton]” (1313a41–1313b1). The erosion of high thoughts and trust (phronēma to kai pistis) (1313b2) requires ­legislation that strikes at the heart of human intimacy and shared life, dictating where citizens may be and may not be, and what they may do and not do with one another: “Leisured discussions are not allowed, or other meetings connected with leisure [kai mēte scholas mēte allous sullogous epitrepein gignesthai scholastikous], 28  τῶν δ’ ἐπιχειρούντων ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ σώματος διαφθορὰν οὗτοι φοβερώτατοι καὶ δέονται πλείστης φυλακῆς ὅσοι μὴ προαιροῦνται περιποιεῖσθαι τὸ ζῆν διαφθείραντες. διὸ μάλιστα εὐλαβεῖσθαι δεῖ τοὺς ὑβρίζεσθαι νομίζοντας ἢ αὑτοὺς ἢ ὧν κηδόμενοι τυγχάνουσιν· ἀφειδῶς γὰρ ἑαυτῶν ἔχουσιν οἱ διὰ θυμὸν ἐπιχειροῦντες, καθάπερ καὶ Ἡράκλειτος εἶπε, χαλεπὸν φάσκων εἶναι θυμῷ μάχεσθαι, ψυχῆς γὰρ ὠνεῖσθαι.

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but everything is done to make all as ignorant of one another as possible [kai panta poiein ex hōn hoti malista agnōtes allēlois], since knowledge tends to create trust of one another [hē gar gnōsis pistin poiei mallon pros allēlous]” (1313b3–6). The citizens’ manufactured ignorance of one another is matched by the generated knowledge of their doings for the tyrant, resulting in a kind of radical surveillance: “residents are made to be always in evidence and pass their time about the doors [of the tyrant’s palace] [kai to tous epidēmountas aiei phanerous einai kai diatribein peri thuras]; for in this way their activities would escape notice least of all, and they would become habituated to having small thoughts through always acting like slaves [kai phronein an ethizointo mikron aiei douleuontes]” (1313b6–9). In this, the tyrant strives “to let nothing that is done or said by any of those he rules escape his notice” [to mē lanthanein peirasthai hosa tugkanei tis legōn ē prattōn tōn archomenōn],” an effort in which he enlists other people to act as spies (kataskopous), further eroding their ability to trust one another and organize against their common enemy, “like the women called ‘inducers’ [potagōgides] at Syracuse, and the ‘eavesdroppers’ [ōtakoustas] Heiro sent out whenever there was some meeting or gathering (for men speak less freely when they fear such persons, and if they do speak freely they are less likely to escape notice [parrēsiazontai te gar hētton, phoboumenoi tous toioutous, kan parrēsiazōntai, lanthanousin hētton]” (1313b12–16).29 In fact, Aristotle is particularly disturbed by the status of women and slaves in the tyranny, by what to him would have been a perversion that he sees as common to extreme democracies and tyrannies: “dominance of women in the household [gunaikokratia te peri tas oikias], so that they may report on their husbands, and laxness toward slaves for the same reason” (1313b33–5). And because slaves and women prosper under a tyranny, they do not conspire to bring 29  οἷον περὶ Συρακούσας αἱ ποταγωγίδες καλούμεναι, καὶ οὓς ὠτακουστὰς ἐξέπεμπεν Ἱέρων, ὅπου τις εἴη συνουσία καὶ σύλλογος (παρρησιάζονταί τε γὰρ ἧττον, φοβούμενοι τοὺς τοιούτους, κἂν παρρησιάζωνται, λανθάνουσιν ἧττον). Compare this use of the human sen­sor­ ium, the eyes and ears of others, with that of the king: “monarchs create many eyes for themselves, and ears, feet, and hands as well; for those who are friendly to their rule and themselves they make co-rulers [sunarchous]” (1287b30).

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down the tyrant. Instead, they flatter him, another feature ­characteristic of the tyranny, and another sign of the base character of the tyrant, for his love of flattery, and those who flatter him, for “no one would do this who had free thoughts [touto d’ oud’ an heis poiēseie phronēma echōn eleutheron]: respectable persons may be friends, but they will certainly not flatter” (1314a1–4). This erosion extends beyond women to friends themselves by the encouragement of slander against one another (to diaballein allēlois), setting “friends at odds with friends [kai sugkrouein kai philous philois], the people with the notables, and the wealthy with themselves” (1313b16–18). The verb sugkrouein has the sense of “striking together” or “bringing into collision or clashing”; it is not so much a pulling apart as a violent dashing together. The tyrant represents an especially perverse mixture of idiosyncratic and homogenizing impulses: in setting his own interest above all others, he regards others as an inchoate mass without distinct, autonomous needs and values, and behaves accordingly. The tyrant thus violates both the essential differences and the achieved similarity of the city, he throws off the precarious balance between difference and similarity that is the political partnership. But in this he is aided already by the iniquities that have all along made tools of humans, that have produced the particular social status of the wife and of the slave, upon whom are visited the tyrannies of everyday life.30 Tyranny is the most extreme expression of the parasitic character of citizen life, of Aristotle’s assessment that sufficient leisure to realize the human political impulse requires a distribution of labor in which the bottom rung consists of beings who are valued solely for their labor. And while he will describe tyranny as unnatural, it is nevertheless a part of the human horizon, and so it must be con­ sidered in politeia-analysis. That Aristotle both discusses the tools of its preservation and offers his round condemnation of it indicates the internal tension at work here. Aristotle finds odious the very clearest expression of a central feature of human political life as he 30  We see this in the very analogy Aristotle uses to distinguish between the “female” and the slave, whose difference is assured by nature such that, like the Delphic knife, “each instrument would perform most finely if it served one task rather than many” (1252b1).

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himself understands it: the virtues of political life and the commission of noble deeds are underwritten by the labor that must be taken in order to assure their conditions for possibility. And in fact, the tyrant’s destruction of shared life is supported by his weaponization of need through the impoverishment of citizens, “so that they cannot sustain their own defense, and are so occupied with their daily needs that they lack the leisure to conspire” (1313b19–21).31 Leisure is also discouraged by the tyrant’s warmongering (1313b28). And while the kingship is preserved by friends of the king, “it is characteristic of the tyrant to distrust his friends” (1313b30–1) on the grounds that while everyone hates him, his friends are the most able to do something about it. Consequently, the tyrant surrounds himself with foreigners, both as his defenders and as his “companions for dining and entertainment [sussitois kai sunēmereutais]” (1314a10). Aristotle concludes his analysis of the traditional forces that preserve the tyranny with condemnation of them wholesale— “Such things are, then, characteristic of tyrants and help preserve their rule—though in no respect do they fall short in depravity [outhen d’ elleipei mochthērias]” (1314a12–14)—and a summary of their main aims: tyranny aims at three things: one, that the ruled have only modest thoughts [mikra phronein] (for a small-souled person [mikropsuchos] will not conspire against anyone); second, that they distrust one another (for a tyranny will not be overthrown before some persons are able to trust each other—hence they make war on the respectable as being harmful to their rule not merely because they claim not to merit being ruled in the fashion of a master, but also because they are trustworthy, both among themselves and with respect to others, and will not denounce one another or others); and third, an incapacity for activity [adunamia tōn pragmatōn], for no one will undertake something on behalf of those who are incapable, so that not even a tyranny will be overthrown where the capacity is lacking. The defining principles to which the wishes of tyrants may be reduced are, then, these three. For 31  ὅπως ἥ τε φυλακὴ τρέφηται καὶ πρὸς τῷ καθ’ ἡμέραν ὄντες ἄσχολοι ὦσιν ἐπιβουλεύειν.

122  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life one might reduce all things characteristic of tyranny to these ­presuppositions—that they not trust one another, that they not be capable, and that they have modest thoughts [ta men hopōs mē pisteuōsin allēlois, ta d’ hopōs mē dunōntai, ta d’ hopōs mikron phronōsin]. (1314a15–28)32

In short, the tyrant attacks his citizens’ self-regard, political and social bonds, and capacity for action. The residence in the same place of the citizens of a tyranny is an echo of the sharing of life. For one, their co-residence can neither realize their common advantage— as they have none—nor is it chosen for the sake of living beautifully. If anything, the citizens have been turned against one another to not choose one another; the means by which they would make this choice—e.g., knowledge of others, ability to express oneself truthfully—have all but been destroyed. But the tyrant also attempts to deny any expression of the hormē to live together, and so fails at this more zoological motivation of suzēn as well. That is, the tyranny is not when we are most animal, rather, it is when we are least able to express an impulse inherent in our animality. It invites us to become worse than the beasts, a possibility that is also inherent in human nature, a negative exceptionalism that touches on the very capacities that mark the first threshold between animate and inanimate: “without virtue, [the human] is the most unholy and the most savage [of the animals], and the worst with regard to sex and food” (1253a31ff.). We encountered this zoological dimension of human suzēn in our study of the ethics as well. There we observed that the naturalness of philia extends beyond the realm of the human—in the affection of parents for their children, for instance, which operates across a 32  στοχάζεται γὰρ ἡ τυραννὶς τριῶν, ἑνὸς μὲν τοῦ μικρὰ φρονεῖν τοὺς ἀρχομένους (οὐθενὶ γὰρ ἂν μικρόψυχος ἐπιβουλεύσειεν), δευτέρου δὲ τοῦ διαπιστεῖν ἀλλήλοις (οὐ καταλύεται γὰρ πρότερον τυραννὶς πρὶν ἢ πιστεύσωσί τινες ἑαυτοῖς· διὸ καὶ τοῖς ἐπιεικέσι πολεμοῦσιν ὡς βλαβεροῖς πρὸς τὴν ἀρχὴν οὐ μόνον διὰ τὸ μὴ ἀξιοῦν ἄρχεσθαι δεσποτικῶς, ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ τὸ πιστοὺς καὶ ἑαυτοῖς καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις εἶναι καὶ μὴ καταγορεύειν μήτε ἑαυτῶν μήτε τῶν ἄλλων)· τρίτον δ’ ἀδυναμία τῶν πραγμάτων (οὐθεὶς γὰρ ἐπιχειρεῖ τοῖς ἀδυνάτοις, ὥστε οὐδὲ τυραννίδα καταλύειν μὴ δυνάμεως ὑπαρχούσης). εἰς οὓς μὲν οὖν ὅρους ἀνάγεται τὰ βουλεύματα τῶν τυράννων, οὗτοι τρεῖς τυγχάνουσιν ὄντες· πάντα γὰρ ἀναγάγοι τις ἂν τὰ τυραννικὰ πρὸς ταύτας τὰς ὑποθέσεις, τὰ μὲν ὅπως μὴ πιστεύωσιν ἀλλήλοις, τὰ δ’ ὅπως μὴ δύνωνται, τὰ δ’ ὅπως μικρὸν φρονῶσιν.

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broad spectrum of animal life—and considered the particularly human tendency toward provincialism and clannishness, toward privileging those of one’s own kind at the expense of the human as such.33 It is in this light that we need to measure the effects of the exercise of the human capacity for choice when it is directed at the choosing of other humans. For our study of the Politics has shown us that the capacity for choice brings with it also a set of ­vulnerabilities—we must learn how to choose well, and this is particularly the case in the choices we make about the direction and recipient of our affection. I will thus conclude by drawing out what larger considerations our study of suzēn across these texts has opened up for a comprehensive understanding of human political life.

2.4 Conclusion In our study of Aristotle’s Ethics, we observed the deep connection between suzēn and philia via the most vivid form of suzēn—the sharing of two virtuous people’s most cherished activities—as well as the grounding of this intimacy in human self-regard. Far from playing the role of ‘inarticulate’ matter, by this ana­lysis zōē proves indispensable to Aristotle’s most speculative thinking about the nature of divine and human intellectual capacities. Indeed, Aristotle will go so far as to say that “living is a kind of knowing” (EE 1244b29). The perceptions and thoughts that are particularly ­revelatory of certain living beings are themselves explicitly treated by Aristotle not as standing against the realm of zōē but rather as expressions of zōē, indeed as the clearest expressions belonging to this particular kind of living being (e.g., EE 1244b25). To speak, to argue, to debate, to calculate, to solve, to understand: these are not departures from zōē, but instantiations of it, they are, for a certain kind of animal, what it means to be living in the most active of senses. So, again, we simply cannot accept a formulation of zōē and bios that reduces and opposes them along the lines of the “biological” and the “political.” 33  See Chapter 1, Sections 1.3–4.

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In particular, we must avoid a division between zōē and political life. We cannot elide zōē with bare life, or biological life, or reproductive life because, as we have seen, Aristotle consistently formulates one of the fundamental markers of human political partnership by reference to a particular form of zōē, namely, suzēn. In fact, one of Aristotle’s clearest constructions of the human as a political animal includes reference to suzēn as a gloss on what it means to be meant for a city: “for a human being is meant for a city and is of such a nature as to live with others [kai suzēn pephukos]” (EN 1169b18). Because of its conveyance of the political character of human life, we must locate suzēn in between to zēn and eu zēn, in between living and living well, and read this triplet not as opposing terms and their mean, nor as a hierarchy, but as marking out a spectrum of intensity, with the end (eu zēn) as the most vivid instantiation of the beginning (to zēn), not as a sphere opposed to it. And its location along this spectrum suggests that the sharing of life helps to both articulate and realize life to a greater degree than living in isolation. At its most intense, suzēn results in an active awareness of one’s being that is made possible by sharing one’s most cherished ac­tiv­ ities with one’s friends (see, e.g., EN 1171b32–1172a8), and that proves essential for describing the most complete form of philia, virtue friendship. And while Aristotle is clear that it is noble deeds, rather than the sharing of life (suzēn), in which the city finds its end (Pol. 1281a1), the virtue friendships that inspire such deeds are formed by the intensity of their sharing in zōē. In its affiliation with philia, and thus with the sharing of affect, perception, and action, shared life inscribes zōē in the most fundamental of political phenomena, from the affective bonds that create the conditions for friendship, to the perception of just and unjust that defines a politeia, to the pinnacles of human accomplishment, virtuous deeds and even the act of contemplation. That is, it reveals that political life is permeated by zōē. In the ancient Greek context, we thus cannot separate zōē out from political life as though it encompassed some separate sphere that could then be either included or excluded or included by exclusion or excluded by inclusion. It is not an exception, it does not run parallel to political life, not even in order

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to intersect with it periodically. Nor is it the hidden ground upon which the political rests. It simply is what is being expressed when humans form the political bond; they do so because of the kind of animal that they are, political animals, a class to which they do not have exclusive rights. In the Politics we get a fuller sense for the place of this sharing along a larger spectrum of human intimacy. For one, both suzēn and the attachment that marks its imbrication in the human cap­ acity for choice (philia) require institutional support—in the form of legislation and customs surrounding household formulation and the ownership of property, which both define material conditions for sharing life and support the emotional ties and trust necessary for the more vivid forms of suzēn—and will be destroyed in their absence. The tyrant aims to make friendship impossible, and in so doing dissolves shared life into the vicious competition for resources that stand below even the surface milling together of cattle. That is, life in a tyranny fails to assure the institutional space necessary for both the pursuit of common advantage and the expression of the human impulse toward political community. Second, both of these motives—that is, the desire for common advantage and the impulse toward human community—are active in the human pursuit of shared life. And because shared life expresses both an impulse that could be called broadly zoological, an impulse that accompanies human political nature and thus is not chosen but simply is an aspect of the kind of animal the human is and an impulse that galvanizes the human capacity for choice in order to pursue the best life available to one via the pursuit of common advantage, human political community cannot simply be read as a break from animality. What the possession of the capacity for choice tells us, instead, is that the human can fail to attain its living, can fail at living well, can fail at animality, and the political community is implicated in this failure. Life in the tyranny is most beastly (and not most animal) because it strengthens those aspects of human nature that pull away from human political community; conversely, life in the best polis will be marked not by its transcendence of the animal but rather by its transcendence of what makes the human least able to realize its animality on its own.

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When taken together, we see that shared life marks a bond with various modes of expression and strength, from the bonds of marriage and “the pastimes of living together” to the clearest expression of human intimacy in the shared striving toward the good via the commission of noble deeds. That is, we see that shared life simply is the manner in which humans express the political character of human nature. We have also broached the human capacity to fail in even the most basic actions of living. And the possibility of this failure tells us that our understanding of suzēn would be incomplete if we did not measure the bonds it creates against other forms of animal sociality. There do seem to be, for Aristotle, clear differences in terms of vividness and intimacy between the herding together of cattle and the sharing in cherished tasks, including in the most extreme case the sharing in noble deeds of some humans. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to map this distinction on to animal sociality (without choice) versus human suzēn (with choice) if what that means is that we must move beyond the animal to be human. Rather, Aristotle is making the claim that our humanness can also fail at animal-ness; this is why for Aristotle living well is at stake for humans in a way it is not for other animals, or, rather, this is what Aristotle means when he asserts that it is only up to humans to live finely. This is so because it is also open to humans to be the source of their own failure to meet the basic threshold of living. Moreover, it suggests that a base level of success for humans is not rejecting animality, but succeeding at it. Thus, the spectrum of suzēn is not from animal, choiceless, living together to human, chosen, living together. Rather, human suzēn must be seen as ­ emerging along a spectrum of sociality whose furthest reaches include the loosest and most tense residing in place (or coincidence in location) of vicious animals (which can include human coincidence of the kind we encountered in the tyranny), through simple sharing of needs (possible for most animals, human included), to the more intimate chosen sharing of cherished deeds (only open to humans). My point here is that the human occupies both ends of the spectrum. That is, we have to observe human suzēn arise within the context of an antisocial tendency that we may also see, for instance, in crook-taloned animals (HA 488a5), but that, again, the

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human gives most radical expression to. The stupidity that Aristotle attributes to sheep (HA 610b24–5), or even the viciousness of eagles against their own young (HA 619b3–620a6), is nothing compared to the depravity of radically corrupt humans. And what this, in turn, tells us is that to fully take the measure of human political phenomena, especially politeia-building, we must view it in the context of political animality as such. We cannot fully understand the character of shared life without a study of animal sociality. And so, we must look not only to the instances of shared life in the ethics and the Politics, but also to the account of animal sociality that arises from Aristotle’s treatment of animal life and character in his zoological works. And here too we need to cultivate a double gaze. It is not enough to include the zoological texts in order to assess Aristotle’s understanding of human nature. In attempting to integrate Aristotle’s zoological work into our understanding of his broader philosophical pursuits we also have to be on guard against the errors of scientism, the naivety of granting an unassailable truth and priority to perception. In correcting for the marginalization of Aristotle’s zoological works in the philosophical scholarly tradition, we cannot take for granted that his politics and ethics must be weighted against a zoology that provides the grounding in observation of ethico-political phenomena. We should avoid assuming that Aristotle, or anyone else for that matter, was somehow able to simply, assuredly, and without complication uncouple his analysis of what he sees from his assumptions of what should be seen. Rather, we should anticipate a bi-directional exchange of influence between Aristotle’s zoological and ethico-political texts, and attend not only to the zoological dimension of the ethics and politics, but also to the political and ethical conceptual vocabulary informing the zoological work.

PART II

THE LIVES OF ANIMALS By the time Plato described the instability of the polis in terms ­borrowed from the beehive, he had a long and well-established poetic lineage locating power and rule in the context of animal life from which to draw. When Homer wanted to convey the unity of thought and purpose that drove the Achaean army, for instance, it is to the migration of cranes, the swarming of bees, the order of ants that he turns, the very animals that Aristotle will describe as pol­it­ ical. Indeed, the etymological connection between agelē (herd), agēlaion (the character of being gregarious), and agein (to lead) asserts a connection between the sociality of living beings (or the lack thereof) and the nature of political life, between living together and ruling. And when Hesiod pauses in his account of the miseries of life in the Iron Age to include a meditation on the nature of power, he draws from an avian source.1 The illustration of this model of power—the complete violation of bodily autonomy—in the grasping of the hawk would have come as no surprise to Aristotle; no crook-taloned animal is gregarious, he tells us (HA 488a5). Aristotle’s approach to political life is a direct recipient of this trope. His claim that we can first discern both mastery and political rule in the zōion (Pol. 1254a34–1254b4) should be read in the context of this larger connection between animality and rule.2 As we have seen from the previous two chapters, zōē permeates the polis 1 Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 235–45. 2  τὸ δὲ ζῷον πρῶτον συνέστηκεν ἐκ ψυχῆς καὶ σώματος, ὧν τὸ μὲν ἄρχον ἐστὶ φύσει τὸ δ’ ἀρχόμενον . . . ἔστι δ’ οὖν, ὥσπερ λέγομεν, πρῶτον ἐν ζῴῳ θεωρῆσαι καὶ δεσποτικὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ πολιτικήν. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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for Aristotle, not only in his designation of the human as a zōion politikon (one amongst several) but also in his treatment of ­perception and thought and even logos as expressions of zōē. The student of politikē would be well served, then, by also being a student of zōē, and if we turn to Aristotle’s History of Animals, we see this intertwining of zoological and political concerns clearly in, for instance, the perpetual polemos between animals competing for a food source (608b19–21), in the greater political character of animals whose possession of memory allows them to take greater care of their young (589a1–3), in the structure of rule and signification necessary for successful crane migration (614b18–27), in the conflicts and harmonies of the hive (623b5–627b22). And yet, the tendency within both Continental and AngloAmerican scholarship, until very recently, has been to hold the human and the animal apart. Both approaches attribute to Aristotle a model of human political life as in antagonism with zōē and zōion, such that human life is seen as requiring a rejection of animal life. Whether we find this model at work in an interpretation of the ­difference between living and living well that insists upon their fundamental divide, such that living well must somehow involve transcending or moving beyond “mere” living; or an alignment of zōē with engineered bare life, and thus with the concerted effort to produce reduced, depleted, exhausted, anonymous living stuff that would have such horrific effects on the political life of a very specific time and place, the underlying assumption is the same: the “completion” of that most political of animals, the human, must be understood in light of a radical division from the animal, even if, as both Agamben and Keyt assert, that division resides within the human.3 Given the disparaging things Aristotle has to say about cattle in the ethics and Politics, for instance, and his elevation of humans above all other animals, this seems obvious enough. And yet, if we read Aristotle’s approach to cattle as indicative of his approach to zōion as such, we overlook the very different attitude toward other forms of zōa throughout Aristotle’s work, and risk continuing to consign to the margins of philosophy a substantial portion of work 3  Keyt (1989) 18; Agamben (2003) 15.

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that Aristotle himself saw as anything but outside the scope of philo­soph­ic­al inquiry. We also overlook the significance of the full field of living being to what are taken to be the heart of Aristotle’s philosophical projects, his studies of substance and character, in particular. The problem, then, is that a limited engagement with Aristotle’s zoological texts combined with a not-unrelated im­port­ ation of an early Christian orientation toward “the animal” as the repository of the necessary, the material, the vicious, has resulted in aligning zōion with “the animal” in this reduced sense. Such a vision of zōion would then require a division between political and animal (read, biological) life. Our study of the role of the sharing of life, of suzēn, in Aristotle’s thought reveals that this conception of “the animal,” while resonant with things Aristotle says about “the beastly,” is at a far remove from Aristotle’s thinking about the full range of zōa, and at odds with much of what Aristotle says about the activity of living. What our study of suzēn has shown thus far is that Aristotle does conceive of a radical and constitutive division within the human, but it is not between human and animal, anthrōpos and zōion. Its lines fall elsewhere. To see where, we have to turn to the History of Animals to the passage in which Aristotle marks off different forms of animal bios. The primary differentia of bios for animals is that of topos; animals are either land-dwelling or water-dwelling (589a10–11). But there are other significant differentia as well. Some animals, for instance, are gregarious (agelaia), others solitary (monadika), and others dualize (ta de epamphoterizei); of those that are gregarious, some are politika and some are sporadika (scattered). And here, Aristotle is quite succinct; humans are dualizers: ho d’ anthrōpos epamphoterizei (HA 488a7).4 Thus, the division that ­constitutes the human is not between its so-called human and ­animal natures but between its gregarious and solitary tendencies.5 4  ὁ δ’ ἄνθρωπος ἐπαμφοτερίζει. When in Book 7 he specifies that there are certain animals “alone” which tend toward both sides (589a11), namely those that take in air and reproduce on land but feed and spend most of their time in water, I take the force of the “alone” to be restricted by the context of dualizing with respect to being land or water animals. On human dualizing, see also Pol. 1332b1–11. 5  As Cooper (1990) and Lord (1991) observe, there is some ambiguity in this passage as to whether the human dualizes between gregarious and solitary or between political and

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When Aristotle goes on, just a few lines later, to identify the human as one amongst several political animals—political because they all pursue a common deed—there is no contradiction here provided we keep in mind his general approach to several kinds of dualizing animals; namely, that while they or some of their kind exhibit behaviors outside of a kind, they are by and large identifiable as tending toward that kind.6 Something similar will need to be said about the claim in EN that self-sufficiency does not mean a solitary life, as humans would not choose this because they are by nature political (1097b10–13)—here again, humans for the most part and outside of certain circumstances would not choose this, but humans are also capable of veering off course and of producing environments that encourage this veering off course and the desire to be solitary. Thus, in one sense, all that must be recognized in acknowledging Aristotle’s characterization of humans as dualizers is that a rejection of the political impulse is within the human horizon. But the full weight of this possibility must be recognized if we are to understand Aristotle’s political theory, especially the time he takes in the Politics to chart the sources and effects of political strife and the trans­­ forma­tion of one politeia into another. For the status of humans as dualizers, along with the existence of animals other than human that are also political, requires us to acknowledge that humans are neither exclusively nor even, strictly speaking, exhaustively p ­ olitical. This is not to deny that human life is fundamentally oriented toward pol­it­ical life for Aristotle. This is surely so: all humans are possessed of a hormē toward political life (Pol. 1253a29–30). Nor is it do deny that, for Aristotle, the human possession of logos marks human life scattered; however, I am convinced by Depew’s (1995) argument, against Lord and others, that the former makes the most sense of Aristotle’s writing about the full range of human possibilities (as Cooper (1990) argues as well). For my purposes, nothing is riding on the distinction, as the failure at collective life I am speaking of here would be demonstrated in either case, and granting with Cooper (1990) that this failure is the exception to normal human behavior. 6  See the discussion of dualizers in Balme’s notes to his translation of HA 7 (note on 66–9) and also Cooper (1990). Whether this approach is true of all animals Aristotle describes as dualizing has been the source of some debate; see Carraro (2019) for the basic terms of the discussion. Carraro distinguishes between two senses of dualizing: a) ambiguity regarding essential properties, and b) possessing either of two opposites as an accidental property; Carraro himself locates human dualizing within the latter.

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as especially political. This is also surely so (Pol. 1253a7–9). Without doubt, when Aristotle claims, for instance, that other animals and slaves do not have a polis (Pol. 1280a33), he draws a sharp divide between some animals and some humans. Aristotle is equally clear in his claims that only humans deliberate and have recollection (HA 488b25). There can be no denying that there is an exceptionalism at work here. But exceptionalism of what sort? After all, Aristotle is also perfectly comfortable treating human beings as examples of two-legged, warm-blooded animals (see, for example, HA 489a31–490a27) whose capacities in some cases exceed and in others fall short of other animals, a fact that is not always marked by interpreters of Aristotle’s political thought. Arendt’s concern, in particular, lies in using ancient Greek thought in order to analyze totalitarianism, rather than the other way around, and as Aristotle himself points out, no one seeks absolute political power for the sake of creature comforts alone, that is, “no one becomes a tyrant in order to get in out of the cold” (Pol. 1267a13).7 But to describe the human as essentially political is insufficiently precise. What is essential to human life, that is, what marks human life as distinct from other forms of life including other political animals, is not that humans are political but rather how humans “do” politics. For this “doing” includes the possibility of radical rejection, of a flight from political life into other forms of life that cannot be written off as inhuman or outside of the purview of human possibility; indeed, that must be owned as consistent with human possibilities if they are to be avoided. The human is that political animal who may reject political life, that is, who may reject the taking on of a common task, and whose possession of logos both deepens its political character and threatens it with the rupture of the political bond. As we saw in Chapter  2, human idiosyncratic tendencies may take on larger proportions that cannot be contained within the polis, and that threaten its stability. In its passions (­especially its erotic passions), in its anger, in its acquisitiveness, and in its fears, the human equivocates between common and private, and is always in danger of falling into the private, of ­ 7  οἷον τυραννοῦσιν οὐχ ἵνα μὴ ῥιγῶσιν. Here I follow Lord’s translation.

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rejecting the pursuit of the common. This rejection may be ­performed by the occasional sociopathic or psychotic personality, the lover of war, as Homer and Aristotle call it, but it may also be due to the fact that humans can create forms of political community that are intolerable to its constituents (in part or whole), that foster conditions which make life unlivable. That is, as we saw in Chapter 2, because human political community is irreducibly heterogeneous, it is capable of being more or less amenable to its constituents. Within Aristotle’s political theory, it is the structure and plurality of politeiai that conveys this heterogeneity, which reminds us there is not just one logos but many logoi, and not just one polis but many poleis in varying degrees of friendship and antagonism both within themselves and with one another.8 An analysis of politeiai is thus an essential feature of philosophical political theory, as it is an analysis of the plurality of forms of political life, a plurality that marks human political life as distinct and that includes the possibility of a form that rejects all forms, a form in perpetual enmity with other forms and thus doomed to an instability that does not guarantee its destruction, a form that, following the famous description of Athens recorded by Thucydides, “takes no rest itself and gives no rest to others.”9 For Aristotle, humans are more political than other animals because the pluralization of political life is also an intensification of political life; in the use of logos, humans amplify what is available to all animals of the political kind, that is, they intensify the ability to pursue a common task, an intensification that comes with a cost: “For just as the human is the best of the animals when completed, when separated from law and adjudication it is the worst of all” (Pol. 1253a33–4).

8  Güremen (2018) makes a compelling case based on a close reading of Pol. 1.2 that it is the human production of multiple forms of community that mark it is as most political, and not the possession of logos. However, as I will argue in this chapter and the next, a more expansive sense of logos (like that called for in Frank (2015)), and in particular, a focus on the use of logos to enshrine the attachment created by a shared perception of just and unjust within polis institutions via the forms of politeia, connects logos to the plurality of communities. As I argue here, the structure that permits access to this connection is that of politeia, and its analysis is essential to Aristotle’s political theory. 9  Thucydides 1.70. Aristotle himself addresses the problems of a city that is unable to be at leisure in his diagnosis of the Spartan regime at Politics 2.9.

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This is all to say that, in the context of the Politics, Aristotle’s anthropocentrism is more alarmist than celebratory, more posthumanist than humanist. And when Aristotle seeks terms to describe the human with a “desire for war”10 it is not to the animal per se that he turns, not to zōion, but to thērion. Or, more precisely, humans that behave in this way are thēriōdēs, beastly, literally “of the form of a beast” or “beastlike.” That there are beastly humans Aristotle does concede (e.g., the discussion of thēriotēs in Book 7), and sees their existence as an indication of the need humans have for practitioners of the political art. For while in all humans there is an impulse toward political partnership, yet, “the one who first constituted a city is responsible for the greatest goods” (Pol. 1253a29–31). In fact, in their need for such structure, too, humans are superlative: without virtue, the human is “the most unholy and the most savage [anosiōtaton kai agriōtaton]” (Pol. 1253a35). And so, while the possession of logos may account for humans’ especially political character, this does not licence positing an ontological divide between humans and other animals any more than it gives permission to assume in advance an unproblematic correlate to the “biological” in Aristotle’s thought, both of which characterize an entrenched approach to Aristotle held across broad scholarly orientations.11 Aristotle’s construction of the phenomenon of suzēn suggests an anachronistic dimension to both assumptions. As a zōion echon logon, the human possession of logos is bound to human animality. For Aristotle, having logos may mark humans as unique animals, but it does not mark humans as not animal. The challenge, rather, is to view the human possession of logos as an expression of 10  πολέμου ἐπιθυμητής, ἅτε περ ἄζυξ ὢν ὥσπερ ἐν πεττοῖς (1253a6–7). 11  For example, both Keyt (1991) and Irwin (1988) tend to treat the extension of politikē to non-human animals as mainly metaphorical. For discussion of the similarity here, see DePew (1995) 162. See Arendt (1958) 27: “Aristotle’s definition of man as zoon politikon was not only unrelated and even opposed to the natural association experienced in household life; it can be fully understood only if one adds his second famous definition of man as a zoon logon ekhon” (see also 36–7), and, for a discussion of Arendt’s reading of nature and the household in Aristotle and Agamben’s appropriation of this discussion see Finlayson (2010). Depew (1995) 162 attributes Arendt’s constructions here as (like Strauss, and ultimately Heidegger) stemming from a misreading of the claim that human is a political animal: “The worst mistake one can make about ‘political animal,’ for example, is to think that this phrase picks out the defining essence of humankind, and to hold that in consequence Aristotle must be speaking metaphorically when he says that animals other than human are political.”

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zōē, a challenge that is especially germane to our understanding of Aristotle’s Politics, as it is in the Politics that human animality and human exceptionality collide. What is required, then, in order to understand Aristotle’s treatment of the human possession of logos in the Politics is a broader sense of human qua zōion, qua living being. If we elide zōion and thērion, we obscure the need for such a study and we overlook a distinction that, I maintain, was very much alive for Aristotle. In Part II, I explore what in Aristotle’s thought is opened up if we set aside an ontological division between human and animal. Once we do this, we can better observe the theorizing about political life that develops out of Aristotle’s work on animals and its place within broader conceptions of power. Toward this end, Part II brings two strands of research to bear on Aristotle’s polis-analysis: recent work on bios in the zoological texts, and recent work on the meaning and force of politeia in the political texts. My interest is less in the epistemological status of political science than in the ontological status of its objects.12 That is, I am less interested in the  extent to which the demands for epistēmē as laid out in the Posterior Analytics and elsewhere are or are not operative in Aristotle’s investigation of living beings, political or otherwise, than in how Aristotle envisions human animality in the context of understanding human political phenomena. It is unnecessary to document here the efficacy with which “the beastly” serves an exclusionary political impulse. And, in looking over human history, violence is far more likely to be committed, and on a much greater scale, by such political maneuvers than by the occasional psychotic personality. My interest is less in these personalities than in the structures and forms of community that behave psychotically, that foster a rejection of the political impulse and encourage violent acts from those who would, under different circumstances and within different communities, not be so inclined. To see this political psychopathology, we need eyes trained to the interaction between person and structure. My most general claim is that Aristotle provides valuable resources for doing this. 12  See, e.g., Henry and Nielsen (2015) 2.

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Thus, in Part II I aim to deepen our understanding of the ­pol­it­ical valence of zōē and zōion in Aristotle’s thought by charting the conception of animal intimacy that emerges from Aristotle’s zoological work in order to then show how human political life amplifies this intimacy. In Chapter 3 I will explore that character of animal politicality as it emerges out of Aristotle’s description of more general forms of animal intimacy and the lack thereof in the History of Animals Books 7 and 8, with particular focus on the model of power that emerges from Aristotle’s account of the bios and genesis of bees. In Chapter 4, I bring what we have learned about animal intimacy to our understanding of life in the polis, and of the ways in which this life can realize (or fail to realize) the human political hormē. Before we dive in to the details of these factors, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider what is, and is not, implied by treating animals as possessing an ēthos. While Aristotle writes extensively about the ēthos of non-human animals, it would be quite a stretch to say that he conceives of an ethics of non-human animals. At first pass, the reason for this is quite clear. For while non-human animals may exhibit something analogous to intelligence or practical wisdom, the absence of the capacity for deliberate choice makes of these cap­abil­ities and tendencies things that come to the animal by nature.13 The non-human animal cannot choose to better (or worsen) its life, and yet becoming better is exactly what knowledge of ethics is for the sake of, as Aristotle tells us quite clearly (EN 1103b27–9). It would seem, then, that non-human animals have character, but they do not have (and have no need of) an ethics. And yet, Aristotle will also identify those animals that seem particularly good at living in their surroundings, marking them as eubiotos (how this stands with respect to the eudaimonia and eu zēn he attributes as a possibility only to humans will be a topic of discussion presently), will highlight aspects of non-human animal capacity that exceed those of humans, and will speak of animal intelligence in a way that strains the reading of this as “merely” 13  For a recent discussion of natural character in Aristotle’s zoological work, see Leunissen (2016) and (2017); and on the role of natural character in Aristotle’s ethics, see also Leunissen (2012) and (2013) and Lennox (2015).

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analogical.14 There are also moments when his description of ­animal “stupidity” falls so far short of what we know about the particular species under question, e.g., the octopus, as to call into question the merit of studying what Aristotle has to say about non-human animals at all. But while Aristotle’s comments about octopuses may, in the end, tell us very little about octopuses, they do tell us quite a bit about what Aristotle thinks constitutes intelligence (or the lack thereof) and its relation to life more broadly conceived. It is also worth bearing in mind that the development of human rational capacities is not guaranteed. And what haunts Aristotle’s ethics is not only human viciousness but also the possibility of the diffusion of the aspects of human character, of an incapacity or unwillingness to have and maintain resolve, of a refusal to govern oneself and thereby compromise one’s personhood. Thus, while he observes extreme forms of vice and aberration that make humans beastly (thēriōdēs), much greater attention is given to the refusal or weakness that results in and from dissipation, as though humans, when faced with the work required to build character and complete themselves, will simply prove too weak, and will retreat into the realm of caprice and whim. When we read Aristotle speak of ēthos in the comparative, then, we need to keep in mind that he does so both between and within kinds.

14  As Lloyd (2013) observes.

3 Land-Dwellers and Water-Dwellers If we evaluate Aristotle’s zoological writing solely with a positivist commitment to the absolute priority of perception, we have little to prevent us from using our comparatively greater sophistication of perception, our ability to see more of the parts of animals than Aristotle could, to conclude that he has little to tell us about animals’ lives and bodies. But this assumes that in looking at these animals we see the same things, just better, as though our seeing were not already informed by certain sensibilities pertaining to what is to be seen. I think it wise not to take for granted that we and Aristotle have identical things in mind when we talk about animal parts, organs, movements, etc.15 In evaluating Aristotle’s zoological writings, it is worth making a concerted effort to recover some sense of what Aristotle saw when he looked at animals. If we pursue this question from the perspective of the Metaphysics, in which living being plays such a powerful role in elucidating substance, it appears that Aristotle sees unities, held together over time with the cooperation of more or less tight collections of more or less sophisticated capacities. The Parva Naturalia and de Anima fill in our understanding of these capacities as developed over the course of an identifiable life cycle iterated by all animals of a kind, barring defect and/or untimely death, and as including temperature regulation, nutrition, reproduction, in many cases movement with respect to place and perception, and in some cases thought.16 15  As Kuriyama (1999) on anatomical seeing makes clear, any programmatic claim about the self-evidence and vividness of animal parts masks the historical and cultural contingency of a kind of seeing. 16  On the conception of life that emerges for the Parva Naturalia, see King (2001). Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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If we move to Aristotle’s studies of animals, it is clear that Aristotle takes as his field of inquiry the array of similarities and differences by which one is confronted in the realm of living beings, an array that requires us to treat an investigation of organic unity as going hand in hand with an investigation of biodiversity. After all, for Aristotle the act of living, like the acts of ruling and being, is irreducibly heterogeneous. Or, as he will put it in de Anima (resonating with the famous claim about being in the Metaphysics), living is said in many ways (dA 413a22). This connection between living, being, and ruling is not an accident; instead it proves foundational for Aristotle and forms an insight shared between his metaphysics, ethico-politics, and zo­ology. For if living being can serve as a paradigm of substance or of rule, if it can disclose something fundamental about being or power, this is so because, for Aristotle, living being is fundamentally disclosive. In their vast differences and their enduring unities, living beings bring to light, make manifest. What they make manifest is, of course, a matter of question; their disclosive character is not the same thing as self-evidence, but rather a provocation to interpret and an opening of the contest of interpretations that Aristotle so frequently documents. Regardless of whether we take the direction of Aristotle’s thought as moving from living being to being as such, or vice versa, his approach to animal life tends to emphasize what emerges as most vivid from it and this, in turn seems to include both the striking unity of any single living being and the equally striking array of differences between animals.17 The concern with what living beings make manifest is structural in Aristotle’s zoological works. This is especially so for his History of Animals, a work designed to mark and consider the clearest differentiators amongst living beings in as granular detail as current 17  The depth of the latter observation’s impact on Aristotle’s zoological work is confirmed by the turn toward Aristotle’s zoological texts thirty years ago and in the emerging debate between “essentialist” and “relativist” positions regarding the nature of Aristotle’s classificatory schema. The main terms and conclusions of the debate are well represented in the collection of essays and responses published in Deveraux and Pellegrin (1990). For a more recent return to the debate, see Carraro (2019). The History of Animals proved a pivotal text for this debate in that it asserts, perhaps most clearly, less a taxonomy of animals than a science of differences, attending to the most vivid differentiators between animal kinds.

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observation and knowledge allowed. Of the differentiae that Aristotle claims divide animals into kinds—parts (moria), manner of life (bios), character (ēthos), and action (praxis) (HA 487a10)—parts are the most evident of differentiators (HA 491a15–16) and are treated in the greatest detail. But the other differentiae have their day as well, and when he turns to them he maintains this o ­ rientation toward what is most vivid or manifest. Thus, he will observe at the start of Book 7’s study of animal bios and praxis that animals other than humans “mostly possess traces of characteristics to do with the soul, such as present differences more obviously in the case of humans” (588a19–21).18 And again, when Aristotle turns to animal character in Book 8, he opens by considering the conditions under which animal character is most vivid: “The characters of the animals are less obvious to us by perception in the case of the less developed and shorter-lived ones, but more obvious in the longerlived. For they are seen to have a certain natural capability in relation to each of the soul’s affections—to intelligence and stupidity, courage and cowardice, to mildness and ferocity, and the other dispositions of this sort” (608a1–17). Throughout, Aristotle will spend some time detailing, for instance, the actions that indicate that an animal has the bios of a land-dweller or a water-dweller, or of a carnivore or a herbivore, as well as the complex forms of character to be seen in the animal realm. Some are intelligent (phronimos), ingenious (technikos), scheming (epiboulos), resourceful, gentle or spirited, fearful or cour­age­ous, jealous or loving, caring or indifferent.19 Signs of these qualities are often written onto the body of the animal, in the shape of the eyebrows (491b15), the color, size (492a1ff.), and nick of the eye (491b25), etc. Following his discussion of these differences in HA 7 and 8 will yield a portrait of animal sociality as occurring along a spectrum of greater and less intimacy, culminating in the 18  Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the History of Animals are those of Peck (1965) and Balme (1991). 19  Phronimos: 488b15, 612a4, 614b18; dianoian suneseos: 588a23; dianoias, 612b21; technikos: 616a5; epiboula: 488b18; biomechanos: 616b19 and 21, see also 616b28. Labarrière (1990) remains the most comprehensive study of both the similarities and differences between humans and other animals with respect to phronesis.

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intimacy produced by the political character of certain animals, that is, the intimacy produced by sharing a common deed. More specifically, I argue that the character of being political (having a common task) emerges as a form of animal intimacy, that is, as a form of group cohesion and identity that presents in concentrated form aspects of animal sociality which can be seen in many other kinds of animals, and that is required in order to secure existence within a particular habitat. This form of intimacy emerges out of a complex interrelation of roles, parts, and kinds with ac­com­ pany­ing morphological capacities and supports, especially for sensory interaction. It also brings with it particular forms of vulnerability, as we can see most clearly in Aristotle’s account of the communal life of the beehive and the power structure by means of which it thrives and reproduces itself. Indeed, in Aristotle’s account of the ēthos and genesis of bees we find both a model of power and an aspirational elision of reproductive and political life that resonates with Aristotle’s eugenics legislation, a topic that will be handled in greater detail in Part III. To make good on these claims, I will begin with Aristotle’s account of animal bios and praxis in Book 7 before moving on to study in detail his account of animal ēthos in Book 8.

3.1  Bio-logy in the History of Animals Aristotle’s study of animal bios and praxis makes clear that any explanation of the unity that arises out of organic complexity would be incomplete without an account of the topos in which the living being conducts its living, a topos that profoundly affects its parts and capacities. Indeed, the unity that is the living being is maintained only to the extent that it negotiates the fluidity and porosity of embodiment, with its demands that the living being take in and expel what is outside of it; its character as a substance emerges from its ability to hold itself together in the performance of these negotiations. Thus, its body is organized around the passageways, fissures, apertures, openings that connect the internal with external and zōion with topos. And while a sophisticated account of the relation

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between parts, capacities, and ends is necessary to understanding animal life, these on their own do not amount to an account of the living being without including a subtle account of the interaction between zōion and topos, precisely because of the intimacy of their interaction. Animals are divided “according to the places [kata tous topous]” (HA 589a10), their lives depend upon the place in which their sustenance is “housed” (see Pol. 1256b9–23),20 their matter “is of the same nature as the region in which they exist.”21 Or, as Jessica Gelber puts it, for Aristotle habitat “is already included in what it is to be an animal of [a particular] kind.”22 If one is to understand with any specificity the unity and diversity of living beings, one must develop as subtle a conceptual vocabulary as possible for the interaction between zōion and topos. It is in the context of this aspiration that we should locate Aristotle’s analysis of animal bios, as it is bios that, following Lennox, “accounts for the unity that integrates the many parts of an animal’s body and the many different activities those parts perform.”23 And the most general forms of bios that are mentioned in the History of Animals distinguish between animals on the basis of the topos in which they do their living: land animals and water animals.24 The factors in Aristotle’s discussion that determine whether an animal is one or the other—what it takes in, what it eats, its bodily blend, where it reproduces, and where it spends most of its time—mark out the degree of intimacy between living being and place, to the 20  Of course, we need to ask: what does it mean to say that nature has provided for the sustenance of all animals? On the one hand, this would seem to mean that animals are at home on the earth, that they have been provided for. But, on the other, insofar as one animal provides sustenance for another, it also means that they are condemned to enmity with one another. It is against the background of this perpetual polemos between animals, of the friendships and enmities marked out in HA 8, for instance, that we should view the human capacity to share life. 21  On Respiration, 477b30, Ross translation. Aristotle will go on to say that the conditions of their bodies might be contrary to their environment; e.g., they could feel cold while residing in a hot place or vice versa. Nevertheless, “while states of the body can be opposed in character to the environment, the material of which it is composed can never be so” (478a5). 22 Gelber (2015a) 279. Gelber provides a very careful and convincing account of the in­tim­acy between topos and zoion in Aristotle’s zoological work, and gestures briefly toward the polis as the proper habitat for the human (see 289–90). See also Gotthelf (1997) 91/(2012) 192 and Lennox (2010a) and (2010b). 23  Lennox (2010b) 350. 24 See HA 589a11: “they have been divided according to the places: for some are land animals and others are water animals.”

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extent that their bodies themselves are formed out of and in sympathy with their places and the trophē such places provide.25 That some animals will have a bios of one kind or the other depending on the general activity under consideration—as is the case with the ­infamous dualizers, such that an animal can be a water-dweller from the perspective of where it spends its time but a land-dweller with respect to what it takes in (the cetacous kind)—emerges as noteworthy precisely within the frame that bios provides, by means of which we can see them as anomalous. This reliance on topos has important implications for what an analysis of bios tells us. Whatever teleology an account of bios may serve, it is, as Ross observes, an immanent teleology precisely because of the extent to which it is defined by the animal’s topos.26 Bios names the relationship between parts and functions that en­ables the living being to successfully interact with its topos; it is thus contingent on topos, and if one were to ask what its end is, it would seem that any particular bios has its end in living (to zēn). In non-human animals, differences with respect to achieving this end are marked by the condition of eubiotos, in humans with that of eu zēn.27 That this integration can be more or less successful, that an animal’s life may be eubiotos or kakobios, should remind us that we are not dealing with a rigid environmental determinism here, but rather marking out the horizon within which and to which morph­ ology responds.

25  See, for instance, On Respiration 477b25. 26  It is constructive to consider what an ancient account of bios that does support a more universal teleological framework would look like, and here we have Plato’s Timaeus as an example, wherein Timaeus claims that women and non-human animals exist because of the moral failings of the human prototype; see Brill (2015b). 27  HA 609b20: eubiotos; Balme translates this as “lives well,” also at 615a17, 615a28, and 615a34 with euetheis, “goodnatured,” 616b10, 14, 24 and 31, 619b24, 620a22: eubiotatoi, and notes (277) that “eubiotos is applied to birds several times in HA VIII(IX). It is coupled with beauty, song, happiness, pleasing behavior, and seems to denote more than an easy foodsupply: it suggests that the bird lives successfully in its surroundings. The opposite is not dusbiotos (living in hardship) but kakobios (living poorly, 616b31, 619a2)”; other words that Balme translates as “flourishing” are 601a23: euemerousi; 601b9: euthenei; 602a16: eustheneian, in the claim that “places help each kind to thrive” and then just below at 19: “But there are also certain places peculiar to each kind, where they thrive [euthenousin]”; on the role of topos, see also 605b23: “In general the animals differ according to localities” and just below, “not thrive” is ouk euemerei; also, 607a9: “Localities also produce differences in character.”

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Most immediately, the horizon that most structures Book 7’s account of animal bios is trophē; once Aristotle has identified the primary bioi of land- and water-dwellers, the entire discussion of bios leading up to an account of praxis is occupied with a discussion of the foods different animals take in (590c19–596b19). Throughout Book 7 animals are designated by morphological features related to their feeding, e.g., crook-taloned (gamphonuchoi), saw-toothed (karcharodonta). If we borrow conceptual terms from de Anima for a moment, it would seem that most animal bios is a matter of the manner in which it conducts its nutritive life. And keeping in mind that nutritive soul is the source of both eating and reproducing for the sake of preserving the animal, we can see this ascendency of nutritive life in Aristotle’s account of animal praxis as well: “their activities all have to do with mating or production of young, or with their supply of food, or are contrived against periods of cold and heat or the changes of season” (596b19–24). Aristotle’s emphasis on the perception of seasonal changes structures the rest of Book 7, with a focus on seasonal migration, animal thriving, and diseases; and then their general differences according to location, and differences with respect to their health during pregnancy, which sets up the transition to a discussion of animal ēthos. The significance of perception of seasonal change complicates the priority of nutritive life by gesturing toward a form of perception as well: “For all animals have an innate perception [aisthēsin echei sumphuton] of changes in respect of hot and cold” (596b24–5). And throughout Book 7 (and Book 8 as well) we encounter the impossibility of isolating nutritive from perceptual life in anything other than a logical sense when it comes to understanding animals (as distinct from plants), an impossibility Aristotle also asserts in his very formulation of these capacities in de Anima, and the instability of the distinctions between bios, praxis, and ēthos.28 What, then, does bios provide that a careful analysis of parts and functions does not? Or, more simply, what do we know when we know an animal’s bios? We know the manner in which the animal’s parts, actions, and character are integrated into a single way of 28  As Lennox (2010a) also observes.

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taking up the task of living, a manner that is not reducible to the parts themselves nor their functions and which, rather, is what explains why the animal has the parts and functions it does. Or, as Lennox puts it, “the way of life of an animal demands that there be co­ord­in­ation among its parts and activities. It is that coordination around the animal’s way of life that accounts for such things as the convertible relationship between crooked talons and hooked beaks, fins and gills, long necks and long legs. It is by grasping an animal’s way of life that we grasp the underlying unity in organic complexity.”29 Bios, then, names how the animal reacts to or is composed within certain limits established by its topos. Consequently, neither animal unity nor animal difference can be understood without understanding the animal’s topos and its role in shaping the essential features of the animal. And if an animal’s attainment of trophē, for both itself and its young, attains ascendency on this account, we cannot fail to observe that for Aristotle an animal’s mode of attaining trophē has characterological effects. How an animal reproduces and seeks food for itself and its children proves decisive in the shaping of a character, an ēthos, and Aristotle will document in some detail the most significant differences between these ēthē in Book 8.

3.2 Animal Ēthos Aristotle’s emphasis on the factors that produce the clearest vision of animal character is structural for Book 8, dedicated to a study of the ēthos of animals in order to fill out Book 7’s concern with animal bios and praxis. In Book 7, as we have just seen, we are left with a sense of the ecological character of Aristotle’s approach to animal life—animal bios and praxis are largely a function of the topos in which the animal finds itself and the trophē by means of which it secures its existence. In Book 8, Aristotle’s discussion of animal ēthos proceeds by identifying five aspects of animal character, following them, and, occasionally, taking the opportunity to expand a 29  Lennox (2010b) 352.

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bit on the behavior of the species in question as the current state of knowledge allowed. These aspects are, in order of their appearance, length of life, sexual difference, friendship and enmity, intelligence and lack thereof, and courage/cowardice/mildness/wildness. He concludes with a discussion of the factors that cause a change in character, ranging from seasonal and/or temperature changes to changes in body parts, with particular attention to the characterological effects of castration. Aristotle’s treatment of length of life is brief, but sets the logic of the chapter following the emphasis on vividness and visibility evident throughout the work: “The characters of the animals are less obvious to us by perception in the case of the less developed and shorter-lived ones, but more obvious in the longer-lived [ta d’ ēthē tōn zōiōn esti tōn men amauroterōn kai brachubiōterōn hētton hēmin endēla kata tēn aisthēsin, tōn de makrobiōterōn endēlotera]. For they are seen to have a certain natural capability in relation to each of the soul’s affection—to intelligence and stupidity, courage and cowardice, to mildness and ferocity, and the other dispositions of this sort” (608a11–17). He goes on to add that certain animals are receptive of learning and instruction (mathēseōs kai didaskalias) (608a17–18), some from each other and some from humans—those that, in addition to hearing sounds, “distinguish the difference between the signs [hosa kai tōn sēmeiōn aisthanetai tas diaphoras]” (608a20).30 He then turns to identify aspects of character that arise from sexual difference, observing strong cross-species similarity with respect to these differences, but also, here again, emphasizing those animals in which the differences are most vivid, in this case humans, larger animals, and viviparous quadrupeds (608a23–4). According to Aristotle, the character of the female is softer, quicker to be tamed, more receptive to handling, readier to learn, less spirited (in all animals except the bear and the leopard), more vicious, less simple, more impetuous, and more attentive to the feeding of the 30  As Balme notes, this resonates with Book 7, in which Aristotle claims that the other animals have traces (ichnē) of the characteristics to do with the soul, similar to the traces and seeds (ichnē kai spermata) of dispositions had by children (588a20 and 34).

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young. He pauses here to observe, “There are traces of these ­characters in virtually all animals, but they are all the more evident in those that are more possessed of character [en tois echousi mallon ēthos] and especially in the human. For human nature is the most complete, so that these dispositions too are more evident in humans” (608b4–7). This allows him to briefly direct attention to the differences between wife and husband—“a wife is more compassionate than a husband and more given to tears, but also more jealous and complaining and more apt to scold and fight” (608b8–11)—before returning to the female and the male: the female is more dispirited and despondent, more shameless and lying, is readier to deceive and has a longer memory, is more wakeful, more afraid of action, less inclined to move, and takes in less nourishment than the males, while the male is a readier ally and is braver. In general, while I will discuss this in much greater detail in Part III, it is worth observing the structural misogyny at work here; this list resonates with attitudes toward women that have long-standing cultural expression from Semonides’ poem “Females of the Species” to Hesiod’s account of Pandora, to Aeschylus, and on. As Giulia Sissa has recently argued, Aristotle’s account of the female’s relative coolness and paucity of thumos is directly related to his assessment of their less political, less deliberative character.31 For now, we can simply note that, like length of life, sexual difference is treated as impacting all aspects of character. After assessing the global effects of length of life and sexual difference on character, Aristotle narrows down on its more specific aspects. He begins with that form of shared life that proves so vital to his ethics, friendship (philia), in a discussion that resonates with the connection between character and food source that he observed in Book 7 (588a19–20).32 And he provides a sobering assessment of animal sociality: “Now there is war against each other among all animals that occupy the same place and get their living from the same things” (608b19–21). Hunger makes enemies of all, such that 31  Sissa (2018). 32 “their activities and lives differ according to their character and nutrition” (588a19–20).

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even animals of the same species make war against one another, “male against male and female against female” (608b23–4).We are a far cry here from the placid surface imagined in the Politics, in which nature not only supplies sustenance for the young, but also and similarly, for grown things, such that, “one must suppose both that plants exist for the sake of animals and that the other animals exist for the sake of human beings” (1256b15–17). If this is so, it is news to the animals under question; all are at war with the carnivores, observes Aristotle, and they with the others (608b26–7). And yet, for Aristotle this acrimony is a direct function of food scarcity; without such scarcity those that grow wild would become tame, as is evident if one observes animals in Egypt, “for because food is available and they are not in want, even the wildest animals live with each other [dia gar to trophēn huparchein kai mē aporein met’ allēlōn zōsi kai auta ta agriōtata]” (608b33–5). Here Aristotle suggests that given the right environmental conditions, “wildness” would not preclude sociality. The rest of Aristotle’s account of animal friendship and enmity proceeds exactly along the lines suggested by this opening, by following the effects of shared topos and trophē. So, for example, eagle and dragon snake are at war because the eagle eats the snake. Owl and crow are at war because their tokos and trophē are melded: the crow eats the owl’s eggs by day and the owl eats the crow’s eggs by night. The turtle dove and pyralis are at war, “for they have the same feeding place and livelihood [topos gar tēs nomēs kai bios ho autos]” (609a20). The kite and raven are at war because the kite uses its superior strength in talon and flight to take what belongs to the raven, “so that their food makes enemies of these too [hōste hē trophē poiei polemious kai toutous]” (609a24). Amongst these many examples of animal antagonism, there are a few instances of animal friendship, in some cases simply following the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, for example, “raven and fox are friends to each other, for the raven is at war with the merlin, hence it comes to the fox’s aid when it is struck” (609b32–4) but also because while some wild animals make war against one another all the time, others do so only on occasion, like humans (610a3–4). Thus, crow and heron are philoi, as are

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schonion and lark, laedos and green woodpecker, piphex and harpe, fox and snake, and blackbird and turtle dove. However, wild elephants “fight fiercely against each other” and enslave the defeated elephant, who “does not stand against the victor’s voice [phonēn]” (610a15–17). He concludes that “in these wild animals [tois thērios], their friendships and wars happen because of their feeding and way of life [dia tas trophas kai ton bion]” (610a35). Aristotle closes his discussion of friendship and war between ­animals with a consideration of the social behavior of fish, with a focus on shoaling together [sunagelazomai] as a kind of cross-species sociality some fish engage in all the time and others under certain conditions. Thus, he observes, “among the fishes some form shoals with each other and are friends, while those that do not shoal are at war (610b1–3); some form shoals while pregnant and some after giving birth (610b4–5), some “go not only in shoals but in pairs too [estin ou monon agelaia alla kai suzuga],” and some who are normally aggressors will shoal together at times if their food source is plentiful, so: “Basse and grey mullet, although very hostile [polemiōtatoi], shoal together on certain occasions [kairous sunagelazontai allēlois]; for often not only those of the same kinship [ta homogona] shoal together [sunagelazontai] but also those whose food supply is the same or similar, if it is plentiful” (610b11–14). With fish social behavior, then, Aristotle seems to be moving a bit beyond friendship and enmity on the basis of food source alone to identifying a kind of shared dwelling/group behavior that is present even in fish who are otherwise enemies, as though the adequacy of sustenance would allow for the realization of a generally more preferable sociality, that is, as though a more political existence is something the animals would tend toward were they released from care for food. Two other aspects of character are treated in some detail in Book 8—intelligence (and lack thereof) and courage—with the former getting the lion’s share of consideration. Aristotle’s study of animal intelligence and its absence ranges over most aspects of an animal’s life. Animals may exhibit intelligence in attaining sustenance or shelter, in their relationship with one another, in their care of their young, and in their efforts at self-healing. His method of

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highlighting how animals stand with respect to phronēsis is to begin with what appears to him to have been the clearest indicator of its absence: “For the character of sheep and goats, so it is said, is simple-minded and stupid: of all the quadrupeds it is the worst” (610b24–5). As evidence of this mindlessness, Aristotle begins with these animals’ tendency to wander (herpei) “into deserted places towards nothing,” to find themselves caught helplessly in the snow where they would perish were it not for the intervention of their shepherds (610b25–9), to scatter at the sound of loud noises, and thus to need to be taught to run together (sunthein, 610b35, 611a2; sundramein, 610b36) in order to avoid miscarriage (611a1) and death (611a). And while they lie in family groups (athroai kata ­suggeneian; from athroos: in crowds, heaps or masses, crowded together), their orientation toward one another seems affected by the season: “when the sun turns more quickly, the shepherds say that the goats lie no longer facing each other but turned away” (611a5–7). This sparks an observation about the “group behavior” of cattle: “The cattle too graze with their companions in habitual groups [hai de boes kai nemontai kath hetaireias kai sunētheias], and if one strays the others follow; hence if the cowherds fail to find a particular one, they immediately look for them all as well” (611a6–9). Aristotle’s objection to goats and sheep seems to be about a certain aimlessness attributed to their behavior, a lack of direction that impedes their ability to secure their livelihood. They are diffuse. Hapless and helpless, they require the intervention of shepherds in order to avoid absurd injury and/or death; they leave their herd and perish, they frighten and scatter, and miscarry or die. It is their perceived unwillingness or incapacity to stay and act together that most garners Aristotle’s criticism. And while cattle do move together, their moving is a wandering and lacks direction. That he would use this diffusion or apparent aimlessness as evidence of a simple-minded and stupid character tells us quite a bit about what Aristotle thinks is gained by the possession of mind and ­intelligence, namely the ability to secure one’s livelihood by way of integration with a group and shared activity. On this point it is worth observing that all of the political animals Aristotle mentioned in Book 1 are treated in his discussion of animals that are phronimos.

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Aristotle follows up his description of cattle with the following observation about horses: “Among the horses, when one mare has died the mares that graze together [hai sunnomoi] rear each others’ foals. And in general the horse kind seems to have by nature a parental affection [philostorgon]. Evidence of this is that often the barren mares steal the dams’ foals, and are the ones that care for them, but through having no milk cause their death” (611a10–15). Having proved examples of the absence of intelligence, Aristotle finally turns to those animals that are phronimos, beginning with deer and bear, and moving on to a variety of other larger animals. But Aristotle reserves more extensive comment on the intelligence of animals for the smaller ones, for while, “with regard to their lives, one may observe many imitations of human life in the other animals,” in the smaller ones especially, “one may see the precision of their intelligence [tēn tēs dianoias akribeian]” (612b18–21). This observation opens an extensive discussion of birds (612b18–620b9), beginning with the nest-building of the swallow, moving on to a brief discussion of marine animals (620b10–622b18), and concluding with a lengthy discussion of insects (622b19–629b5), of which the accounts of the lives of bees (623b5–627b22) and wasps (627b23–628b33) are the most detailed. Throughout, he takes pains to highlight behavior he describes as phronimos, ingenious (technikos), resourceful (eumechanos), and industrious (ergatikos), as well as to mark the care of thought (dianoia) and the living well (eubiotos) exhibited especially by birds. The swallow’s nest-building, for instance, requires an orderly repetition of materials, “for in the mixing of straw into mud she keeps the same order. She interweaves mud with the stalks; and if she lacks mud she moistens herself and rolls her feathers into the dust. Further she builds the nest just as humans build, putting the stiff materials underneath first, and making it match herself in size [kai tōi megethei summetron poiousa pros hautēn]” (612b25–7). Similarly, one kind of wolf spider “weaves by first stretching thread to the extremities in every direction, then it lays down the radii from the middle (it takes33 the middle with fair 33  lambanei; as Balme observes, “The word used for making a logical postulate, or an approximation in drawing a geometrical figure. Aelian VI 57 remarks that the spider has no need of Euclid.”

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accuracy) and on these lays down the woof, so to speak, and then weaves them together [sunuphainei]” (623a9–12). Later, when discussing animal courage and gentleness, Aristotle also observes that the dolphin adjusts its speed to compensate for the length of its breath, “as though from calculation [hōsper analogisamenoi]” (631a27). The attempt at shared child-rearing exhibited by horses has a happier result in other animals, and forms one of the vectors of overlap between signs of animal intelligence and animal intimacy. For instance, along with their manner of nest-building, swallows evince an intelligence in imitation of human life34 in their care for their young: “Over the feeding of the young both birds carry out the work; they give to each, watching habitually the one that has already had it, so that it should not get it twice” (612b26–8). This sharing of childcare labor is even more evident in the case of pigeons, who not only pair with more than one and do not abandon their pairing prior to the death of one of the partners, but also strive to share even the pain of labor, a quality Aristotle describes in a passage we considered in Chapter 1: “Over the birth pangs the male cares for her and shares her distress [therapeia kai sunaganaktēsis] to an extraordinary degree; and if she shows weakness towards entering the nest because of the birth, he strikes her and forces her to go in” (612b35–613a2). Cranes too exhibit a phronimos character: “Many instances of intelligence [phronima] seem to occur among the cranes too. For they migrate a long way, and fly to a great height in order to survey the distance [pros to kathoran ta porrō], and if they see clouds and bad weather they fly down and stay quiet. Further, they have both a leader and signalers [eti de to echein hēgemona te kai tous episurittontas] who whistle among the end birds so that their call is heard [hōste katakouesthai tēn phōnēn]. And when they settle, while the others sleep with their head under the wing, standing on one foot 34  “In general, with regard to their lives [peri tous bious], one may observe many imitations [mimēmata] of human life [tēs anthrōpinēs] in the other animals, and more especially in the smaller than in the larger animals one may see the precision of their intelligence [tēn tēs dianoias akribeian]: for example, first, in the case of the birds, the swallow’s nest-building” (612b18–23).

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and then the other, the leader with his head uncovered keeps a lookout [ho d’ hēgemōn gumnēn echōn tēn kephalēn proorai], and whenever he perceives something he signals with a cry [kai hotan aisthētai ti sēmainei boōn]” (614b18–27). Here Aristotle’s emphasis falls on the accomplishment of the shared task of long-distance migration by way of a tight group formation made possible by a structure of rule and a capacity for communication. What is pol­it­ ical about the crane is that its survival depends upon an action that requires group cohesion and for which it has developed a successful system of organization and signification. And what Aristotle emphasizes through this description is that the cranes’ intelligence is integrated with their perception: they fly in order to get a view of the whole; they amplify the whistle so that all may hear; they have a leader who keeps lookout, and who uses his cry to signal. Their intelligence is measured in terms of their ability to accomplish the common task of migration, and this common task, in turn, is accomplished both by the fineness and the synchronization of their perceptions. That is, they strive to see and hear together. We have with cranes, then, a proto-sunaisthēsis. Some birds exhibit their intelligence by extending their childcare beyond their own species, a fact of which the cuckoo takes advantage, displaying its intelligence by acknowledging its failings as a parent and devising a means to get a bird of another kind to care for its young: “It seems that the cuckoo manages its reproduction intelligently [phronimon]: for because it is conscious [suneidenai] of its own cowardice and inability to give help, for this reason it makes its own chicks supposititious [hupobolimaious], as it were, in order to save them” (618a25–9). The results for the caregiving bird’s own children are disastrous, as they are either thrown out by their mother, or eaten by the mother cuckoo or her chick (618a14–26). The phene rears not only its own children but those of the eagle as well, who expels its chick prematurely: “It is believed that the eagle expels the nestlings because of jealousy; for it is naturally jealous and voracious, and also it is quick to seize food” (619b27–30). As an aside, the family life of the eagle sounds especially unpleasant, and given the absence of fellow-feeling of the crook-taloned and solitary, how could it not be: parents fight with children over food and

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children fight with one another; the sharp-sighted eagle parents force their children to look at the sun and kill the first child whose eyes tear up, raising the rest (619b3–620a6). The title of most industrious (ergatikōtaton, 622b19), however, is reserved for the ant and the bee. The ant’s industriousness is evident to all: “Now the working of the ants is on the surface for all to see [hē men oun tōn murmēkōn ergasia pasin estin epipolēs idein], and how they all go on one path [kai hōs aei mian atrapon pantes badizousi] and put aside and store their food [kai tēn apothesin tēs trophēs kai tamieian]; for they work at night too when there is a full moon [ergazontai gar kai tais nuxi tais panselēnois]” (622b24–8). Here again, emphasis is placed on their group cohesion—they all go on one path. But the inclusion of their setting aside and storing their food adds a sense of time to their collective movement over space. They are sufficient masters of themselves as to not simply eat where they find food, but to bring it back and hold it for future use. Aristotle thus offers a comparison between ants, spiders, and bees: “Now the ants hunt nothing, but collect things ready made; the ­spiders make nothing nor store away but merely hunt their food, and . . . the bees hunt nothing but produce their food themselves and store it away” (623b13–19). What most impresses Aristotle about bees in particular is that “their working methods and way of life show great complexity [esti de peri tēn ergasian autōn kai ton bion pollē poikilia]” (623b25–6).35 At their best, bees employ a division of labor (625b18 and 627a21), are orderly in their schedule and way of life, discriminate by kind,36 35  The linguistic connection here between complexity and weaving/embroidering established by poikilia anticipates the model of comb-building as weaving a fabric in which holes are then made, rather than stacking comb on comb, as Balme observes in a footnote a few lines later, and also the connection between bees and women (positive) and drones and women (negative). Here is the passage: “They begin the webs [histon; Balme: “histos is commonly applied (among other things) to the upright beam of the loom and also to the web itself. It does not denote a honeycomb, but stands for it here metaphorically: as the following lines show, the comb-building is regarded as the weaving of a fabric in which openings are made for cells, not as the building of cell upon cell”] from above, starting from the top of the hive and woven continuously below, and they make many webs down to the floor” (624a5–8). 36  “On each flight the bee does not go on to flowers different in form; it goes for example from violet to violet, and does not touch any other before it has flown back to the hive” (624b3–6).

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are clean (626a25 and 627a12),37 industrious,38 fiercely protective of what is their own and otherwise gentle, and sensitive to changes in season and weather39 as well as to the disposition of the hive. Given the depth of Aristotle’s discussion of the lives of bees, and its significance for our understanding of what Aristotle means when he talks about sharing a common deed, we will defer discussion of Aristotle’s description of bees until we have seen the full structure of Aristotle’s account of animal ēthos in Book 8. After his discussion of animals that are phronimos, Aristotle turns to the question of animal courage and related phenomena: “With regard to the characters of the animals, as we have said previously too, it is possible to observe differences, chiefly in respect of courage and cowardice, but secondly in respect of gentleness and wildness, even among the wild ones themselves” (629b5–8). As examples, Aristotle offers the lion—“although it is very dangerous while feeding, if it is not hungry and has fed is very gentle . . . it is not shy nor suspicious of anything, and towards those reared with it and familiar it is very playful and affectionate” (629b8–11)—the thos (who are philanthrōpoi, 630a9), the bison, the elephant (the tamest and gentlest of all wild animals, “for there are many things that it both learns and understands . . . it has quick perception and superior understanding” (630b19–22)), and the camel and the horse (whose courage and gentleness, it would seem, is evinced by their unwillingness to mate with their mothers, even if force is used). In short, even wildness admits of variation by degree, and seems closely linked to environmental circumstances related to food scarcity. With respect to sea animals, the dolphin is noteworthy for its mildness and gentleness, “in particular their loves and passions

37  “Bees that die are carried out. And in all other respects the animal is very clean; hence they often even fly off to discharge their excrement because it is ill-smelling” (626a24–7). 38  Differences with respect to industry are also keyed to environmental features: “There is a difference between the bees produced from those that forage in domesticated plants and the bees produced from those foraging in the mountain plants; for those from the forest foragers are hairier and smaller and more industrious and fiercer” (624b29–31). 39  “The bees foretell [proginōskousi] both wintry weather and rain; a sign is that they do not fly off but crowd around the hive in fine weather, by which the beekeepers learn that they are expecting a storm” (627b11–14).

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[erōtes kai epithumiai] toward boys around Tarentum and Caria and other places” (631a10–11). Further evidence of dolphin mildness is to be found in their group attention to the wounded and their care of the small by the large, even after death: “There has been seen before now a crowd of dolphins, big and small together, of which two were seen to have been left behind a little way, swimming beneath a little dead baby dolphin whenever it was sinking to the depths, and bringing it up on their backs, as though out of pity [hoion kateleountes, from eleeō: have compassion], with the result that it was not devoured by some other wild creature [tōn allōn thēriōn]” (631a16–20). Reports about their speed also give rise to other suggestions of their distinctiveness: their leaping over the masts of ships, for instance, is the result of hunting practices—they will follow a fish down to the depths, “and when the return journey is becoming long for them they restrain their breath as though from calculation [hōsper analogisamenoi], and after drawing themselves together they go like an arrow, wishing to achieve the distance through their speed in order to breathe; and if a ship happens to be nearby they leap over its masts” (631a26–30). Aristotle concludes Book 8 with a discussion of factors that can cause a change in character, singling out changes in behavior regarding sexual difference due to action, changes caused by castration (ektemnō), rumination, and according to season. If the dis­ cussion of sexual difference at the start of Book 8 emphasizes its global effects on character, this final discussion emphasizes the malleability of the characterological effects of sexual difference, that is, their dependence on action, an assertion that resonates with the decisive role Aristotle gives to action in character development in the ethics. Or, as Aristotle will put it here, “their characters change according to their activities [ta ēthē metaballousi kata tas praxeis]” (631b7).40 For example: “for domestic hens, after defeating the males, crow in imitation of the males and attempt to tread, and their crest and tail are raised so that one would not easily recognize that they are females; in some there has even been an outgrowth of 40  Note another close conjunction of body part and character at “their forms and character [tas morphas . . . kai to ēthos]” (631b19–20).

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a sort of small spurs” (631b8–12) Similarly, “some of the males have been seen before now, after the death of the female, busying themselves about the chicks, leading them around and rearing them, with the result that they neither crow any more nor attempt to tread” (631b13–17). The effects of ‘castration,’ performed on male and female alike, varies by time of life in which the procedure was performed; when performed on the young, the animals tend to grow larger and “smoother” (632a8–9). Seasonal changes in character are particularly evident in birds, and Aristotle closes Book 8 by cataloguing a few of their changes “in both color and voice according to the seasons [kata tas hōras kai to chrōma kai tēn phōnēn]” (632b14–15). We are now in a better position to clarify the model of animal intimacy that arises from out of Aristotle’s account of the differences in animal bios, praxis, and ēthos. As his use of comparative forms of politicality, character, and even life suggests, Aristotle conceives of animal intimacy and sociality along a spectrum starting from the hyper-aggressive relationality of some carnivores, which receives perhaps its most extreme expression in the behavior of crook-taloned birds, to the simple massing together and sharing of place and common food source (topos and trophē) of certain herding animals, to the cross-species shared shoaling of fish, to the more complex social interactions of political animals like cranes and (as we will see in Section  3.3) exemplified by bees, interactions that emerge from a shared or common deed. Indeed, the greater the political bond, the deeper the possibilities for intimacy; that is, the possession of a shared deed creates conditions for a deeper form of sociality, and the more complex the sharing of deeds the more intense the social engagement as well. This relationship between complexity and intimacy is vividly demonstrated in Aristotle’s account of the lives and character of bees.

3.3  The Lives of Bees Bees begin and end their day with a syncretized group action keyed to the signal of a single bee: “At daybreak they are silent until one

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bee arouses them by buzzing two or three times. Then they all fly out together to work, and on returning they are noisy at first but gradually become less so until a single bee flies round buzzing as though signaling for sleep; then suddenly they are silent” (627a24–8). In between waking and sleeping they divide their labor mainly between pollen collection, water gathering, and comb maintenance. Those constructing the comb “work to make the combs even, with the outer covering all smooth; and there is one form [hen eidos] of the comb, for example all honey or grubs or drones; but if it happens that they make all of them in the same comb, there will be continuously one form [hen eidos] constructed through a mixed heap” (624b32–6). Those collecting wax for honey discriminate between kinds of flower and work on one kind at a time: “On each flight the bee does not go on to flowers different in form; it goes for example from violet to violet, and does not touch any other before it has flown back to the hive” (624b3–6). Their capacity for strong group cohesion is particularly evident in their connection to and care for their leader—“they say too that if the swarm has strayed they turn back, tracking the leader by scent until they find him. It is said that he is even carried by the swarm when he is unable to fly, and that if he perishes the swarm perishes; and that if they do survive for some time and make no combs, no honey is produced and the bees soon perish” (624a27–34). As the concluding lines suggest, this leadership structure has negative effects for which they must compensate, as becomes clear in the complex organizational system by which the swarm takes flight: “When a swarm is about to take flight, a monotonous and peculiar hum is made for some days, and two or three days beforehand a few bees fly around the hive . . . When they have all collected, they fly off and the ordinary bees divide up around each of the kings; but if a small group happens to settle near a large group, the small group changes its place to join the large one, and if the king whom they have abandoned accompanies them they destroy him” (625b7–16). They do so because the presence of the king poses a threat to the cohesion of the hive by inciting its diffusion: “[bees] die because of various circumstances, especially when a number of leaders are produced and each leads away a section of them” (626a29–31). For

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this reason, worker bees “readily kill the majority of the leaders, especially the bad ones, so that there should not be a multiplicity of them to disperse the swarm” (625a16–18). Indeed, the greater their complexity, the greater their vulnerability, and for all of Aristotle’s efforts to document their industriousness and intelligence, he also observes the instability to which hives and swarms are subject, an instability that is not solely due to external forces. The far greater threat to the hive, it would seem, are the idleness and vices of some of the bee kind, i.e., the drones, robbers, and kings. That is, the seeds of the destruction of the hive come from within: “Bees flee from no animal except each other” (636a14–15). In addition to the danger of diffusion posed by the presence of the king, the drone threatens the hive with its indolence, for while the drone is the biggest of the bee kind, it is also “stingless and sluggish” (624b26–7). It does not help with the production of honey but does feed off of it (624a22), keeping mainly within the hive, venturing out only for exercise and then returning to feast on [euōchountai] honey (624a23–7). (But note that for beekeepers the presence of a few drones is advantageous: “The presence of a few drones benefits the hive, for they make the bees more industrious” (627b9–11).) This negligence is shared by the robber: “The robber and drone, once produced, do not work but damage the work of others; and when caught they are killed by the good worker bees” (625a15–17). The robbers are a trans-hive menace, for they “not only damage the combs in their own hives but also enter into those of others if they are not detected; if caught, they are killed” (625b1–3), but also suffer from their excessive eating, “for if he has got in undetected, through overfilling himself [dia to huperpeplēsthai] is unable to fly but rolls about in front of the hive so that it is difficult for him to escape” (625b3–7). Thus, in the course of discussing the bees’ comb construction and maintenance, reproductive life, division of labor, creation of honey, defense against predators, health concerns, and daily and seasonal patterns of behavior, Aristotle documents not only the orderliness and industry of the worker bee, but also its efforts to mitigate its own vulnerabilities due to the shortcomings of the drones, robbers, long bees, and the potential damage caused by too

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many kings. For instance, in comb construction and in its general behavior toward the drones and kings, the worker bee practices a system of population control that is responsive to environmental factors: they fashion combs in which other workers are produced all the time, those of kings when there is “much production of young” and those of the drones “if there are signs that honey is plentiful” (624a1–3). “When the honey has run short they expel the drones” (628b10). “They also kill the drones when there is no longer room for themselves to work; for they are in the innermost part of the hive” (626b12–13). And: “They kill [the leaders] mostly when the hive is not producing many young and when no swarming is about to happen; at these times they destroy even the combs of the kings, if they have been prepared, because kings lead the swarms out. They destroy the drones’ combs too if there are signs of a shortage of honey and the hives are not well stocked with honey; and it is then that they fight most over the honey against those who take it, and expel [ekballousi] the drones that are present, and are often seen sitting out on the hive stand” (625a19–27). In short, the hive is a volatile place. For all of the worker bees’ group cohesion, efforts at population control, sensitivity or fineness of perception, and orderliness, the failure of the hive and the decimation of the swarm are most frequently caused by an internal tension between kinds possessing different characters. This internal conflict is the vulnerability that attends the bees’ complexity. In order to get the clearest picture of how the bees navigate this vulnerability, we will need to discuss some comments Aristotle makes about their reproductive life in the Generation of Animals.

3.4  The Generation of Bees Bee reproduction presents an especially remarkable aspect of their communal life, as we can see if we turn briefly to the Generation of Animals. The attention Aristotle gives there to bee reproduction is a function of what he calls the peculiarity of their reproductive ­process, which generates “many impasses [pollēn aporian]” (759a8). Chief amongst the aporiai is whether or not the bees reproduce

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sexually, but Aristotle must first address an even more fundamental question, namely, whether bees generate themselves or, as some believe, they fetch their larva from elsewhere. Aristotle dispenses with the latter possibility quickly, for whether the larva is spon­tan­ eous­ly produced elsewhere (in the flower, perhaps) or is produced by another animal, neither explains why the bee should then fetch it: “After all, why should they? All creatures which concern themselves about the young ones take that trouble over what appears to them to be their own proper offspring” (759a36–759b2). And so, the question to focus on is whether bees generate themselves sexually or asexually. If sexually, then three possibilities exist: either each of the three kinds of bees (the king or leader, the worker or what Aristotle will just refer to with the name of the species, and the drone) generates its own kind, or one of the three kinds generates all three, or one kind unites with another kind, as would be the case for those who maintain either that drones are male and bees female, or vice versa. For Aristotle none of these is possible. He deals with the final possibility first: It is not reasonable (oude . . . eulogon) to hold that bees are female and drones male, “because nature does not assign defensive weapons to any female creature; yet while the drones are without a sting, all bees have one” (759b2–5); nor is the converse eulogon, “because no male creatures make a habit of taking trouble over their young, whereas in fact bees do” (759b7–8).41 Thus, bees and drones do not copulate with one another in order to produce bees and drones. However, because there have been instances in which the gonē of drones have been found without any adult drone present, and because young bees are produced only if there is a king present, then neither can it be the case that bee produces bee and drone produces drone (that is, it cannot be the case that each kind generates its own kind). The only remaining possibility for their sexual generation is that the kings copulate amongst themselves, but this is already belied by the fact that drones are generated 41  In the History of Animals, caring for the young is one of the effects of castration on male animals; but this is complicated by Aristotle’s identification in the very same book of several species of animal whose male members do indeed take trouble over the young (e.g., the male pigeon). On eulogon in Aristotle’s natural treatises, see Falcon and Leunissen (2015).

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without the presence of the king. The only conclusion that can be drawn thus far, then, “is something parallel to what we find occurs in certain fishes: the worker bees generate the drones without copulation” (75928–30). This means, then, that the worker bees mingle the characters of male and female—“so far as generating is concerned they are female, yet they contain in themselves the male as well as the female, just as plants do, and this is also why they possess the organ for self-defense” (759b29–32)—although for Aristotle it means that they are without sex: “for of course it is wrong to apply the term ‘female’ to creatures where no separate male exists” (759b33–4). The generation of drones, then, occurs by the asexual re­pro­duct­ ive acts of the worker bees. And this on its own, so far as Aristotle is concerned, is sufficient to assert that all three bee kinds are generated asexually: “And if this is so, then surely the same argument must apply to the bees and the kings; they too must be generated independently of copulation” (759b34–6).42 However, the observed facts complicate things a bit. Because the worker bees themselves are not generated without the presence of the kings in the hives, we must conclude that they do not generate themselves, even as they do generate the drone. We must further conclude, then, that the kings “generate their own kind and the worker bees as well” (760a3–4). The ability to generate different kinds astonishes Aristotle and prompts a reflection on the degrees of sameness and difference that would make such a generation possible (for it flirts with the very possibility of one creature being generated by another kind that Aristotle had so quickly dismissed earlier): “We see then that the manner in which bees are generated appears to be peculiar, in keeping with their extraordinary and peculiar character. Bees’ 42  Asexual generation accounts for some of the exceptional, or peculiar, character of bee reproduction. When Aristotle turns to give an account of the reproduction of insects that resemble bees, wasps, and hornets, he opens by observing that while there are some simi­lar­ ities, the extraordinary features are lacking, “because they contain no divine ingredient as the tribe of bees does [ou gar echousin outhen theion, hōsper to genos to tōn melitton]” (761a5–6), following this up directly with the observation that the primary generators, what he describes as “so-called ‘mother-wasps’ [hai mētrai kaloumenai],” generate as an effect of copulation. Bees, on the other hand, are able to generate themselves without copulation.

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generating without copulation might be paralleled by the behavior of other animals, but their generating some different kind of creature is peculiar and unique, for even erythrinoi and channae generate creatures of the same kind as themselves. The reason is that bees themselves are not generated in the same way as flies and other such creatures, but from a kind which though different is akin to them—they are, of course, generated from the leaders” (760a5–12). This form of reproduction, that is, generation of different kinds, creates a complex chain of reproductive power: So it turns out that the leaders generate their own kind, and another kind as well (viz., the worker bees); while the worker bees generate another kind (the drones), but not their own kind; this they have been deprived of doing [alla tout’ aphērēsthai autōn]. And since any business of nature’s always has an orderly arrangement, on that account necessity requires that the drones shall have been deprived even of generating some other kind [kai to allo ti genos gennan aphēirēsthai]. And this is what is found to be the case in actual fact: they are generated themselves, but generate no other creature; thus the progression of gen­er­ ation reaches its limit at the third term of the series [all’ en tōi tritōi arithmōi peras eschen hē genesis]. (760a28–760b1)

Thus, the sterility of the drone serves a necessary purpose, and the roles to which each of the three kinds have been allotted serve a natural end: “And this arrangement has been so well constituted by Nature that the three kinds continue ever in existence and none of them fails, although not all of them generate” (760b1–3). While there is much to say here, I will limit myself to three observations, or, more precisely, to the identification of three fantasies embedded within Aristotle’s account of bee reproduction. For the life of bees is a repository of ancient Greek cultural and philo­soph­ ic­al imaginaries. In describing the excesses and deficiencies of the drones and other kinds of bees, Aristotle is contributing to a much longer cultural history. Throughout early Greek poetry, the beehive represented both order and the possibility/threat of excess.43 This 43  See the sources provided in Lewis and Llewellyn-Jones (2017); for their appropriation in Latin poetry, see Polleichtner (2005).

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lineage is especially clear in the hive and drone imagery Plato’s Socrates uses to describe the corrupt forms of regimes in Republic 8 and 9. There, the generation of a drone class by the oligarchy’s unwillingness to legislate against complete bankruptcy serves as the primary destabilizing factor that leads to degeneration of the oli­ garchy into democracy and of the democracy into a tyranny. Throughout his description, Plato emphasizes the pathological effects of the errancy and excess of the drone class—because they have no place in the city, no job, and no stake represented by property, they operate as fundamentally destabilizing forces, pushing the city and its citizens toward their basest impulses. And so, we will trace three fantasies at work in the philosophical imaginary (to borrow from Michèle Le Dœuff) of Aristotle’s account.44 For one, the self-generativity of the king kind plays upon the deep current of desire for individual autogenesis, and spe­cif­ic­ al­ly for self-generation without a human mother, that is evident in Greek and especially Athenian fantasies of autochthony and sets the stage for a philosophic version perhaps most explicit in what Page duBois calls the Platonic appropriation of reproduction.45 In these contexts, self-generation is an index of power, and here Aristotle goes out of his way to emphasize that self-generation is the exclusive rite of the king; the worker bee “has been deprived” (760a30) of generating itself. In assessing the significance of what the worker bee has been deprived, it is worth bearing in mind here the contemporary account of honey bee reproduction: there are three bee kinds, the queen (female), the worker (also female), and the drone (male). Bees are generated sexually, by eggs produced by the queen who also determines the gender of the eventual bee, fertilized eggs producing either workers or queens and unfertilized eggs producing drones. Fertilization begins when the queen collects sperm, a process that occurs in mid-air when the queen takes a mating flight; a single queen will mate with between ten and twenty males in a 44  Le Dœuff (1990). 45  Which forms the title of her contribution to Tuana (1994). On the complex significance of autochthony in the Athenian context, see Loraux (1981), Rosivach (1987), and Forsdyke (2012).

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single flight, will use the sperm she has collected from them to ­fertilize her eggs, and can hold sperm for up to four years. While worker bees can also lay eggs, their eggs are not fertilized and so they can only produce drones. Only the queen can produce both male and female bees. The similarities and differences here are noteworthy. Both accounts identify three kinds, both allocate a primary reproductive role to one, and a secondary reproductive role to another. Because Aristotle denies sexual reproduction, however, he cannot grant a fertilizing role to any kind, even as he attributes primary generative power to the king. One effect of his simultaneous denial of sex to the primary generator, and designation of the primary generator as the king, is the absence of an active sense of female generativity as regards the reproduction of bee kinds. To be sure, Aristotle himself strikes a cautionary note about his conclusions in a passage well known for the apparent primacy it grants to aisthēsis over logos: “This, then, appears to be the state of affairs with regard to the generation of bees, so far as theory can take us, supplemented by what are thought to be the facts about their behavior. But the facts have not been sufficiently ascertained; and if at any future time they are ascertained, then credence must be given to the direct evidence of the senses more than to theories—and to theories too provided that the results which they show agree with what is observed” (760b28–34). Nevertheless, it is not lack of perception alone that interferes with the designation of bees as male or female. By Aristotle’s account, culturally coded behavioral (care for young) and morphological indicators (presence or absence of sting), taken to be the work of nature, militate against such a designation. Because bees mingle male and female principles, and because it is wrong to call something female when no male of its kind exists (759b33–4), the bees’ “hermaphroditic” character preclude the attribution of a female kind. Moreover, Aristotle’s designation of the primary generator as king galvanizes a set of conceptions of masculinity. That is, the attribution of generative power to the king is in keeping with larger cultural forces that would deny generativity to the female, and to Aristotle’s own relegation of the female principle in sexual

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reproduction to the provision of matter; that is, the self-generation of the king feeds the fantasy of generation without a female.46 Indeed, in its self- and other-generation, the king is given a priv­ il­eged ascendency of generative power that affects not only what is to be expected of it but also the very formation of its body: “it is well that the kings, who have, as it were, been made specially for the purpose of procreation, should stay within, released from the drudgery that has got to be done by somebody; and that they should be large, since their body has been constituted as it were for procreation” (760b7–9). The king bee’s power, that is, what justifies that it should be attended to by the workers and should not be allowed to do any work, emanates precisely from its generative capacity. The worker bees’ attendance on the kings simply enshrines the king’s generativity itself as the principle of power and sovereignty. Here we find another fantasy, companion to the fantasy of self-gen­er­ation; namely, the fantasy of unfettered, excessive generation. And because this hyperfertility has been arrogated to the king it can be treated as an unproblematic source of the king’s power that must be served and celebrated rather than an anxiety-provoking potential for reproductive excess that must be managed and limited, as it is in the case of, for instance, Pandora’s potential hyperfertility. For, unlike the case of Pandora, the excessive fertility of the king is authorized by nature itself, by the more limited fertility of the worker and the absence of fertility (the sterility) of the drone: for it is also well (eu) “that the drones should be idle, as they have no weapons for engaging in combat to secure their food, and also on account of the slowness of their bodies. The bees, however, are as 46  Although see Connell’s (2016) reappraisal. Nevertheless, as Connell herself notes, while Aristotle denies the attribution of female to creatures for whom there is no male, he does not assert the converse (see Connell (2016) 252 note 39). Denying designation of male or female while choosing to maintain the more widespread designation of the primary generator and ruler as “king” keeps intact a broader formulation of the fecund male as the standard. My point is that Aristotle is contributing to the larger trope of appropriating female generativity to a masculine model, and in this the criticisms by Lloyd (1983), Keuls (1993), Byl (1975), Pomeroy (1994), and Davies and Kathirithamby (1986) stand against the defense of Aristotle in Barnes (1984), Lennox (1985), Mayhew (1999, reprinted as the first part of Ch. 2 in Mayhew (2004)), and Connell (2016). On the widespread use of “king bee” see HudsonWilliams (1935) and Davies and Kathirithamby (1986); as Mayhew notes, Xenophon described the leader as female, see Oeconomicus 7.17.32–3, 38 and Pomeroy (1994).

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regards size midway between the two, for thus they are serviceable for active work, and they are workers inasmuch as they support and feed their children and fathers alike” (760b11–16). Thus, the three kinds each fulfill a necessary purpose, and contain a balance of productive and reproductive forces, the superlative generativity of the king, the dutiful service of the worker, and the spurring indolence of the drone. The conceit of harmony is already apparent if we dig beneath this rather placid surface and recall that one of the jobs the workers are called upon to perform is to kill off the kings, as well as the drones, when their number is too great or when environmental conditions demand it. The worker must not only attend to father and child, but also be willing to kill father and child in the greater interest of the hive. Because, as Aristotle would have it, in doing so it is fulfilling a mandate in its nature, because it does not choose to do so, the worker bee is exempt from the effects such regicide/patricide (matricide) and infanticide might otherwise have. That is, we have no need to seek for a bee psychoanalyst. This fantasy of unproblematic (read: male) hyperfertility links up with other prominent lines of ancient Greek thinking about the nature of power and political life, as we will see in Part III. For now, it brings us to the third fantasy at work here, the aspiration for the perpetual replenishment of kinds: “And this arrangement has been so well constituted by nature that the three kinds continue ever in existence and none of them fails, although not all of them generate” (760b1–2). The excesses of the king are not a problem for the hive (that is, not a threat to bee diversity of kind) because they have a check in the form of the sterility of the drone so that the kingly kind does not overtake all the others, and overpopulate the hive. This provision has been made by nature itself, and so we find in bee reproduction the seeds of a fantasy of the successful management of human reproduction for the sake of the preservation of the essential differences necessary for a political community. What is preserved in perpetuity is not just the bee but the bee way of life, the bee bios, which requires that there be three kinds who perform three roles. It is this aspiration, this hope to attain a perpetual preservation of kind, that drives Plato’s and Aristotle’s reproductive legislation. We

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can see it at work, for instance, in the legislation the Stranger ­proposes for the reproduction of Magnesia’s citizens in Plato’s Laws: “In order that these arrangements remain fixed for all the rest of time, the following must also be understood: the number of hearths we establish now is never to be altered, never to become greater or smaller. To maintain this arrangement firmly through the whole city, let each allotment holder always leave behind only one heir to his household from among his children . . . if a surplus of females or males occurs, or on the contrary a deficiency because of a lack of childbirths, there will be a magistracy which we will designate—the greatest and most honored in fact—which should, after looking into all these things, devise means of assisting those who have too many offspring and those who are lacking, so as to maintain the five thousand forty households always intact so far as possible” (5.740b1–d5). The concern with reproduction and eugenics legislation, and the fantasies charted here, will be explored in much greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6. To return to the lives of bees, we have seen that the plurality of bee kinds is necessary for the reproduction of the bee bios and yet is also the source of the greatest threats to the bee kind. This threat is managed by the natural distribution of generative reproductive power across kinds, which makes use even of the anti-productive forces of the drone, indeed, which requires them. Thus, in the bee we find a model of power (generativity) and of political life (the management of generativity) that will have im­port­ant implications for Aristotle’s conception of the flourishing polis, a topic we will treat at length in Chapter 4.

3.5 Conclusion From the solitary existence of the crook-taloned, to the gregarious but scattered herd life of goats, sheep and cattle, to the motivated overcoming of enmity for the sake of shared reproductive labor in certain forms of fish, to the tight group formation of cranes and the sophisticated distribution of labor among bees, the spectrum of animal intimacy has the political bond—the bond of a common

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task—as its most concentrated point. And by Aristotle’s account here, having a common task implies a complex interaction between kinds (a distribution of labor) distinguished by role (e.g., the leader of the cranes) and morphology (e.g., the king bee, whose body has been made for the sake of procreation). In fact, the bee is particularly illuminating on this count because its way of life, its bios, entails a division into three kinds, and the perpetuation of this bios requires, in turn, the perpetuation of the three kinds, so that they do not collapse into a single kind. It is in the context of this sharing of deeds characteristic of the intimacy of political animals that we should locate Aristotle’s account of suzēn, of human shared life, whose most vivid expressions are precisely in the sharing of one’s most cherished tasks (EN 1172a3–8) and especially in the sharing of life of virtuous friends (EN 1170b10–14). And, as with the communal life of bees, with this greater capacity for intimacy comes also greater and more varied forms of vulnerability and estrangement. It is also in this context that we should read the shared activity of politeia creation and maintenance as it is discussed in the Politics, and it is to this that Chapter  4 turns in order to identify the place of the human along this spectrum, and to bring our understanding of animal bios—the integration of capacities that allows the living being to accomplish its living within a particular topos—to Aristotle’s claim that the politeia is the bios of the polis (Pol.1295a40).

4 Polis-Dwellers According to the terms of our previous study of animal sociality in the History of Animals, what distinguishes humans from other animals is not that they have a bios, but that they have more than one from which to choose, the bios of the hunter or the nomad, to follow one set of examples from the Politics, or the philosophic or political life, to follow another (1246b1; 1324a25–33).1 This var­ iety is true of the bios of the polis, the politeia, as well. And, in a sense, the polis too is said in many ways: Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, etc. For Aristotle, the distinction that makes a real differ­ ence between these names, and gives one access to something like the polis as such, is a distinction within the political partnership itself, a distinction in the pursuit of virtue via a shared perception of ­justice. It is this difference that creates a democracy, or an ­oligarchy, or a tyranny. Or, as Aristotle puts it, it is in hunting for virtue that humans create different manners of life and regimes (1328a41–1328b2). For Aristotle, an understanding of virtue, and justice in particular, neither arises independently of one’s access to the sea, for example, or the availability of farmland, ease of defense, climate, etc., nor is it reducible to them. What is conveyed in the human residing in and working over place is the concretization of the human function—of putting logos into action—in political institutions, architectural features, legislation, sustenance-gathering practices, etc. In the zoo­ logical context, this means that the topos into which the human must integrate consists of a nexus of geographical and symbolic 1  This latter list contains two of the traditional three lives discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics, the life of pleasure, the political life, and the contemplative life (NE 1.5.1095b17). On this history of the three-life trope, see Lockwood (2014).

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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features formed over time. And because this entire matrix is ­vulnerable to falling out of sync with the lived conditions of its citi­ zens, integration, in turn, is first and foremost an integration of morph­ology and choice, determined not exclusively at the level of the species but also accomplished by collectives of individuals. For Aristotle, it is in the formation and maintenance of politeia institu­ tions that the human expresses its political animality. Cranes dis­ play their political character in the tight group cohesion and system of signs required for the work of migration; bees in the coordinated perceptions required by honey production and hive maintenance; humans in the shared perception of justice that forms the political partnership required for the collective pursuit of virtue. The real and profound differences between these activities simply are the differentiators by means of which human animality can be distin­ guished from bee animality and crane animality. We can thus detect a zoological sensibility throughout Aristotle’s Politics. We see it in the methodology he espouses for studying the forms of politeia, for example, the same method of identifying essential parts and their varying forms of combination that one would employ in order to grasp the kinds of animals (1290b25). We can detect it in the demarcation of modes of human bioi on the basis of human efforts to attain sustenance (1246a29–30). We can detect it in the role that life cycle plays in Aristotle’s allocation of certain essential civic tasks (1329a8–9; 1335a7–27). And, perhaps more controversially, we can detect it in Aristotle’s tendency to grant a quasi-organismic character to the polis, to speak of the polis as having its own deed (1326a13), for instance, or a bios (1295a40; 13274 and 5), or its own excellence (1253a38). While the scholarship on Aristotle’s Politics grants parallelisms between Aristotle’s treatment of political and zoological phenom­ ena, the tendency has been to isolate the explanatory force of the zoological lens to the “anthropological” dimension of the Politics, relegating its role in his political science to the generation of meta­ phors with varying degrees of heuristic value.2 For instance, in his 2  This is particularly clear in Kullman (1991), with the distinction between Aristotle’s treatment of the nature of human beings (which, he finds, is firmly rooted within a zoological

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survey of Aristotle’s descriptions of humans as political animals, Wolfgang Kullmann concludes that Aristotle’s understanding of human nature is grounded in a zoological perspective. A greater degree of ambiguity, in Kullmann’s estimation, hangs around Aristotle’s approach to the polis itself. For while Aristotle will often speak of the polis as like a living being or as relevantly compared to phenomena emergent in the lives of animals, and while his attribu­ tion of a bios, or an ēthos, or an ergon to the polis, or his description of a polis as political, invite comparison with a living being, this should be read, according to Kullmann, as analogical and heuris­ tic.3 Polis, by this reading, is not a substance.4 It is natural, but n ­ ot animal. Its analysis may find useful comparison with zoological phenomena, but requires something other than a zoological perspective. However, where we mark the limit of this perspective must take into account Aristotle’s expansive sense of the phenomena that con­ stitute it. The polis need not be a living being in order to be mean­ ingfully (and essentially, as opposed to analogically or heuristically) understood within a broader investigation of living beings; even if this perspective is not sufficient, it is nevertheless necessary. Put differently, organisms are not the only entity usefully explicated by a zoological perspective (even if they are the most significant such entity); in order to understand them, if we are to follow Aristotle’s account, something else must be understood as well, namely, the milieu in which they thrive, the set of environmental factors that context) and his treatment of the polis (the quasi-organismic character of which, Kullmann argues, must be read as an analogic or heuristic extension), but is evident in varying degrees throughout recent studies of the “biological” dimension of Aristotle’s Politics, see, e.g., Pellegrin (2015), DePew (1995), Lord (1991), Cooper (1984/2004); see also Mulgan (1974). Here I am working against the grain of this distinction, Kullmann (1991) will go on to argue that for Aristotle polis itself is neither living nor a substance, and suggests that we should read Aristotle’s attribution of a bios (1295a40, 1327b4 and 5), ergon (1326a13), aretē (1253a38), and political character (politikon: 1327b5) to the city as analogical and heuristic. For the debate about whether the polis is an ousia see, e.g., Barker (1959) 221, 276–7, Clark (1975) 102–4, Riedel (1975) 76–7, Kamp (1985) 116, 106–7, and Mogens (2013) 22–3 for arguments in the affirmative and Kullmann (1991), Höffe (1987) 269–70, Yack (1993) 92, and Pellegrin (2015) for the negative. 3  Bios: 1295a40, 1327b4 and 5; ergon: 1326a13; aretē: 1253a38; politikon: 1327b5. 4  This claim is, of course, controversial, and others have argued that this polis is indeed an ousia (a substance); see references in note 2.

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support them and shape them as, for instance, land-dwellers or water-dwellers, what Pellegrin calls the “situation” of animals.5 As the horizon toward which human life aims and the milieu in which it unfolds, the human political community operates in its relation to its constituents as an amplification of the relation between any living being and its environment.6 A comprehensive understanding of the approach to human pol­it­ ical phenomena Aristotle takes in his politics requires us, therefore, to acknowledge that Aristotle’s zoological perspective extends beyond his characterization of human beings to his understanding of human political community itself. Indeed, I argue, it is only with this context in mind that we can fully appreciate what is unique about the polis, namely, the degree to which it is shaped by the en­tities whom it shapes, a reciprocity illuminated by an analysis of politeia insofar as it highlights not only the exchange between per­ sons and structure, but the status of institutional structures them­ selves as traces of shared human perception of the just and the unjust. That is, the relevant question for Aristotle in the Politics is less whether or not the polis is a substance, than to what forms of living a polis gives rise. But this is more complex than it seems, as this topos is made up not of the preponderance of an element, but, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, of the traces, presences, and absences of other people. It is a human environment.7 What takes on the determining role of land or water, in the human context, is other human beings, both literally in the presence of other people with whom to share power, resources, and life, but also in a more figura­ tive sense, in the traces of others, their affects, values, judgments of the advantageous and disadvantageous, of the just and unjust, that 5  Pellegrin (2015) 40. 6  “Constituents” rather than “inhabitants” because for Aristotle not all people residing within the boundaries of a polis are fully enfranchised citizens—in fact, most are not. Whatever else may and should be said about Aristotle’s account of the so-called natural slave, it makes clear that his ideal of citizen life is parasitic on the labor of others. Conceiving of the polis in ecological terms has the added value of drawing out this parasitic character more clearly and problematizing the sense of the “natural” with which Aristotle is operating at this juncture of the Politics. On the role of phusis in Aristotle’s political thought Miller (1995) remains canonical; for more recent work, see Trott (2013) and Riesbeck (2016). 7  Here Arendt’s work on the human character of political community seems to me to be written very much within an Aristotelian vein.

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are memorialized in laws, structures, and institutions. In the polis, we are surrounded by what Plato’s Diotima would call the psychic “children” of others.8 Because the polis is founded upon the accretions of deliberation and opinion that constitute its politeia, which, in turn, provide it with its identity and life, the polis is subject to the tenuousness and instability of human shared perception of what is just and unjust. For this reason, Aristotle takes himself to be in need of conceptual resources beyond what he uses in the zoological texts by means of which he can give an account of this fragility, to describe it, diag­ nose its particularly pathological forms, and outline some treat­ ment for them. And because the human capacity for viciousness is more pervasive in political life than the rare cases of its completion, Aristotle’s anthropocentrism, at least in the Politics, should not be confused for a humanism as it is traditionally conceived.9 The particular instability that attends the properly human topos is thus clearly an effect of that which makes humans especially pol­ it­ical. However, it is not the possession of logos that requires a political analysis distinct from a zoological analysis. Logos too admits of a zoological account. If Pellegrin is right that in his Politics, Aristotle “proposes the same biological analysis for language that he produced for political character,” we can read the Politics as an extension of the concern that animates the History of Animals, namely, to identify and describe the most salient differentiae of liv­ ing beings.10 Throughout the Politics, Aristotle treats the posses­ sion of logos as an essential facet of human animality, one to which human bodies have been suited by the form of the human tongue, for instance, or the thinness of human skin (see Parts of Animals 2.16.659b33–660a13), both of which serve the perception of the just and the unjust. The “possession” of logos is a multisensory phe­ nomenon; the human bonding and attachment via logos that has 8  To be sure, these affects, values, judgments, etc. interact with geographical features. But they cannot be reduced to these features. 9  See Johnson (2006) on the challenge that Aristotle’s teleology presents to the anthropo­ centrism of many of his contemporaries. On how Aristotle’s anthropocentrism might stand with respect to the “mortalist” humanism Bonnie Honig (2013) criticizes, see Section 4.4. 10  Pellegrin (2015) 43.

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such powerful implications for human political life is supported by morphological features of the human body that must be taken into account when considering the nature of that bond. What this tells us is that, for Aristotle, it is other people, along with the artifacts of their collective deliberation, that provide the landscape to which human morphology responds and by which it is supported. Thus, the having of logos does not sever the political from the animal, nor a study of politics from a study of zoology. To be sure, that Aristotle bothered to compose a work entitled the Politics tells us that the particular and contingent use of logos in the formation and maintenance of poleis requires its own focused and nuanced analysis. But, as we saw in Chapter 2, this is because, far from mark­ ing a departure from other forms of political life, the possession of logos creates the conditions for an intensification of the political bond, an intensification that comes with some ambivalence.11 In order to take the full measure of Aristotle’s zoological perspec­ tive, then, we have to return to the source of the political bond we identified in Chapter 2, to the shared perception of just and unjust that the possession of logos affords, and consider it in light of the capacity to pursue a common deed that makes an animal political and our conclusion about this capacity in Chapter 3. In order to do this, we will focus on the more granular study of politeia in the cen­ tral books of the Politics, first to the discussion of the various forms and modes of regime in Book 4 (Section 4.1), and then to the sources of their destruction and preservation in Book 5 (Section 4.2). In his account of the tyrannical inclinations of certain forms of democracy and oligarchy, for instance, or of the outrages of the monarchy and the forces that align against them, Aristotle deploys a conception of politeia as the institutionalization of an opinion about justice that shapes the lives of citizens, that requires renewal through their enactment of citizenship, and that dissolves if this renewal is withheld. It is through his politeia-analysis that he gains access to the particular dynamic between person and structure, between 11  See, for instance, Aristotle’s justification for banishing “foul speech” (aischrologia) from the city, “for by speaking readily about some foul matter one comes closer to doing it” (7.17.1336b4, compare with the critique of mimesis in the Republic), and the discussion of Aristotle’s critique of empty talk (kenologia) in Kelsey (2015).

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zōion and topos, that forms the bios of the polis and the topos of the human. This in turn helps to explain the ­intimacy of the legislation that Aristotle proposes in Books 7 and 8, wherein citizen lives and bodies are shaped from before their birth and le­gis­lated in every aspect of their life cycle (Section 4.3).

4.1  Types of Regimes Spanning Books 3 and 4 of his Politics, Aristotle’s most technical account of regimes operates by way of developing a fine lens for viewing collectives of human beings as they coalesce around a net­ work of forces, capacities, and needs, aimed at training the political expert in how to read a human multitude. Book 4 is directed spe­ cifically to educating the statesman in discerning a) what regime is best simply, b) what regime is fitting for which kind of city (that is, the best regime that circumstances could allow), c) the character of those existing regimes that are neither best nor have the best politeia for their particular human collective, and d) which regime is most fitting for all cities (1288b10–35). In doing so, it takes up and builds upon the more general account of politeia offered in Book 3, and I offer here a brief schematic summary in order to better situate our consideration of the details of Aristotle’s politeia-analysis. In Book 3, Aristotle defines the politeia in cursory fashion as “a certain arrangement [taxis] of those who inhabit the city” (1274b35) and in greater detail as “an arrangement [taxis] of a city with respect to its offices, particularly the one that has the most authority” (1278b8–10). He continues, “For what has authority in the city is everywhere the governing body [politeuma], and the governing body is the regime (1278b10–11). This conception of the governing body as the site in which the character of the politeia is given com­ mits Aristotle to investigate what is authoritative in the city, and to do this he locates the three forms of rule identified in previous books along a spectrum, from the rule oriented toward the good of the mas­ ter (mastery), to that toward the good of both ruler and ruled inci­ dentally (household management), and finally to the rule oriented toward the common good (political rule) (1278b33–1279a21).

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Aristotle’s teleological commitments, in turn, require him to locate these forms of rule within nature; he asserts that there is a collective of people who are naturally apt for each form of rule, e.g., a multitude (plēthos) apt for kingship (1288a8-9), an aristocratic multitude (aristokratikon plēthos) (1288a9–10), and a political multi­tude (politikon plēthos) (1288a12–15). This “natural” connec­ tion between kind of human collective and kind of rule is, for Aristotle, “both just and advantageous” (1287b36). It also allows him not only to describe certain forms of regime as para phusin, contrary to nature (e.g., 1287b41), but also to makes claims about when a particular kind of regime is called for on the grounds that it naturally suits the human collective it is to integrate, e.g., “Where the multitude of the poor [to tōn aporōn plēthos] is preeminent, therefore, with respect to the proportion mentioned, there a democ­ racy is what accords with nature” (1296b24–6). He spends the rest of Book 3 developing a preliminary description of the first two of the three correct regimes “according to what is just simply” (1279a18–19, i.e., those which look to the common advantage: kingship, aristocracy, and polity), which embroils him in a discus­ sion of what the authoritative element should be, with particular focus on the rule of law, the authority of the many, and what to do in the unusual and unnatural case of a person whose virtue exceeds that of all the combined virtue of the rest of the citizens. Book 4 opens with a return to the general characterization of politeia as an arrangement: “For a regime is an arrangement [taxis] in cities connected with the offices, the manner in which they have been distributed, what the authoritative element of the regime is, and what the end of the partnership is in each case (1289a15–17). It then announces its focus on polity and the ­deviant regimes (oli­garchy, democracy, and tyranny), and then turns to offer a more detailed discussion of the parts of the city and the modes of rule characteristic of each part in order to discern the finer differences between kinds of democracies, ­ ­oligarchies, and polities. Throughout, we can chart Aristotle’s efforts to distinguish between politeiai on the basis of the kind of human collective to which the politeia must conform and the capacities it must

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integrate, that is, to distinguish between politeiai on the basis of the particular reflexive interaction between the character of citizens and kind of regime. In order to train the eyes of the statesman to discern which kind of politeia will best suit which kind of human collective, Aristotle traces their interaction in a manner that ­illuminates the fragile ecology of the polis and the perspective needed to shore up its vulnerabilities. And while this is a practical investigation, aimed at assisting the statesman in acting, it never­ theless has important implications for his understanding of the polis as the fullest expression of the human hormē for political life. We will begin, then, with his account of the parts of the city and then move on to watch the interplay between individual and ­structure as it unfolds in some more specific account of the lives of citizens and the character of the polis. Aristotle begins enumerating the parts of the city by harking back to a question broached in Book 1, namely, given the ir­re­du­ cibly heterogeneous character of the city, which differences matter, which differences support the city, and which do not? For he asserts that the reason there are a number of regimes is that there are a number of parts of the city, “for, in the first place, we see that all cities are composed [sugkeimenas] of households, and next that of this multitude [toutou tou plēthous] some are necessarily well off, others poor, and others middling, and that of the well off and the poor there is an armed and an unarmed element” (1289b28–32), and concludes that there are as many regimes as there are “arrange­ ments based on the sorts of preeminence and the differences of the parts” (1290a11–13). I take these lines to be commensurate with the claim that cities principally differ in their “hunting” for virtue because, as Aristotle will go on to demonstrate, the various parts of the city and their differing degrees of authority has bearing on what a collective considers justice to be and how to attain it. A political expert, then, must have eyes trained for discerning the different arrangements and preponderances of parts. In providing this train­ ing, Aristotle rejects the line of argument that proceeds by way of taking the most frequently occurring examples as the primary kinds—what he describes as a meteorological or harmonic model (1290a13–23)—and replaces it with an organic model which

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identifies the most necessary parts and numerates kinds on the basis of the different possible organizations of these (1290b25–39). The subsequent list of parts of the city Aristotle gives spans and holds together sets of human collectives formed on the basis of sus­ tenance, preservation, substance, and capacity. He begins with “the multitude that is concerned with sustenance [to peri tēn trophēn plēthos]” (1290b40), farmers, and then moves quickly to identify four more: artisans (the “vulgar” element), those who are concerned with buying and selling (the marketing element), the laboring elem­ ent, and the warrior element. This final element prompts him to break off and observe his divergence from the list of necessary parts that Socrates produces in the Republic on the grounds that Socrates constructed it “as if every city were constituted for the sake of the necessary things and not rather for the sake of what is fine” (1291a17–18). A proper understanding of the end toward which the city aims requires not only warriors but also adjudicating and deliberative elements. Aristotle then resumes his list: there must be a wealthy element, a magisterial element that performs public ser­ vice regarding offices, and then the two elements he mentioned in his discussion of warriors: the deliberative and the adjudicative. These two elements require that there be people who share the ­virtue of political rulers. What Aristotle is observing here is not yet separate groups of people so much as essential aspects of the city, several of which could be performed by a single person; for example, Aristotle observes, the same people could be warriors, farmers, and artisans, while also having some virtue and thinking themselves capable of ruling. But the same people cannot be both rich and poor, and this difference serves as the sharpest delineator of the bunch. Moreover, because the wealthy tend to be fewer in number and the poor greater, these are the two most opposed elements of the city. “Accordingly, regimes are instituted on the basis of the sorts of preeminence associated with these, and they are held to be two sorts of regimes, democracy and oligarchy” (1291b11–13). This, in turn, allows him to focus on the kinds of democracy and oligarchy based upon the differing kinds of dēmos and notables.

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Throughout, Aristotle’s analysis is driven by the identification of the various forms “the people” may take. As it is often the largest group, it is also likely to be the most variant. Its capacity to serve as an authority in some manner is established near the end of Book 3 when Aristotle considers what, if any, authority should be granted to the multitude (to plēthos): The many [tous polous], of whom none is individually a serious man, nevertheless can when joined together [sunelthontas] be better—not as individuals but all together [ouch hōs hekaston all’ hōs sumpantas]— than those [who are best], just as dinners contributed [by many] can be better than those equipped from a single expenditure. For because there are many, each can have a part of virtue and prudence, and on their joining together [sunelthontōn], the multitude [to plēthos], with its many feet and hands and having many senses [polupoda kai polucheira kai pollas echont’ aisthēseis], becomes like a single human being [hōsper hena anthrōpon], and so also with respect to character and mind [houtō kai peri ta ēthē kai tēn dianoian]. (1281a42–1281b7)12

Here, the unity that Aristotle denies a city, the unity that would make a single human being of a human collective, has its place as the capacity that allows for the many to have some legitimate authority.13 It is this capacity for unity that makes the many better judges of the works of music and the poets (1281b7). While it would be a mistake to allow them to share in the greatest offices, he main­ tains, it is also dangerous to deny them any share of office. Their capacity for unity does make them suited to share in deliberating

12  τοὺς γὰρ πολλούς, ὧν ἕκαστός ἐστιν οὐ σπουδαῖος ἀνήρ, ὅμως ἐνδέχεται συνελθόντας εἶναι βελτίους ἐκείνων, οὐχ ὡς ἕκαστον ἀλλ’ ὡς σύμπαντας, οἷον τὰ συμφορητὰ δεῖπνα τῶν ἐκ μιᾶς δαπάνης χορηγηθέντων· πολλῶν γὰρ ὄντων ἕκαστον μόριον ἔχειν ἀρετῆς καὶ φρονήσεως, καὶ γίνεσθαι συνελθόντων, ὥσπερ ἕνα ἄνθρωπον τὸ πλῆθος, πολύποδα καὶ πολύχειρα καὶ πολλὰς ἔχοντ’ αἰσθήσεις, οὕτω καὶ περὶ τὰ ἤθη καὶ τὴν διάνοιαν. 13  As will be clear in what follows, I concur with Melissa Lane’s argument for a narrower scope of the authority Aristotle grants to the many in this passage than others have tended to construe (see, e.g., Waldron (1995), Kraut (2002), and Ober (2008)), even as I offer a slightly different reading than her aggregate approach to what the many offer to deliberation about who should hold office and judgment of their work; see Lane (2013).

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and judging, “for all of them when joined together have an adequate perception [hikanēn aisthēsin] and, once mixed with those who are better, bring benefit to cities” (1281b34–6). In order to quell any anxiety that such an authority would result in “lesser” persons hav­ ing greater authority than the respectable, Aristotle reminds his readers that “neither the juror nor the councilman nor the assem­ blyman acts as ruler, but the court, the council, and the people, and each individual is a part of the things just mentioned” (1282a35). It is as though the dēmos names an existential stance, a realiza­ tion of the capacity of the many to unify in such a way as to build upon and refine one another’s perceptions in order to produce a single perception that is better than that of any one excellent person and which, when mixed with the perceptions of better people, bene­fits the city.14 This would imply that the many, in turn, realize the possibility of a dēmos to dissolve into many disparate and con­ flicting perceptions without unification. The unification would seem to require extra-individual (read, political) resources, even if those resources simply take the shape of a mode of education that values collaborative work toward a common aim. Further, Aristotle’s emphasis on their shared perception, in addition to their better character and mind, is striking, as it is precisely this capacity, when directed not toward works of art but toward justice, that forms the partnership that is the city. The suggestion here is that there is some distance between collective judgment about, for instance, a work of art, and collective judgment about justice; the unity of the many is not co-extensive with the shared perception of justice that forms the political partnership. It may support this partnership by provid­ ing its capacity to share perception to deliberations about who 14 Here I diverge from Lane’s (2013) aggregate reading: “The many feet, hands, and senses . . . are many versions of the same bodily limb or organ. That is, the multitude multiply (aggregatively) the feet and hands of a single person, making up a single gigantic human being who disposes of the same kind of bodily limbs and organs as an ordinary individual, but just more of them” (260, Lane’s emphasis). I read the reference to many hands, feet, and senses at 1281b5–6 to be synecdoche for actions, experiences, and sensations that belong to each individual (and are thus not the same) and whose combination produces a single indi­ vidual whose “limbs” are not the same as an ordinary individual, but better. This com­bin­ ation, then, must include not only an adding but a refining of perceptions. Thus, I accept Reeve’s (1998) translation of mias in a related passage (1286a30) as “unity” as consistent with Aristotle’s meaning and not an over-translation; see Lane (2013) 253 and 261.

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should hold office and how well they have done once in it, but it may also overstep its authority, overestimate its value, and damage the political partnership, an example of which Aristotle will supply just a few lines later in his discussion of the fifth kind of democracy (1292a10), which we will discuss below. In any case, its capacity for excellent collective perception requires it be granted some authority. Accordingly, Aristotle’s most detailed discussion of the kinds of democracy is driven by identify­ ing the multiplicity of forms the dēmos may take: farmers, artisans, those concerned with buying and selling, and the element con­ nected with the sea, of which there is the military element, the elem­ent engaged in business, the ferrying element, and the fishing element (1291b18–22). Aristotle pauses for a moment in order to linger over the power of the sea to form peoples and thus shape the texture of the city, “the fisherman in Terentum and Byzantium, the warship crews at Athens, the trading element in Aegina and Chios, and the ferrying element in Tenedos” (1291b23–5). These cities derive a significant dimension of their character from a particular interaction between citizen and sea; the well-educated statesman should be able to see the significance of this relationship and the role it will play in the city’s formation of offices and collective delib­ erations. In addition, the dēmos includes the menial and poor elem­ ents, the element that is free but not descended of citizen parents on both sides, and any other similar multitude. The kinds of notables are distinguished by “wealth, good birth, virtue, education, and whatever is spoken of as based on the same difference as these” (1291b28–30). From this list of kinds of dēmos, Aristotle generates five kinds of democracy, from the democracy most based on equality, in which there is no greater preeminence for the poor than the wealthy but the people form a majority (the first kind of democracy), to the democracy in which offices are filled on the basis of a very low assessment (second), to that in which anyone with unquestioned descent may hold office (third), to that in which all citizens may hold office (fourth), to the democracy in which decrees, rather than law, are authoritative (the fifth kind of democracy). This final democracy resembles a tyrannically inclined monarchy:

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“For the people become a monarch, from many combining into one [sunthetos heis ek pollōn]—for the many have authority not as indi­ viduals but all together (1292a11–13).15 Its reliance on decree rather than law threatens its status as a democracy, and even as a regime at all, “for where the laws do not rule there is no regime” (1292a32). Aristotle identifies four kinds of oligarchy based on how offices are filled: first, an assessment large enough such that the poor do not share in office but anyone who can meet the assessment can; second, also a sizable assessment, but those of whom can pay it elect to fill vacancies; third, when son succeeds father; and fourth, when son succeeds father and the officials rather than the law rule. This final form is called a dynasty and is the oligarchic version of the fifth democracy. As though to remind us that wherever we encoun­ ter the organization of offices we encounter the interaction between a perception of justice and the specific group of people who are called upon to renew and support this perception, Aristotle con­ cludes by observing that in many places we see a divergence between law and style of governance such that a city with oligarchic laws is governed democratically and vice versa, “as a result of the [citizens’] habits and upbringing [dia de to ethos kai tēn agōgēn]” (1292b13–14). Any nuanced account of kinds of regimes must be able to observe this interaction between character of the citizen and kind of institution, and Aristotle’s subsequent descriptions of polity and tyranny bear this out. But one of the clearest examples of the interaction between person and structure occurs in Aristotle’s treat­ ment in Chapter 11 of what regime and way of life is best for most cities and human beings, and it is to this we now turn. In fact, the intimacy between character of the citizen and charac­ ter of the city is decisive for Aristotle’s study of the best regime in which most cities can share, from his formulation of the very ques­ tion, in which politeia and bios are treated in close proximity— “what regime is best and what way of life is best for most cities and most human beings” (1295a25)—to the structure of his answer: that just as what was true of human character in the ethics, namely, 15  μόναρχος γὰρ ὁ δῆμος γίνεται, σύνθετος εἷς ἐκ πολλῶν· οἱ γὰρ πολλοὶ κύριοί εἰσιν οὐχ ὡς ἕκαστος ἀλλὰ πάντες. The subsequent taxonomies at 1292b22-1293a11 and 1318a7-1319b33 only list four.

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that a happy bios accords with virtue and virtue is a mean, so also, “these same defining principles must also define virtue and vice in a city and a regime; for the regime is the way of life of the city” (1295a39–1295b1). Thus, the middling regime is best, and this is particularly so with respect to the sharpest division between groups of citizens, namely wealth and poverty. Aristotle argues for the value of the middling regime by consid­ ering the conjoined characterological and political effects of the greatest divide between rich and poor, where we also encounter one of the clearest examples of the intertwining of ethics and politics in Aristotle’s thought. For while those who hold a middling possession of the goods of fortune (tōn eutuchēmatōn hē ktēsis hē mesē) are readiest to obey reason (rhaistē gar tōi logōi peitharchein), those with extremes in either direction—overly handsome, overly strong, overly well-born, overly wealthy (huperkalon ē huperischuron ē hupereugenē ē huperplousion), and on the other side, overly indigent, overly weak, very lacking in honor (huperptōchon ē huperasthenē ē sphodra atimon)—find it difficult to listen to reason (chalepon tōi logōi akolouthein) (1295b5–9). Moreover, they are prone to injustice, the former because of their arrogance (di’ hubrin), the latter because of their malice (dia kakourgian) (1295b9–11). Additionally, those who hold the goods of fortune to excess do not wish, nor know how, to be ruled, while those who are bereft of the gifts of fortune do not wish, nor know how, to rule. Their respective stances toward rule are established from child­ hood (1295b16–19), and result in the rich knowing only how to rule in the mode of the master and the poor knowing only how to accept such rule (1296b19–21). “What comes into being, then, is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters [ginetai oun doulōn kai despotōn polis, all’ ouk eleutherōn], the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt” (1295b21–3). What Aristotle is tracing here are the psycho-political effects of wealth and poverty, and while it may be possible to isolate the effects on the individual from the effects on the polis, it is crucial to acknowledge that this is ­precisely what Aristotle does not do. The entire point for him is that we come to see the interplay between legislation concerning possessions, household environment, character development, and

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pol­it­ical enfranchisement. We can call this a psychological profile only if we have in mind an expansive sense of psyche as indicating not only an individual’s life but the extra individual forces that shape it. The arrogance of the wealthy and the extreme humility of the poor make them ill-suited to fulfill the demands of citizenship. Their inclination against following reason, their aptitude for injustice, their incapacity for shared rule make them a human ­collective for whom mastery is the only exercise of power available, and thus, the fates of their lives and the lives of the city are ­inextricably intertwined. And as Aristotle goes on to make clear, a city of masters and slaves—a city whose members are consumed by contempt and envy respectively—is hardly a city at all, precisely because of the absence of attachment between its members. About the animosity between rich and poor, Aristotle observes, “nothing is further removed from friendship and from a political partnership; for partnership involves the element of affection—enemies do not wish to have even a jour­ ney in common” (1295b23–5). Here again, Aristotle orients his analysis by asserting the political valence of philia and returning to the ground of political partnership in human attachment. The in­tim­acy between the psychological and the political here allows Aristotle to follow this observation with a personification of the city: “The city wishes, at any rate, to be made up of equal and simi­ lar persons to the greatest extent possible, and this is most particu­ larly the case with the middling elements” (1295b25–7). For this reason, he concludes, it is clear that the political partnership that depends on the middling sort is best (1295b34–7). This extends to those actively involved in the regime as well: “it is the greatest good fortune for those who are engaged in politics to have a middling and sufficient substance” (1295b39–40); where the opposite is the case, and some have much while others have nothing, the result is the most extreme democracy (the democracy that most resembles a tyrannically inclined monarchy), unmixed oligarchy, or tyranny. Aristotle reserves further explanation of how the middling regime protects against forces aimed at tyranny for the discussion of the sources of destruction and preservation of regimes in Book 5, and it is to this discussion that we now turn.

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4.2  The Destruction and Preservation of Regimes As we observed in Chapter 2, Aristotle devotes much of Book 5 of his Politics to identifying the forms of estrangement that threaten the capacity to share life. That is, he turns in this book to the tra­ gedy of political life, to identifying the error (hamartia) with respect to justice out of which many regimes come to be, an error that stems from a misunderstanding of oneself and one’s place in the political community (1301a25–36). His analysis of the minutiae of political life, of the scorned feelings of former lovers or the hu­mili­ ation of a failed bid for marriage, and his tracing of the manner in which small matters come to take on larger and larger proportions are aimed at discerning to the finest degree possible the scene of political life, the actions, passions, and system of meanings that determine how one is recognized, and the extent to which one is able to judge one’s worth accurately (a capacity, Aristotle points out, of which humans are notoriously short, 1280a14–16).16 Throughout Book 5’s analysis of political instability, we find Aristotle straining to discern the character and quality of life within the city, objects which defy reduction to single causes and which must be taken as irreducibly many and seen in their complex dynamic.17 We can see this effort at work, for instance, in the list he offers of the factors that can foment revolution and destruction of a particular politeia. People are goaded to revolt by unrest over their allotment in the city, that is, by how the city conceives of and administers justice. They are galvanized by an array of what we would call psychological, demographic, and broadly behavioral

16 On the relationship between personal and political motivations for stasis, see Hatzistavrou (2013). As will become clear, I place greater emphasis on the melding of psy­ chological and what Hatzistavrou calls sociological motivations, but our conclusions about Aristotle’s identification of structures of injustice are largely in agreement. For further discus­ sion of Politics 5, see Newman (1887–1902), Mulgan (1977), Wheeler (1977), Polansky (1991), Yack (1993), Miller (1995), Keyt (1999), Kalimitzis (2000), Weed (2007), Skultety (2009), and Rogan (2018). 17 Like “l’irréductible polysémie” Rogan (2018) sees at work in Aristotle’s account of stasis.

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factors: humans “are provoked against one another by profit and honor, not in order to acquire these things for themselves as was said earlier, but because they see others aggrandize themselves (whether justly or unjustly) with respect to these things. They are provoked further by arrogance, by fear, by preeminence, by con­ tempt, by disproportionate growth, and further, though in another manner, by electioneering, by underestimation, by [neglect of] small things, and by dissimilarity” (1302a38–1302b6). In his account of the causes of stasis and metabolē (faction and revolution), as well as in his advice to statesmen seeking to preserve a politeia, we encounter Aristotle tracing the political valence of human affect (anger, humiliation, fear), self-regard, and desire for justice, that is, highlighting the specific psycho-political dimensions that feed or starve friendship. For instance, he observes at 5.10 that those attacks against kings and tyrants that arise against the person (epi to sōma), rather than the office (epi tēn archēn), arise because of arrogance (di’ hubrin). “Though arrogance is of many sorts, each of them gives rise to anger [gignetai tēs orgēs], and most of those who are angry attack for the sake of revenge [timōrias] rather than preeminence [huperochēs]” (1311a33–6). He then mentions a series of examples that shed light on the political implications of hubris and the power of anger in defense of what one takes as one’s own: the attack on the Pisistratids because of Harmodius’ anger over the abusive treatment (dia to propēlakesia) of his sister; against Periander (tyrant of Ambracia), “because when drinking with his favorite he asked whether he was yet pregnant by himself ” (1311a41), the attack on Phillip by Pausanias because “Phillip let him be treated arrogantly [hubristhēnai] by Attalus and those around him” (1311b2), the attack on Amyntas the Little by Derdas, “because Amyntus boasted [kauchēsasthai] about his youth” (1311b4), and the attack on Euagoras of Cyprus by a eunuch, “on the grounds of arrogant treatment [hōs hubrismenos] because Euagoras’ son had taken away his wife” (1311b6). Aristotle then moves from hubristic insults to shameful ones, documenting instances of attacks on the basis of monarchs’ disgraceful behavior toward the person of others (dia to eis to sōma aischunai tōn monarchōn tinas) (1311b6–8), citing, amongst others, the examples

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of Crataeus and Hellanocrates’ attack on Archelaus that we discussed in Chapter  2, and on the basis of contempt (dia ­ kataphronēsin), before turning to the motives of those who revolt not because of direct insult to them or theirs but because of their own ambition. Throughout, Aristotle identifies the structures of injustice, real or perceived, that mold citizens’ understanding and actions, as well as the passions that shape and in some cases destroy political struc­ tures. Attaining this perspective on politeia requires that we view political structures and institutions as codified perceptions of advantage and disadvantage, just and unjust. That is, as ossified forms of logos which are perpetually reanimated by the citizen body and which may at any point succumb to a refusal on the part of this body to perform this reanimation. We should thus read Aristotle’s analysis of pathological political conditions as resulting from the particular vulnerability that attends the possession of logos, the human tendency to miscalculate, to mistake one’s worth and the worth of others, to draw false distinc­ tions, to insult, to wound, to be in error, a condition, Aristotle claims, in which humans spend most of their lives. While the in­tim­ acy logos provides opens up possibilities for pleasures and commu­ nity that appeared to him to be more vivid than any he found elsewhere in the animal world, so too, of necessity, it opens up pos­ sibilities of wounding and estrangement. We must also acknowledge, then, the perpetual possibility of fail­ ure of the human political enterprise, of the need the polis has of a supplement in the form of rulers who will shore up its vulnerabilities and strive for its preservation. Solitude remains within the possi­ bilities of human life; even if much of human nature militates against it there remains the possibility that humans will resemble less bees than wolves, or become, like the solitary predator of the Odyssey, Polyphemus, one who “did not seem to be a bread-eating man [at all], but rather the wooded peak of a lofty mountain which stands out to view from the others.”18 And what is true of the lives of individuals within the polis is also true of relations between 18  Od. 9.188–92, DePew (1995) translation.

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poleis. The polis too can behave more or less politically (1327b4–5); it too can operate as a solitary predator, acknowledging no law in its dealings with other poleis, but feeding on them as it sees fit.19 But we can also see the traces of human being’s dualizing between gregarious and solitary within the city; if its failures with respect to justice are great enough, part will feed on part without sense of restraint. Monarchs will abuse their power, tyrants will outrage, the dēmos will rule tyrannically, etc. In these cases, the topos a city pro­ vides can become toxic and incapable of supporting the life that had been suited to it. The seeds of the stasis Solon is eventually called upon to quell that is described in the Athenian Constitution, for instance, are sown by its oligarchic structure, in which a large part of the population “had no share in anything” (2.3). What an analysis of stasis reveals for Aristotle is that the fragile environment is not land or sea, but the polis, and the primary ecology is a pol­it­ ical ecology. This assessment of the forces of political instability decisively shapes Aristotle’s account of the best city.

4.3  The City of Prayers In the discussion of the city of prayers we find the closest melding of civic and personal identity; Aristotle insists that the happiness of the individual and that of the city is the same, the excellence of the individual and of the city is the same, the most choiceworthy way of life of the individual and the city is the same. This polis comes as close as possible to realizing the identity of citizenry, gov­ erning body, and city. The best city is the fullest realization of human pol­it­ical phenomena. Because the best way of life for a city and an individual is a life lived for the realization of virtue—it is insofar as it acts toward this end that it can be said to be happy—its bios must be a virtue-seeking bios. But in seeking the polis and politeia that are best at realizing virtue, Aristotle must also take into account the many instruments that are needed for living, and the many aspects of living successfully that are outside of the 19  See Saxonhouse (2015) and Lockwood (2019).

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control of the would-be founder. He thus spends quite a bit of time outlining the pre­sup­posi­tions that must be in place in order for the best city to come into being, whose presence cannot be counted on, but only prayed for. For one, there must be the best possible multitude of humans, residing in the best possible place. Or, as Aristotle puts it, “to the equipment characteristic of the city [politikēs chorēgias] belongs first both the multitude of human beings [to te plēthos tōn anthrōpōn]—how many should be available and of what quality by nature—and the territory in the same way [kai kata tēn chōran hōsautōs]—how much there should be and of what quality” (1326a5–8). With respect to the size of the human multitude, “the best standard for a city is this: the greatest excess of multitude with regard to self-sufficiency of life that is readily surveyable [hē megistē tou plēthous huperbolē pros autarkeian zōēs eusunoptos]” (1326b22–4). The same could be said of the territory: it too must be such as to support self-sufficiency and its size must be large enough, “so that the inhabitants are able to live at leisure in liberal fashion and at the same time with moderation [hōste dunasthai tous oikountas zēn scholazontas eleutheriōs hama kai sōphronōs]” (1326b29–31). It must be easy for citizens to exit and difficult for enemies to enter; it, like the human multitude, must be easily surveyable, and lie in the right relation to land and sea.20 A certain amount of naval power is best as well, “if it is going to live a way of life that is capable of command and is political [ei men gar hēgemonikon kai politikon zēsetai bion]” (1327b4–5). Aristotle’s conjunction of human collective and territory is not accidental; it is instead one of the clearest indications of the melding of person and topos we have seen at work throughout the Politics. When Aristotle speaks of a human multitude he is already operating from a perspective that sees “the human” as providing a mass or collection, the “stuff,” or, as Aristotle puts it, the “proper material [tēn oikeian hulēn]” for the legislator to 20  The sea, because of both its benefits and its dangers, get its own chapter, in which Aristotle concludes that if the dangers of exposure to “others” can be managed, then it is beneficial to have some access to the sea—having a port but one that is a bit removed from the city proper (as with Athens’s Piraeus) is a good model.

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work over, just as, to follow his own analogy, the weaver works over wool (1325b40–1326a5). As we will discuss in detail in Chapter 5, this assertion of the need to produce bodies amenable to the will of the legislator flies in the face of the assertion made much earlier in the Politics, one that employs the same imagery but to the opposite effect, namely, that political expertise does not create beings but makes use of them just as the expert weaver does not make wool, but uses it (1258a21–4). By the end of the Politics, political expertise is revealed as having to wade into the “production” of bodies (1325b40–1326a5) bred in such a manner as to assist nature in bringing about a physical distinction between free-born and slave (see 1254b27–33). Political expertise is treated here as including expertise in the management of genera­ tivity. And its aim is the “production” of material that is in suitable condition. Not only must this material be of the right size, nei­ ther too big nor too small, but it must also be of the right kind. And here, Aristotle appeals to a very particular vision of the alignment of character and place. The human multitude of the best city must possess a mixture of spirit, on the one hand, and intelligence and art, on the other; a mixture that is evinced by the “Greek” people residing in a mixed climate, as opposed to the “Europeans” residing in a cold climate who, in possessing spirit but not intelligence, are free but lack the ability for political rule and thus cannot rule their neighbors, and the people of “Asia” residing in a warm climate who, in possessing intelligence and art but not spirit, remain ruled and enslaved. Differences of the same general kind exist within Greek peoples as well. This is all to say that the ideal population of citizens is based on an ethno­ centric “climatological” model of the melding of character and place, a pseudo-ethnography with deeply nefarious effect.21 It is not a model of Aristotle’s invention, but it is one he deploys not 21  This is also the passage we discussed in Chapter 2 in which Aristotle identifies thumos as the source of affection in the context of discussing Socrates’ claim in the Republic that guardians should be affectionate toward those they know and savage to those they don’t. Spirit makes them affectionate, and as evidence of this we are more spirited against our in­tim­ates than strangers. Aristotle continues, “Both the element of ruling and the element of freedom stem from this capacity for everyone; spiritedness is a thing expert at ruing and indomitable” (1328a5–7).

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only to give advice about the melding of psychic factors needed for the citizenry of the best city but also, as Pellegrin notes, to assure a steady supply of “natural” slaves.22 Having attained a certain mass and quality of human stuff, a multi­tude of the right size and kind, a political multitude, as he describes it (1327b18), Aristotle next sets about differentiating it, identifying the differences that are appropriate to the best city. In order to assure self-sufficiency, that is, to assure the successful per­ formance of the acts of living, Aristotle identifies six tasks it must accomplish. These are: the provision of sustenance; of the arts, “for living requires many instruments [pollōn gar organōn deitai to zēn]” (1328b6–7); of weapons; of funds; superintendence with respect to the divine; and finally, “the most necessary thing of all [pantōn anagkaiotaton],” judgment concerning what is advantageous and what is just (1328b5–15). Accordingly, there must be a multitude of farmers, artisans, a fighting element, a well-off element, priests, and judges of things necessary and advantageous. Aristotle next sorts out how to divide up the human multitude as regards these tasks and roles. Because the aim of the city is vir­ tue, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or merchant’s way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and opposed to virtue” (1328b39–41);23 consequently, the vulgar element is denied citizen­ ship, it “does not share in the city [ou metechei tēs poleōs]” (1329a20). Moreover, “nor, indeed, should those who are going to be [citizens] be farmers; for there is need for leisure both as regards the creation of virtue and as regards political actions” (1328b41–1329a2). The farming class, then, should be made up of “slaves or barbarian sub­ jects [doulous ē barbarous perioikous]” (1329a26).24 With respect to 22  Pellegrin (2013) 106–7. In assessing Politics 7.7, Simona Forti’s conclusions from her study of the fascist appropriation of Plato’s work is apropos. By her terms, Aristotle is not responsible for the structures that produce an ethnocentric climatological model of charac­ ter, but he is responsible for his use of them and, in knowingly furthering them, he is not innocent of their effects; see Forti (2006). For discussion of other sources of the cli­ma­to­ logic­al theory Aristotle uses here, including the Hippocratic “Airs, Waters, Places,” see McCoskey (2012) 46–8. 23  οὔτε βάναυσον βίον οὔτ’ ἀγοραῖον δεῖ ζῆν τοὺς πολίτας (ἀγεννὴς γὰρ ὁ τοιοῦτος βίος καὶ πρὸς ἀρετὴν ὑπεναντίος). 24  Here I follow Lord in bracketing the ē of the MSS, which would read “barbarians or subjects.”

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the military and the deliberative element, they should be in a way the same and in a way different; that is, “so far as each task belongs to a different prime of life [hēi men gar heteras akmēs hekateron tōn ergōn]” (1329a8), the regime should assign these tasks to the same persons, “not at the same time, but as it is natural for capacity to be found among the younger and prudence among the older, it is advantageous and just to distribute them to both, for this division accords with merit” (1329a14–17). Priestly duties are allocated to these same men in their old age (1329a27–34). It is these men who are the citizens of the city (1329a19). In restricting citizenship in this way, Aristotle ties the life of the citi­ zen to the life cycle of an exclusive category of men whose early adulthood will be spent in military pursuits, middle age in delib­ eration and command, and old age in honoring the gods. They will conduct these activities in territory that has a mixed climate, fertile farmland, and adequate access to the sea, and in a city whose architectural features will reflect its needs vis-à-vis their life cycle activities. They are supported by a population of slaves and other laborers, and by legislation concerning their ownership of people and provisions as well as the size of their population. Their early childhood will be directed by a system of education that begins with the regulation of their bodies prior to their birth, and then consists of a three-stage model, also keyed to major life cycle events: early childhood education (birth to seven years), early school age (seven years to puberty), and advanced education (puberty to twenty-one years). Their course of education com­ prises a regulation of their complete sensorium, from what they eat, see, and hear, to how they move their bodies, touch, and are touched. Their time as adults is managed as well, with strict train­ ing and practice in war and peacetime activities. When they are beyond child-producing age they are released from procreative duty, but will continue in their role as ruling and being ruled in turn, transitioning to the priesthood in later life. In short, Aristotle envisions a complete supervision and syn­chron­ iza­tion of citizens’ entire life cycle. The aim of this comprehensive regulative structure is the production of a citizen body and soul best capable of producing noble deeds, and a city best able to realize

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the excellence that Aristotle takes to be most definitive of humans. The partnership of such citizens will comprise a city able to sustain itself in perpetuity, defend itself from its neighbors, rule those who need ruling, and carry on in the closest proximation to the eternal orbits of the divine that is humanly possible. In this they will form and maintain the best possible realization of virtue, and enact their shared perception of justice throughout their lives and the lives of citizens to come. The city emerges from this account as syn­onym­ ous with the partnership of these men, its fate is their fate, its char­ acter their character, its actions their actions. These men will be trained to rule their wives with elements of political and aristocratic rule, to rule their children with kingly rule, and to exert the mastery for which they have been suited by nature (and, apparently, design) over their slaves, although their aim is to be sufficiently wealthy as to hand over the management of their slaves to an overseer. They can perform whatever virtuous deeds of which they are capable because their time has been freed up by other humans whose labor purchases them their leisure. This is all to say that the entire structure of their lives is built upon the sys­ temic, ingrained exploitation of a massive labor class made possible by a model of private ownership, understanding of possessions, and system of education. It is to these underpinnings, so to speak, that we will turn in the next chapter.

4.4 Conclusion For Aristotle, political life is a life in which we constantly encounter, in forms both intimate and estranging, near and distant, the lives of those who have gone before us and the lives of those who will come after, through the memorializations of their affect, judgment, thought, and action by which a polis is structured and its politeia determined. That is to say, political life is haunted life. What, if any­ thing, endures is the arrangement, and this too is subject to radical change and destruction. Tracing the zoological dimensions of Aristotle’s approach to the polis in the Politics highlights that it is the possibilities of interaction

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between individuals, the degree of intimacy and endurance of these interactions—the manner in which they can become externalized and take on a life of their own—that proves to deeply and pro­ foundly differentiate the character of human political life. That is, the zoological perspective with which Aristotle operates through­ out the Politics suggests that humans are distinct in the degree to which they can share their lives with one another and that this capacity for sharing life colors all aspects of human life, not simply with respect to deliberation and the division of labor, but also in perceiving and eating and reproducing, in the most intimate terms of human embodiment. The thinness of human skin, for instance, goes underemployed when its perceptions are not submitted to col­ lective interpretation and analysis and, in turn, the fineness of human distinctions, whether about the advantageous, the just, the fair, etc., is directly related to the thinness of human skin. Human bodies need not only mind, but the forms of dialogue and collective deliberation that can only be provided by other minds if their capacities are to be fully realized. While Aristotle’s ethico-political works explore this intimacy, as it is realized in the form of friendship, to some depth, they are also interested in the other side of the coin, in the forms of alienation that are opened precisely by this capacity for intimacy and sharing, the ways in which humans fail to properly value one another, and the effects of the perception (real or imagined) of this failure. As the topos of shared perception, the polis reveals human being in its need for recognition, in its craving for intimacy, in its sense of placelessness and exile without them. Viewing these phenomena in the context of Aristotle’s larger exploration of life and living beings allows us to see more clearly the effects of pathological political communities, but also invites us to appreciate the comprehensive character of human animality and the ecological character of Aristotle’s polis-analysis. While the fragility of the human environment requires other consid­ erations than Aristotle felt it necessary to include in his zoological works, this is not because these other habitats are invulnerable, but rather because they cannot operate differently than they do.25 25  See Pellegrin (2015) 41.

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The peculiarity of the human habitat lies not in its rejection of animality, then, but in its intensification of animal sociality, such that this sociality serves an ambient function, forming the features of the human landscape. Of course, other environmental aspects of the human landscape matter to Aristotle—oligarchies are most likely to flourish where the land is able to support horses, for instance (1289b30-40)—but the interpenetration of these features is striking, at least to eyes trained to divide the human from the ani­ mal. That human relations come to take on these larger propor­ tions, enduring beyond the lives of particular individuals, tells us something important about human political life, to be sure, but also tells us about how this life fits in to a larger vision of the cosmos. Its vulnerability, its potential to be tyrannized by the intensity of its in­tim­acies and estrangements, to be blinded by its inability to judge its own worth and determine its standing amongst others, to mis­ use its possession of logos and its capacity for choice, mark the human political animal as a point on the spectrum between bestial and divine animality, a being whose intimacies ultimately exist in order to enable not its being but its overcoming. In the context of the Politics, at least, the centrality of the human things for Aristotle is in large part due to the precarity of these things, their fragility, and their potential for viciousness. It is with this precarity in mind that Aristotle sets out to identify, and train the political expert in discerning, the various kinds of human multitude. His perspective on human collectives here invites comparison with what we may want to call the biopolitical effort to manage and regulate populations of people, but we also have to observe that what defines these multitudes and provides the end for which they collectively strive is the successful enactment of living, of zōē. This will have larger implications for our study of the ­pol­it­ical valence of zōē. While there may very well be, for Aristotle, a meaningful sense in which it could be said that one chooses one’s being, the same cannot be said of one’s coming-to-be. It is a powerful testament to the degree of anxiety that accompanies this acknowledgment that Aristotle claims matters pertaining to the having, raising, and especially the education of children as the pri­ mary matters for legislation (e.g., 1337a11–12). That is, if birth is

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not a choice of one’s own, it must, because of its gravity, be brought under the realm of human deliberation; for Aristotle that body for whom it is a choice must be the city itself, or at least its legislative arm. The politics that arises out of this understanding of the human multitude is only secondarily concerned with bios in the Aristotelian sense.26 Its primary interest is in assuring the quality of citizens’ zōē, in producing and maintaining a human multitude of a certain kind. A better description of this model of politics, then, would be zōē-politics, and it is to the essential aspects of this model that I now turn. 26  Which, as Holmes (2019) has shown, should not be confused with the prefix bio- of biopolitics or biopower.

PART III

ZŌĒ-POLITICS Italo Calvino’s Laudomia, a city whose distinguishing feature is its inclusion not only of a city of the dead but also a city of the unborn, provides a particularly vivid reflection on the dialectic by which an obsession with mortality leads to an alienated natality: “The living of Laudomia frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them: footsteps echo beneath the hollow domes; the questions are asked in silence; and it is always about themselves that the living ask, not about those who are to come. One man is concerned with leaving behind him an illustrious reputation, another wants his shame to be forgotten; all would like to follow the thread of their own actions’ consequences; but the more they sharpen their eyes, the less they can discern a continuous line; the future inhabitants of Laudomia seem like dots, grains of dust, detached from any before or after.”1 Thus, the citizens of Laudomia consume their young before they are even born. In the silence of their interrogation, in their anxiety about memory and forgetting, in their dedication to discerning themselves, they lose the very intimacy and connection that would succor their young. But the unborn have their revenge. For, as Calvino relates, the citizens of Laudomia are haunted by the natality with which they refuse to reckon—the city of the unborn, unlike the city of the dead, gives them no security, “only alarm”—or more precisely, they are haunted by the two visions of fertility to which their stance toward natality limits them: a monstrous fertility in which the hordes of the unborn crowd one another and are 1  Calvino (1974) 141–2. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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per­petu­al­ly threatened with suffocation by the sheer excess of their numbers; or a thanotopic fertility, in which the finitude of ­gen­er­ations presents them with a natality that is also a mortality, a birth that is also a death, namely, the birth of the last, requiring them to contemplate “a last grain to fall, which is now at the top of the pile, waiting.”2 The vision Socrates describes in the tenth book of the Republic of the same number of souls ceaselessly circulating between different bodies and lives (611a) would seem to offer another alternative, something like recursive fertility, a fertility that is finite but eternal, and thus a natality without mortality, although no less alarming. This is a vision of a fertility that operates according to, rather than outside of, ethical agency, and is figured in the efforts in several dialogues to present biodiversity as a function of human character and the lack thereof—there are animals other than the human because of human moral failings.3 With the primary generative work performed by human ethical agency and divine will—that is, with the displacement of human women from reproductive labor—space is cleared to appropriate the language and work of that labor for the description of the workings and effect of philosophic thought. And, as a number of scholars have pointed out, this is indeed what we find in Plato.4 The case with Aristotle, as we shall see, is slightly different, although no less complex. Aristotle too will place quite a bit of importance on the hermeneutic stance one adopts toward the conditions of one’s coming-to-be, and in this Aristotle too is a thinker of natality, of what derives from the fact of birth. Contra the citizens of Laudomia, for whom the unborn seem “detached from any before or after,” the particular stance Aristotle marks out asserts precisely the attachment that arises from the condition of birth—an attachment that is not without its own ambivalence—which he casts 2  Calvino (1974) 143. 3  A line of fantasy that has its contemporary interpreters/poets/versions, as in the fanciful reworking of this theme in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2016 film The Lobster. 4  See in particular duBois (1988), and the discussion of Plato and the feminine in the second section of Tuana (1994), especially the contributions by duBois, Irigaray, Brown, and Nye.

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explicitly, as we have observed in Chapter 1, as the bond of philia (EN 1155a16–21).5 And yet, perhaps what most resonates with Plato and Aristotle in Calvino’s Laudomia is the location of the unborn in a city. This collision of reproductive and political interests produces a fantastical city to be sure, outfitted with womblike enclosures, but not an un­famil­iar one, uncanny in its fantasy of unmediated suspension in the political milieu in which the generative labor is displaced from the mother to another entity, in this case the city itself. The kind of reproductive legislation Socrates produces in the Republic and Aristotle espouses in the Politics conveys the sense that the city holds open a place for its citizens, that the city expects them. And what holds for their birth is also true for their death: those who commit suicide do not commit an act of injustice against themselves—Aristotle maintains this is impossible—but an in­ just­ ice against the city (EN 1138a13). We can better see this collusion of reproductive and political interests in Aristotle’s work if we trace the political valence of the family. The human intensification of an impulse shared across ­animal kinds, and the specifically political significance of familial philia, is made more explicit in a passage from the History of Animals. Here, Aristotle grounds family philia in perception and memory, as a way of differentiating animal reproduction from that of plants and further distinguishing different forms of animal­rearing practices: “As soon as perception is added their lives differ both in regard to mating, because of the pleasure involved, and in regard to the bearing and rearing of offspring. Now some, like plants, simply accomplish their own reproduction according to the seasons; others also take trouble to complete the nourishing of their young, but once that is accomplished they separate from them and have no further association; but those that have more understanding [ta sunetōtera] and possess some memory continue the association, 5  φύσει τ’ ἐνυπάρχειν ἔοικε πρὸς τὸ γεγεννημένον τῷ γεννήσαντι καὶ πρὸς τὸ γεννῆσαν τῷ γεννηθέντι, οὐ μόνον ἐν ἀνθρώποις ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν ὄρνισι καὶ τοῖς πλείστοις τῶν ζῴων, καὶ τοῖς ὁμοεθνέσι πρὸς ἄλληλα, καὶ μάλιστα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ὅθεν τοὺς φιλανθρώπους ἐπαινοῦμεν.

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and have a more social [politikōteron] relationship with their offspring” (HA 588b28–589a3).6 If we hold to the sense of being political introduced in History of Animals, having a common task (HA 488a8–9), we can see more clearly why politics and extended relationships with one’s children would be linked and why childrearing would be especially significant for the most political of animals, humans. The possession of memory makes possible the participation in intergenerational endeavors, and such a thing a polis must necessarily be, a partnership not only between the living themselves but also between the living and the dead, and, it is anticipated, the not yet alive. For, as we will see, for Aristotle the birth of children holds less the possibility of the new than the possibility of continuity.7 The partnership upon which the city relies has its roots in the shared intergen­er­ ational endeavors that are possible only amongst animals of a certain kind, those whose possession of understanding and ­memory supports the natural impulse for philia between parents and children. But if this is so, Aristotle must still accommodate what is for him the peculiarly human capacity of choice, and consider how the choosing of friends stands with respect to the natural friendship between parent and child. While the choosing of friends is often read as marking out a distinction between political life and its “outside,” figured as the realm of natural friendships, we shall see that the two share a mutually reinforcing moral phenomenology, bound up with the encounter of a friend as another self, which prohibits reducing one to the “biological” while reserving for the other the designation of “political.” And this blurring of boundaries has larger implications for the role of Aristotle’s eugenics legislation. Once memory and understanding become coupled with a certain form of childrearing practice, and this, in turn, is associated with a more political form of life, then any rigid distinction between the realm of reproduction (usually associated with the household) and the realm of politics 6  Balme’s translation. 7  This marks an important divergence in Arendt’s thinking of natality from Aristotle’s.

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falls away, and we can read the hormē to live in a city and the hormē to produce another like oneself as colliding and as placing “re­pro­duct­ive policy” and legislation at the heart of the political project. When Aristotle briefly entertains the notion that one’s happiness could be affected by the fate of one’s progeny (EN 1.10–11) he considers the extent to which one can extend the arc one must trace in order to assess happiness beyond a single life to the lineage of one’s bloodline and the effects of one’s actions that will exceed one’s ­individual life, intertwining “bodily” lineage with the lineage of one’s character.8 It is worth pausing for a moment to consider whether this arc in Aristotle’s thought extends also to the conditions of one’s birth. There is no reason to assume that Aristotle conceptualizes birth along the same lines as more contemporary models, and certainly it is worth being very precise in our consideration of where Aristotle stands with respect to the fetishization of what anthropologist Hillary Weismantel calls the “key reproductive moment in Western thought,” which colors so much of contemporary American and European discourse about reproduction: conception.9 As Sophia Connell has pointed out, in the context of his biological works, there is good reason to hold that Aristotle does not even maintain human beings have fully come-to-be until they themselves are cap­ able of reproduction.10 The years between their status as newborns and as adults are an extra-uterine gestational period. This suggests a wider gap between generativity and birth than one might have expected and it is worth keeping in mind that when it comes to what being born means to Aristotle, when birth happens, and who is responsible for birth (who is fertile, who is potent, what constitutes a reproductive act, what are reproductive substances, etc.)— none of these can simply be taken for granted.11 8  On the sincerity of Aristotle’s engagement with this question, see Pritzl (1983). 9 Weismantel (2004) 502. Very helpful orientation to this question in the context of ancient Greek medical literature and its reception can be found in Brisson et al. (2008), especially the contributions of Boudon-Millot and Hanson. 10  Connell (2001) 315. 11  See, e.g., Bianchi (2014) and Connell (2016). I am particularly interested in the intertwining of “physical” and “social” reproduction in the ancient Greek context (see Ginsburg and Rapp (1995) for a transcultural perspective), a context that declares this intertwining

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Nor can Aristotle’s conception of birth be viewed in isolation from his broader understanding of the nature of power as generativity. Rather, it is precisely a conception of zōē and zēn, of life and living, that drives Aristotle’s understanding of political animality. And so, while Aristotle’s attempts at legislating citizen procreation for the sake of producing a human multitude of a particular quality and quantity merit comparison with the biopolitical manipulation of populations, as Mika Ojakangas has argued, biopolitics seems less able to fully capture the scope of the legislative project here, which aims not only at bios, at the manner of life, but also at zōē, at the generation of life, and has its end in the successful enactment of living (zēn).12 For this reason, I have suggested “zōē -politics” to designate the political framework that emerges when the gen­er­ ation of life is seen as the primary index of power and the management of generativity as the work of politics. Most immediately, it is exercised over the figure that would usurp masculine aspirations to generation and power, the embodiment of female generativity in the figure of the mother, whose potential reproductive capacity must be contained and managed, whose labor must be erased, denied, or arrogated (and sometimes all three), and whose care can be praised only once it has been located outside of the realm of politics. Over the next two chapters, I aim to excavate the notion of zōē that provides the engine for Aristotle’s thinking about politics and to trace its movement through Aristotle’s thought along two interwoven strands. I will begin by highlighting the connection between his critique of usury, his insistence on the private ownership of property, and his eugenics legislation. Here, I am interested in one manner of thinking and acting that undergirds the aim of a seamless integration of reproductive and political life and the complications that impede it, namely, the approach to reproductive life encapsulated in the term tokos, which means both child and interest. Precious,

perhaps most clearly in the concept of tokos. In particular I am interested in Aristotle’s use of tokos in constructing an account of social bonds that is at once a theory of natality and also a theory of ownership. 12  Ojakangas (2016).

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but also threatening in its potential for excess (particularly its potential for excessive growth); desired, but also suspicious; an errant part, which is both one’s own and perpetually capable of autonomy, tokos bears the weight of a dense network of cultural associations and fears. In this, tokos represents a nexus of aspirations and anxieties surrounding the processes of production and reproduction, the realities of natality and mortality, the vicissitudes of embodied rationality; it is with these aspirations and anx­ie­ties that the statesman is called upon to contend. When Marx writes of the mystification of the commodity in the fantasy of its formation in “the womb of capitol itself ” he draws upon a much larger and longer lineage of anxiety about reproductive excess that, since Aristotle, had been associated with economic excess and used to critique the accrual of interest.13 In short, Chapter 5 aims to show that the Politics has at its heart a deep-seated anxiety about reproductive excess; the central role that legislating to mitigate the effects of this excess has in Aristotle’s conception of human political life inscribes this anxiety and fantasy within the foundation of Aristotle’s political theory. In Chapter 6 I will focus on Aristotle’s account of the maternal bond in order to trace the production of a model of self-generation that has its roots in the natal scene and in a deep ambivalence toward this scene. More specifically, I will follow some claims Aristotle makes about the relationship between mothers and children, which develops a model of reflexive generativity with implications for both political and contemplative lives.

13  “Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labour’s social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself ” (Capital, Untermann (1906–9) 3.827).

5 The Commodification of Life From start to finish, Euripides’ Alcestis is a drama of the double. Alcestis is both alive and dead, both there and gone, both vanished and returned, both replaceable and irreplaceable. It is no accident that the play also features as one of its most intense engines of action an antipathy between an “original” and that most unruly “double,” that double that threatens autonomy, the child. In the tense exchange between Pheres and Admetus, between gen­er­ator and generated, between father and son, we see an entire set of ­anxieties and fantasies laid bare. Admetus’ invective against his father for his father’s refusal to die in his place, an invective that includes not only repudiating Pheres as his father but naming his wife Alcestis as his mother and father because of her willingness to die for him, is met by his father’s equally impassioned ­condemnation of Admetus’ failure to grow up, to take charge of his own happiness, to “be a man.” Both threaten the other with replacement, with a certain meaninglessness that disrupts the parent/child bond profoundly, if not irrevocably. Twenty years earlier, Aeschylus gave voice to another version of the threat of replacement and the diminishment of meaning when his chorus of Theban elders lamented the exchange of living men for dead in monetary terms, as the currency of Hades. Death and wealth, wealth as death. Expression of the anxiety of an uneven exchange exceeds the tragic genre; we find it in Homeric epic, in the exchange of gold for bronze, for instance, and in the myth of the beggar and the clod whereby political domination arises as a function of unwise or inappropriate exchange.14 14  For the relevance of this myth to ancient Greek conceptions of property, see Gottesman (2010). Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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Aristotle’s worry early on in the Politics about the exchange value of possessions and the limitless acquisition of wealth reflects these larger concerns. But this anxiety is also initiated by Aristotle’s own conceptions of the nature of property and progeny, for instance, and the relationship he posits between production and re­pro­duc­ tion, both of which hinge upon a particular orientation toward zōē. Because, for Aristotle, successful human life requires not only instruments for living but living instruments, life itself demands a form of living that is not for its own sake but for the sake of another’s living. Living so conceived demands its own instrumentalization and commodification. In his argument for the necessity of slavery, Aristotle broaches the very commodification of life that he elsewhere finds so objectionable, both in its expression in the form of a bios oriented toward the limitless acquisition of wealth, a bios that mistakes such an acquisition for living well, and in its most extreme expression in the unnatural, uncanny proliferation of interest. In short, when Aristotle conceives of human flourishing as requiring the exploitation of labor, he condemns human life to the very dynamic that produces its commodification. The seeds for this commodification and the model of labor that the slave performs are found in Aristotle’s conception of the very first possession, the first thing about which one can say it is one’s own. This conception rests, I will argue, on an alienated approach to the material conditions of human birth and maturation, whereby maternal labor is divorced from maternal agency; this schism, in turn, sets the stage for the appropriation of that labor by the two most successful forms of hunting for virtue, the political and the philosophic.

5.1  Animate Possessions Aristotle’s discussion of household management in Book 1—from which three forms of rule arise, corresponding to the parts of the household, rule of the slave, rule of the wife, and rule of children— begins with an identification of the parts of the household and ­concludes with the observation that more specific account of the education of women and children should be reserved for the

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discussion of regimes, because their education must be designed in such a way as to support the particular regime of which they are part. Failure to attend to such education would be a mistake as “women are a part amounting to a half of the free persons, and from the children come those who are partners in the regime” (1260b19–20). Lack of attention to women and children will necessarily affect the excellence of the city; failure with respect to women in particular leads to the political decay Aristotle will go on to observe in the Spartan regime. Aristotle’s discussion of slavery is in the service of this larger attempt to demarcate the forms of rule, and his more specific inquiry into household management. Indeed, the ownership of human beings is treated as a part of a discussion of possessions as such. A possession is “an instrument for life [organon pros zōēn], and one’s possessions are the multitude of such instruments; and the slave is a possession of the animate sort” (1253b30–2). Because the particular manner in which one undertakes living, that is, one’s bios, is action and not production (ho de bios praxis, ou poiēsis) (1254a7), “the slave is therefore a subordinate in matters concerning action” (1254a8).15 To be an instrument of action is to enable the performance of certain kinds of deeds. This would be most apparent in those forms of bios that make most central the hunting for virtue, the political and the contemplative, forms that could not come into being without sufficient wealth, and are aided when that wealth is such that a person could hire someone else to supervise his slaves: “for those to whom it is open not to be bothered with such things, an overseer assumes this prerogative, while they themselves engage in politics or philosophy” (1255b35–7). According to this formulation, the relationship between master and slave, a relationship that enables the master to engage in what 15  The particular manner of life one selects is in fact at least initially a manner of attaining and holding sustenance (e.g., the bios of the farmer, the pirate, etc.). These bioi shape one’s character and the character of the political partnership in which the bioi of many are collected. The attainment of a significant amount of instruments for life (wealth) also has characterological implications for both individuals and cities in its separation of the human collective into the wealthy and “the people.” This connection between bios and ēthos makes clearer why Aristotle will insist that bios is action not production, i.e., manner of life is a doing, not a making, and that the instruments of bios, then, would be instruments of action.

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are for Aristotle the most important human pursuits, hinges on a decisive orientation toward zōē. The slave, according to Aristotle, is a partner in the master’s life, a koinōnos zōēs (1260a40). It is worth emphasizing the organicism at work here; Aristotle will describe the intimacy between master and slave as such that “the slave is a sort of part of the master, a part of his body, as it were, ensouled yet separate” (1255b11–12). What results from this relationship is a coordinated living of the master’s life that would be impossible without the slave, what Pellegrin describes as a “fused life.”16 This fusion has corroboration in other observations Aristotle makes about essential life activities. We see it in Aristotle’s explanation for why plants do not emit a waste product, for instance: the warmth of the earth in which they are rooted concocts their food for them, serving as an “external stomach” (PA 650a20–5).17 Perhaps the plant’s need to “outsource” its digestive functions attests to the looseness of plant unity as compared to those living beings with internal stomachs, but if this is the case we would have to observe a similar vulnerability in the master, whose participation in higher activities requires the liberation from necessity made possible by the slave. While, according to Aristotle, he is suited to higher purposes than the attainment of sustenance, the terms of the master’s embodiment are insufficient for philosophy and politics without the body of the slave, and what is more, this insufficiency appears to be something Aristotle attributes to an aim of nature. Not only is one a master or a slave not by one’s actions but by one’s being of a certain kind from birth (1254a23–4,1255b20–2), but also, “nature indeed wishes to make the bodies of free persons and slaves different as well—those of the latter strong with a view to necessary needs, those of the former straight and useless for such tasks [ta d’ ortha kai achrēsta pros tas toiautas ergasias], but useful [chrēsima] with a view to a political way of life” (1254b27–32). And while Aristotle concedes that nature is often frustrated in its efforts (1254b32–3), it nevertheless stands that the ideal would be a 16  Pellegrin (2013) 98. See also Konstan (2018) and Fitzgerald (2000). 17 See also Pol. 1335b17: “For offspring in the process of generation evidently draw resources from the one bearing them, just as plants do from the earth.”

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distinction between body and soul such that the seeking after virtue that comprises the political or philosophic way of life requires a fusion of master and slave. A virtuous life simply cannot be a life lived in isolation from all other human lives; at the very least, it requires a human life that has its end not in its own life, but in the life of another. It is thus not enough to observe that Aristotle leaves room for the possibility that the duties of the slave could be performed by machines;18 Aristotle’s vision of the exercise of the full range of human capacities requires taking labor from another, whether that other is another human being or a machine. More advanced technology does not negate the existence of “surplus” human labor, nor the “need” to master it. If Aristotle believed that the ownership of another’s labor was morally ruinous, this would stand in either case. But Aristotle does not believe this, at least when it comes to the ownership of those he believes are suited to be owned by nature (1254a13–17; 1254a23–4). In fact, quite the opposite. For Aristotle, effective lifelong commitment to virtuous deeds requires the ownership of another’s labor.19 What “compensates” the slave for her or his labor in this system, what balances the scales, so to speak, of her or his superior bodily proficiency regarding life’s necessities, is the sharing of the master’s superior psuchē. That is, the master lends his capacity for de­lib­er­ ation and for putting reason into action to the soul of the slave in the very enactment of mastery. Thus, not only does Aristotle envision a bodily fusion of master and slave, but a psychical fusion as well; indeed, master and slave recapitulate the relationship between soul and body (1254b3–4). Aristotle here broaches the transformation of individual lives into a single life that Simona Forti reads as the aim of the form of politics she takes to reside at the heart of 18  See, e.g., Aubonnet (1960) 114. Pellegrin’s objection to this position rests on what he sees as Aristotle’s insistence on the ethical necessity of mastery and servitude; I accept this point and simply add that the necessity for “surplus” labor is present in Aristotle’s understanding of human living full stop; see Pellegrin (2013) 97. 19  Even as he treats mastery with some contempt: “there is nothing revered [semnon] in using a slave as a slave; giving commands concerning necessary things has no share in the fine” (1325a25–7). Hence the usefulness of gaining sufficient wealth as to hire an overseer, see 1255b35–7.

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totalitarianism.20 The master does not share life with his slave, he takes life from his slave. And yet, the pinnacle of human excellence requires this appropriating. And so, Aristotle will not describe the master as taking the labor of the slave at all, but as realizing the truth of their respective natures; “taking from others” is an action Aristotle does indeed malign, but precisely as one of the things that differentiates expertise in exchange from household management (1258b1–2). In farming out their physical and psychical capacities to one another, the connection between individual and organic unity unravels; master and slave meld into the entity capable of performing the most virtuous deeds. For Aristotle, human flourishing depends on this. But if this is so, it would seem that the very noble deeds made possible thereby would not belong solely to the master, but rather to the uncanny fused being their melding produced. The slave does not become the master; his separability is maintained, even as it is given the designation of a separable part or organ. But the master cannot be the master without the slave, as Pellegrin also observes.21 The result would seem to be that the owner of noble deeds would be not the master but the very circumstances of his fusion with the slave, first the family, but more properly the partnership toward which even the family aims, the political partnership. Hence, Aristotle will observe, in the context of arguing that citizens should be educated in common rather than in private, “one ought not even consider that a citizen belongs to himself, but rather that all belong to the city; for each is a part of the city” (1337a27–9). Thus, in the enactment of citizenship that his melding with the slave makes possible, the master too becomes property, and the city the owner. Human political partnership, as it is realized in the polis, becomes something other than the work of the citizens and the sharing of their lives together. It also requires a melding into a zōē that exceeds the life of any one individual. This melding itself opens the possibility of the commodification of life that will so trouble Aristotle’s sense of the proper human comportment toward need, to which we will turn next. 20  Forti (2006) 25.

21  Pellegrin (2013) 105–12.

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Aristotle’s account of the natural slave ventures, if not a corporate personhood, then a corporate life that undergirds and troubles ­citizen shared life. For if the pinnacle of human accomplishment requires the expansion of human organicity to include separable organs, the excellence of “the human” is irreducible to the excellence of “the individual,” and the status of this expanded sense of the human requires some modification of our understanding of the place of the human in the cosmos. That is, in order to account for the conditions of human flourishing, Aristotle requires a global teleo­logic­al orientation that extends well beyond the training of the political expert. We see this same need arise in his account of inanimate possessions as well.

5.2  Inanimate Possessions Aristotle’s most detailed discussion of the relationship between household management and business expertise begins in 1.8, which he opens by calling for a general examination “into possessions as such and expertise in business [peri pasēs ktēseōs kai chrēmatistikēs]” (1256a1–2). Observing that “it belongs to the expert businessman to discern how to get goods and possessions” (1256a15–16), and considering the possibility that wealth and possessions encompass many parts, Aristotle conducts this examination by looking in greater depth into just what business expertise is expert in acquiring, beginning with “sustenance generally and the possessions connected with it” (1256a18–19). Is farming, for instance, a part of business expertise? Aristotle’s concern with the acquisition of sustenance will prove decisive for the model of property he will develop here and for its larger significance within his political theory. With respect to other animals, the attainment of sustenance entails morphological ­commitments with far-reaching implications—talons, and curved beaks, for instance, respond to and belong in a certain topos with its concomitant sources of trophē—sorting animals into carnivorous, herbivorous, and omnivorous kinds, and in turn these responses to topos help shape that kind and degree of animal sociality, e.g.,

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whether the animal will live in a herd or be scattered. Sustenance provision also involves hedonic commitments: one finds the food one is suited to consume pleasurable. Manner of life emerges from these morphological and hedonic factors: “so that it is with a view to their convenience and their predilections in these matters that nature has determined their ways of life” (1256a26–7). The same is the case for humans as well (1256a29–30). The variety of forms of bioi revealed in the entirety of animal life is reflected and exaggerated in human life itself. After offering a list of human bioi which attain sustenance by “self-generated [autophuton, 1256a40]” work rather than through commerce and exchange, Aristotle turns to drive home why this discussion is relevant to the question of possessions and business expertise. In fact, trophē, in the sense of the specific items by which one is nourished, provides the basis for a model of property that is grounded in nature and that provides conceptual resources for Aristotle’s infamous hierarchy of living beings: Now possessions of this sort are evidently given by nature itself to all, both immediately from birth and when they have reached completion. For at birth from the very beginning some animals provide at the same time as much sustenance as is adequate until the offspring can supply itself—for example, those that give birth to larvae or eggs; while those that give birth to live offspring have sustenance for these in themselves for a certain period—the natural substance called milk. It is clear in a similar way [hōste homoiōs dēlon], therefore, that for grown things as well one must suppose [oiēteon]22 both that plants exist for the sake of animals and that the other animals exist for the sake of human beings— the tame animals, both for use and sustenance, and most if not all of the wild animals, for sustenance and other assistance, in order that clothing and other instruments may be got from them. If, then, nature makes nothing that is incomplete or purposeless, nature must necessarily [anagkaion] have made all of these for the sake of human beings. (1256b7–22)23 22  See also Phys. 207a15 and EN 1173b23 and 1176b21; the two EN references are in the negative, i.e., “one ought not to suppose.” 23  ἡ μὲν οὖν τοιαύτη κτῆσις ὑπ’ αὐτῆς φαίνεται τῆς φύσεως διδομένη πᾶσιν, ὥσπερ κατὰ τὴν πρώτην γένεσιν εὐθύς, οὕτω καὶ τελειω-θεῖσιν. καὶ γὰρ κατὰ τὴν ἐξ ἀρχῆς γένεσιν τὰ μὲν

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As Karen Nielsen has observed, Aristotle’s leap from sustenance provided at birth to the provision of sustenance in maturity is unexpected.24 It does not follow directly that the provision of the yolk of the egg or the milk of the breast, what Aristotle will call the remainder (leipomenon) of that from which it was born (ex hou ginetai) just a few pages later (1258a34–7), would necessarily extend to food items for the mature animal.25 And, in fact, Aristotle himself is clear that this extension is a supposition one must make, if one is to maintain that living being is an essential aspect of the cosmos as a whole, and this does indeed seem to be what Aristotle finds it ne­ ces­ sary to contend. Hence Nielsen’s observation that here Aristotle makes a global teleological claim that is noticeably distinct from his more regional and immanent teleology elsewhere.26 Within this broader teleological commitment, the existence of a form of trophē that is provided to newborns at birth is taken to suggest that trophē has also been provided by nature for the mature living being, which in turn is taken to mean that some living beings are for the sake of the sustenance of other living beings. But we cannot overlook the aspirational quality here. In the absence of a detailed account of the necessity of life as such, an account that would well exceed the purview of the Politics,27 we must infer from the assurance of sustenance granted to the newborn a similar “assurance” of sustenance for the mature being as well, a fantasy of perpetual provision, akin to the golden age hymned by Hesiod and συνεκτίκτει τῶν ζῴων τοσαύτην τροφὴν ὥσθ’ ἱκανὴν εἶναι μέχρις οὗ ἂν δύνηται αὐτὸ αὑτῷ πορίζειν τὸ γεννηθέν, οἷον ὅσα σκωληκοτοκεῖ ἢ ᾠοτοκεῖ· ὅσα δὲ ζῳοτοκεῖ, τοῖς γεννωμένοις ἔχει τροφὴν ἐν αὑτοῖς μέχρι τινός, τὴν τοῦ καλουμένου γάλακτος φύσιν. ὥστε ὁμοίως δῆλον ὅτι καὶ γενομένοις οἰητέον τά τε φυτὰ τῶν ζῴων ἕνεκεν εἶναι καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ζῷα τῶν ἀνθρώπων χάριν, τὰ μὲν ἥμερα καὶ διὰ τὴν χρῆσιν καὶ διὰ τὴν τροφήν, τῶν δ’ ἀγρίων, εἰ μὴ πάντα, ἀλλὰ τά γε πλεῖστα τῆς τροφῆς καὶ ἄλλης βοηθείας ἕνεκεν, ἵνα καὶ ἐσθὴς καὶ ἄλλα ὄργανα γίνηται ἐξ αὐτῶν. εἰ οὖν ἡ φύσις μηθὲν μήτε ἀτελὲς ποιεῖ μήτε μάτην, ἀναγκαῖον τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἕνεκεν αὐτὰ πάντα πεποιηκέναι τὴν φύσιν. 24  Nielsen (2013). 25  In the case of goods of the household, “This should be available above all, as was said before, by nature. For it is a work of nature to provide sustenance to the newly born, everything deriving sustenance from what remains of that from which it is born.” μάλιστα δέ, καθάπερ εἴρηται πρότερον, δεῖ φύσει τοῦτο ὑπάρχειν. φύσεως γάρ ἐστιν ἔργον τροφὴν τῷ γεννηθέντι παρέχειν· παντὶ γάρ, ἐξ οὗ γίνεται, τροφὴ τὸ λειπόμενόν ἐστι (1258a34–7). 26  Nielsen (2013). 27  But was given elsewhere, see, e.g., dC 279a17–279b3, Meta. Lambda 1072b25, Gen. Cor. 336b25–34, GA 732a1–4, and the discussion in Cooper (1987) 249, Granger (1987), Lennox (2001), Henry (2006), Menn (2012), and Connell (2016) Ch. 6.

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hyperbolized by Plato. The remainder of the matter of birth, the remainder of the mother’s matter, thus extends maternal provision beyond the bounds of the giving of birth itself, to the trophē of the newborn, and this, in turn, is extended to the mature animal in a model that aims to assure the superior character of the human. The “maternal” model is a model of ceaseless provision of sustenance and eternal justification of life. But Aristotle does not call it maternal here, he calls it natural, an elision made all the more glaring by the fact that what is at issue is precisely the remainder of material, of what the female principle is tasked with offering. We will deal with this more in the next chapter; here I note only that it supplies the conceptual framework for both a hierarchy of living beings and a theory of property. Whatever else may be said of this supposition, it proves decisive for Aristotle’s account of the household, understanding of property and wealth, and vision of human flourishing, as we shall see. Most immediately, Aristotle concludes his account of “first” property in Chapter 8 by acknowledging that there is a part of acquisitive expertise that belongs to household management— expertise in the acquisition of “those goods a store of which is both necessary for life and useful for partnership in a city or a household” (1256b29–30). It is in these things that true wealth (alēthinos ploutos) is found (1256b30), and for these things there is a natural limit to their acquisition: “for self-sufficiency in possessions of this sort with a view to a good life is not limitless [hē gar tēs toiautēs ktēseōs autarkeia pros agathēn zōēn ouk apeiros estin]” (1256b31–2). Once the provision of sustenance can be shown to have defined natural limits, the exceeding of those limits can be marked off as distinct from the proper functioning of the household, and the exercise of an unfettered acquisitiveness can be seen as a failure with respect to living well, the very failure that might lead one to believe that the common ownership of property is a better system than the private ownership of property. But only if one overlooks the status of such overreaching as an aberration or willful ignorance of a form of acquisition that observes natural limits. At least so far as Aristotle is concerned.

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Moreover, unfettered acquisition is not a function of human moral failings alone. The vice is aided by the character of a possession itself, to which Aristotle turns in Chapter 9, in the course of identifying the form of acquisitive expertise that does not follow limits, that sees the limitless acquisition of wealth as its main focus, and that is what most people mean when they speak of business expertise. There is good reason to confuse the two, as the doubling of business expertise into one by nature and another that is not by nature but by experience and art responds to the dual nature of possessions themselves: “Every possession has a double use” (1257a6). And while its two uses belong to it as such, they are not equal, for one is proper to the thing and the other is not. By way of illustrating these two uses, Aristotle offers the example of shoes—one can both wear them and exchange them, and the one who exchanges them is using them as possessions, that is, as objects that he has the right to exchange (and not just any organization of matter) but not for their proper use, that is, not for the reason that their matter was so organized, “for [the shoe] did not come to be for the sake of exchange” (1257a13).28 Thus, the possession is marked by its own doubling; all possessions can be used in the manner that is proper to them and they can also be used as objects of exchange. This double nature will eventually make something of the monster of the possession—because it can always be used in two ways, and one of those ways is as an object of exchange for something else, we are confronted with the possibility of a limitless, eternal, circulation of things whose very exchangeability is a part of what it means to be that thing. A possession is, by nature, a thing that can also be exchanged for other things. A possession specifies an ontological category/aspect; anything can become a possession (that is, become an object of exchange as well as use). In this sense, there is no irreplaceable possession. To be a possession is to be replaceable. If something is highly valued, it must become, in the language of Annette Weiner, an inalienable possession, that is, it must be taken out of exchange; doing so reserves for it something beyond the 28  On ownership as the right to exchange in the ancient Greek context, see Gottesman (2010).

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status of a possession, and for the owner an expression of a kind of sovereignty.29 But this removal must constantly be maintained and guarded; the risk of sliding back into the circulation of exchange is ever-present. The possession, then, raises the specter of a generativity that mimics life, that usurps ordered generativity, that competes with political power, a specter whose most concrete form, as we will see presently, emphasizes precisely this arrogation of generativity: tokos, interest/child. What disturbs Aristotle about interest is that it reveals money precisely in its mimicry of the generation of life, a mimicry permitted by the very character of possessions themselves; it threatens a shadow life, capable of ceaseless self-generation, and it is precisely this capacity that seems to merit comparison with human reproduction, with the generation of children. But to see this connection more clearly, we need to observe the rule of need in establishing it. Aristotle continues: “For there is an expertise in exchange for all things; it arises in the first place from something that is according to nature—the fact that human beings have either more or fewer things than what is sufficient” (1257a14–16). This kind of expertise in exchange, exchange between households of useful things (e.g., wine for grain), is neither contrary to nature nor any kind of business expertise, “for it existed in order to support natural self-sufficiency” (1257a28–30). It is first because exchange cannot happen within the household; the household is already a partnership of the same things, or, as Aristotle puts it, those in the household “were partners in their own things” (1257a21–2). However, business expertise arose from the exchange between households “reasonably enough” (1257a31). “For as the assistance of foreigners became greater in importing what they were in need of and exporting what was in surplus, the use of money was necessarily devised” (1257a31–4). Aristotle continues: “At first this was something determined simply by size and weight, but eventually they impressed a mark on it in order to be relieved of having to measure it, the mark being put on as an indication of the amount. Once a supply of money came into being as a result of such ne­ces­ sary exchange, then, the other kind of expertise in business 29  Weiner (1992).

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arose—that is, commerce” (1257a38–43). In the quasi-historical development Aristotle is charting here, money arises as a way of equalizing difference and compensating for linguistic heterogeneity by providing for a single unit of measurement and thus for a homogenization of goods—one need not speak the same language in order to exchange, the “mark” of money becomes the only lingua franca necessary. And in this capacity money simultaneously serves exchange and threatens the very differences vital to political partnership with the possibility of a profound and irrevocable hom­ ogen­ iza­ tion. Everything is equalizable, everything can be exchanged, everything has its price. As Aristotle’s discussion develops, the use of money to compensate for/shore up against the natural excesses and insufficiencies to meet human need exaggerates the possibilities opened up by the dual nature of the possession. Most immediately it creates some ambiguity around the status of money itself. On the one hand, the emergence of money as a way of contending with “something that is according to nature,” namely, that humans have more or fewer things than they need, holds money within the envelope of a limitobserving sphere. That is, its association with need keeps it natural and “simple.” Money is intended to assist in the negation of need by covering over the gaps between time and place that need creates. “At other times, however, money seems to be something non­sens­ ical [lēros] and to be altogether by law, and in no way by nature, because when changed by its users it is worth nothing and is not useful with respect to any of the necessary things; and it will often happen that one who is wealthy in money will lack necessary sus­ ten­ance” (1257b10–14). That one could have lots of money and still starve is, for Aristotle, absurd (atopon) (1257b14). This oscillation between need and excess, between a simple use of money tied to nature and the exploitation of its potential un­coup­ ling from need, produces two different models of business expertise and of wealth, that which is according to nature and that which is not, and the former he calls household management (which knows true wealth to be in the provision of the necessary things) and the latter commercial expertise, “which is productive of wealth not in every way but through trafficking in goods, and is held to be

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connected with money, since money is the medium and goal of exchange” (1257b20–3). Household management operates with an understanding of wealth as the provision of necessary things, and thus as rule- and limit-observing, while the wealth deriving from the latter kind of business expertise is without limit (apeiron, 1257b25). Thus, concludes Aristotle, in one sense, “it appears ne­ces­ sary that there be a limit to all wealth” but in practice, “all who engage in business increase their money without limit” (1257b33–4). Aristotle is careful to attribute the ambiguity between two senses of business expertise to the very nature of the possession itself: “the cause of this is the nearness to one another of these [forms of ex­pert­ise in business]. For they converge in the matter of use, the same things being used in the case of either sort of expertise in business. For possessions serve the same use, though not in the same respect, but in one case the end is increase, in the other something else” (1257b35–8). The result of this constitutive ambiguity adhering to the nature of the possession is not only divergent ­models of wealth, but also divergent models of life: for those who confuse household management with business expertise in the latter sense (business expertise proper), it seems that their work resides in increasing without limit their store of money. “The cause of this state is that they are serious about living, but not about living well [aition de tautēs tēs diatheseōs to spoudazein peri to zēn, alla mē to eu zēn]; and since that desire of theirs is without limit, they also desire what is productive of unlimited things [eis apeiron oun ekeinēs tēs epithumias ousēs, kai tōn poietikōn apeirōn epithumousin]” (1257b40–1258a2). Here Aristotle touches on a source of anti-natalist sentiment: the limitless desire for life, when not tempered by an understanding of living well, produces a desire for money, for what is “productive of unlimited things.” By the terms of the present study, to be serious about living but not about living well is to mistake what living means to the human, to trade the commission of noble deeds for limitless acquisition of wealth is to fail at the living of a human, which has its most intense expression precisely in the commission of beautiful actions. To fail at one’s humanity, in turn, is to fail at one’s animality, to approach not only the beastly, but the inanimate.

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But the deleterious effects of the ambiguity of possessions are not limited to those who confuse living and living well: “Even those who aim at living well seek what conduces to bodily gratifications [to pros tas apolauseis tas sōmatikas zētousin], and since this too appears to be available in and through possessions, their pursuits are wholly connected with business, and this is why the other kind of business expertise has arisen. For as gratification consists in excess, they seek the sort that is productive of the excess characteristic of gratification [en huperbolēi gar ousēs tēs apolauseōs, tēn tēs apolaustikēs huperbolēs poietikēn zētousin]; and if they are unable to supply it through expertise in business, they attempt this in some other fashion, using each sort of capacity in a way not according to nature” (1258a2–10). The ambiguity of possessions can “infect” even those who explicitly aim at living well, and when it does it reveals another side of the monstrosity of possessions—even the virtues can be commodified, and virtuous deeds can be treated not as the exercise of human excellence but as forms of expertise in business, “as if this were the end and everything else had to march toward it [hōs touto telos on, pros de to telos hapanta deon apantan]” (1258a13–14). Possessions, wealth, money all present a kind of totalizing power to replace the beautiful, the virtuous, happiness, and the good. The arrogating, totalizing power of money extends not only to the end of life, but also to its beginning, in the mimicry of human reproduction that is the accumulation of interest, a point Aristotle makes in finally answering the question of the relation between household management and business expertise: “just as political expertise does not create beings but makes use of them after receiving them from nature, so also should nature provide land or sea or something else for sustenance, while it befits the household manager to have what comes from those things in the state it should be in. For it does not belong to expertise in weaving to make wool, but to make use of it, and to know what sort is usable and suitable or poor and unsuitable” (1258a21–4).30 Household management, then, consists in the good use of what comes by nature; it is not the 30  Aristotle will reverse this position in Book 7, as we will discuss in Section 5.3.

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unlimited acquisition of money but the limit-observing use of nat­ ­ ural provisions. The acquisitions of these natural provision should follow the model established by nature, a point Aristotle makes by again calling attention to the natal scene of first possessions: goods “should be available above all, as was said before, by nature. For it is a work of nature to provide sustenance to the newly born, everything deriving sustenance from what remains of what is born. Expertise in business relative to crops and animals is thus natural for all” (1258a35–8). The other form of business expertise, expertise in commerce or exchange, on the other hand, “is justly blamed since it is not according to nature but involves taking from others” (1258b1–2); Aristotle continues, “usury [hē obolostatikē] is most reasonably hated because one’s possessions derive from money itself and not from that for which it was supplied. For it came into being for the sake of exchange, but interest actually creates more of it. And it is from this that it gets its name: offspring are similar to those who give birth to them, and interest is money born of money. So of the sorts of business this is the most contrary to nature” (1258b2–8). Why is it most contrary to nature? Because it mimics human reproductive/generative capacity, it threatens to displace this capacity by its very fe­cund­ ity and limitlessness. But we would be remiss to fail to notice the deeper connection here between the disdain for commerce and the fear of re­pro­duct­ ive excess. For while Aristotle will claim that the household manager and the political expert resemble one another by not acquiring their material but using it well, by the end of the Politics, the pol­it­ ical expert will indeed be called upon to legislate the creation of citizen bodies amenable to the will of the legislator. Reproduction becomes both the index by means of which the limitless character of exchange is measured and the first threat of limitlessness, both measure and culprit. The complexity of the relation to natality here is profound. On the one hand, the existence of a possession, of a thing that could be called one’s own, is granted by appeal to a natal scene—the “nat­ ural” provision of sustenance to the newborn out of the very matter from which it was born—which is treated as limit-observing.

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On the other hand, the production of children provides the very index by means of which the monstrosity of interest can be discerned— when money generates itself (realizes the fantasy of self-generation) it threatens the very attempt to harness generativity under the yoke of order and limit, that is, it threatens the management of generativity that is essential to political rule. The natal scene supplies the conceptual terms for both limit and limitlessness, for both natural order and excess. It is this ambivalence that connects Aristotle’s understanding of property with his management of reproductive life. The anxiety of limitless acquisition and the anxiety of excessive generation are one and the same; the former results in a condemnation of usury, the latter in eugenics legislation. And so the very commodification that disturbs Aristotle, that leads to his rejection of “the life of moneymaking” and his concern about the accumulation of interest, is native to his own conception of property and the natal scene in which he grounds “first” possession, a scene remarkable for its erasure of the generator of this first property, the one who would seem more entitled to call it “mine,” the mother. Moreover, if the first possession is the yolk of the egg or the milk of the breast, we can better see why Aristotle will insist on the private ownership of property as an expression of the global teleology he must posit in order to account for the place of life in the cosmos. The pleasure that comes from such ownership is the pleasure of having one’s life affirmed as at home in the cosmos, as feeling the necessity of one’s being, as attesting to the validity of one’s self-love. We can also better see the depth of attachment to property at work here, and its connection with the affection that Aristotle claims comes about most of all from two sources, “what is one’s own and what is dear [to te idion kai to agapēton]” (1262b23). The connection here between idiosyncrasy and the kind of affection that as early as Homeric epic was associated especially with one’s children makes particularly clear both the perceived threat of common ownership to one’s deepest attachments and the immanence of this very threat to this conjunction of attachment and property. If the first property, the first thing one called one’s own, was the sustenance that nourished one as a newborn, the extension of one’s own to other objects and peoples galvanizes this natal scene.

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Private ownership thus attests to one’s place in the cosmos, to the “naturalness” and justice of one’s self-regard, and this spring then flows to other people and things. Common ownership, in  turn, would challenge this affirmation of one’s place and the pleasure that accompanies it; it would water down not only one’s affection for others but also one’s sense of the world as a place that is, fundamentally, for one. But of course, necessity belies this very sense, and in sheltering one against the contingency of one’s birth and life, such a model of property, such an approach to the yolk of the egg or the milk of the breast, conceals this state of affairs, soothes the anxiety of placelessness and contingency almost before it arrives, by treating the product of the mother as the gift of nature. But this comes with a cost. For it also opens up the possibility of life itself as a possession, as property; this is the very effect to which such a model of property is condemned. In contending with anx­ iety about reproductive excess, it opens itself up to the perpetual commodification of life itself. It is this dynamic, whereby an attempt to shore up human vulnerability through a displacement of maternal action results in an alienated natality that threatens the entire edifice, that Aristotle’s eugenics legislation is designed to contain by attempting to hold the generation of life under the harness of the political partnership. Displacing the mother, the city itself becomes the source of the “maternal” bond. But to do so, as we shall see, it too must commodify human life.

5.3  Civic Reproduction Zōē’s permeation of human politics reaches a saturation point in Aristotle’s eugenics legislation. While early on in the Politics Aristotle suggests that political expertise lies not in the generation of humans, but in their good use—just as the weaver does not make the wool, but uses it (1258a25)—by its end, the production of good human bodies does indeed fall under the purview of the legislator of the best city precisely because these good bodies are the

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equipment (korēgia) of the city (1326a5, see also 1325b37).31 Unlike the weaver, the legislator must also legislate in order to attain the best material. This is true both for the number of children—no well-governed city can afford to overlook legislation pertaining to population size (1326a27; 1335b23)—and for the quality of their bodies: “one should legislate so that the bodies of offspring in the process of generation become available to the will of the legislator” (1335a5). What this amounts to, in the end, is a series of prescriptions pertaining to procreative acts: men and women should marry at the age most likely to produce an overlap in their fertile years, at eighteen for women and thirty-seven for men, should begin co­habit­ation in the winter, should follow the advice of doctors and specialists in nature on other matters pertaining to conception, should avoid an athletic bodily disposition but should get some exercise, should expose infants whose bodies are deformed, and should keep ­offspring to within the prescribed number, aborting (rather than exposing) offspring in excess of that number.32 All of this is presented as a public duty, a leitourgia, of citizens, from which they are released shortly after the time when they cease being fertile, which Aristotle estimates to be somewhere around fifty-four or fifty-five. This account of the citizen’s procreative duties is given in the course of describing the proper course of education of their children, and done with the assumption that legislating the behavior of the parents will produce citizen bodies that are most educable.33 Thus, while elsewhere in Aristotle reproduction is presented as an 31  “For just as in the case of the other craftsmen—the weaver, for example, or the shipbuilder—material should be available that is suitable to work on . . . so too in the case of the political expert and the legislator the proper material should be available in suitable condition. To the equipment characteristic of the city belongs in the first instance both the multitude of human beings—how many should be available and of what quality by nature—and the territory in the same way—how much there should be and of what quality” (1325b40). 32  Pol. 7.16. Aristotle will not himself venture to establish the number, and thus avoids the awkwardness of the Platonic nuptial number, but insists nevertheless that some number should be established in law—a number should indeed be defined for procreation (1335b24)—even as he observes, a second time, the nearly divine character of such a wisdom. 33  “Reason and intellect are the end of our nature, so that it is with a view to these that birth and the concern with habits should be handled” (Pol. 1334b15).

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expression of an innate desire for immortality (e.g., de Anima), here it is treated as a factor that must be legislated in order to prod­uce the best material for the legislator. This is so because the size of the city, that is, the number of its citizens, cannot sbut impact the manner of life, the bios, of the citizen,34 and so the generation of the potential citizen (the unborn or not yet born, the zōon that is to be a politēs) cannot but fall under the purview of the legislator. The fear of reproductive excess is a driving force not only behind Aristotle’s reproductive legislation, but also his conception of the need for private property, both of which hinge upon a model of human attachment as fundamentally idiosyncratic: in order to have affection for something I must see it as mine and/or hold it dear. Indeed, the transformation of the “natural” impulse to make another like oneself into a matter for legislative supplement is the lasting effects of an anxiety about reproductive excess that has its economic counterpart in the excessive production of interest (and the threat to self-sufficiency (autarcheia) that both forms of excess create). We see this most clearly in the difficulty Aristotle encounters in trying to distinguish household management—as a natural, limit-observing pursuit of self-sufficiency exemplified by the re­prod­uct­ive labor that provides sustenance to the young (1256b7–15 and 1258a35)—from the limitless acquisition that is characteristic of one aspect of business expertise and emblemized in the accumulation of interest. This difficulty is due both to human behavior, in which a frequently made mistake of ends (pursuing living but not living well) results in the belief that unlimited acquisition is the path to happiness, but also in the dual nature of possessions themselves, as both objects of use and objects of exchange (1257a5). And while Aristotle concludes that because the unlimited acquisition of goods is unnatural, usury is justifiably hated—requiring the im­ pos­ ition of a human-made limit (law) 34  This is so because in an overly populous city, the ruling element cannot discern enough about the citizens to make good decisions about the distributions of honors and offices. The proper size of the city, then, has two determinants, the self-sufficiency of the city, an autarchic criterion (1326b7 and 1326b23), and that the city be easy to survey, that it be eu opsis (1326b24). Agamben notes these passages, and observes the biopolitical character of the concern for self-sufficiency (e.g., Agamben (2015) Chs. 4–6), but does not there elaborate on the biopolitical character of the demand for surveillance.

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where no natural limit exists—the very reproductive life he uses to exemplify the natural, i.e., limit-following, acquisition of goods is subject, by the end of the Politics, to legislative supplement in order to check human tendencies toward excess. We should thus read Aristotle’s eugenics legislation in Book 7 and his critique of business expertise and usury in Book 1 as two sides of the same enterprise, a philosophic psychopathology of human acquisitiveness that takes a purported excessive character of desire as its starting point (see, e.g., 1267b3). Discerning the connection between Aristotle’s account of the advent of economic exchange and his understanding of the political valence of reproduction is not only necessary in understanding Aristotle, but also in acknowledging the depth of their connection that is reflected at the linguistic level, i.e., in the level of meaning associating “children” with “interest” in the word tokos, a level that, as we have seen, Aristotle is careful to mark (1258b1). That is, we encounter an anxiety about human generativity (and vulnerability) not only in the obvious realm of eugenics legislation, but also in the insistence on private ownership, the critique of usury, the account of the natural slave, and the entire model of politics as the gen­er­ ation of excellent citizens. All of which trouble any effort to demarcate the reproductive from the political in Aristotle’s thought (even Aristotle’s own attempts to do so), and suggest a fundamental flaw in any effort to isolate reproductive life from his conception of political life, to treat it as somehow prior to or outside of politics.

5.4 Conclusion When Aristotle grounds the real existence of property in the “nat­ ural” provision of sustenance first to the young, and then to the mature animal, he commits himself to a global teleology that aims to assure and justify the existence of life as such, and thus the nat­ur­ al­ness of the impulse to produce another like oneself. In one sense, this is all ancillary to Aristotle’s real concern in the Politics. Arguments for the continuity of coming-to-be and passing away, and for an uninterrupted procession of generation as a function of

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the divine in the cosmos, appear elsewhere in Aristotle’s work (e.g., Gen. Corr. 336b25–34), and he seems to be presupposing an ­argument like this here. Thus, why there are living beings is not really a driving question in Aristotle’s Politics. And yet, neither can we take for granted the “naturalness” of reproduction in Greek thought, nor assume that what would have been presented as ­natural is obvious. “Natural birth,” under the terms of the Generation of Animals for instance, would be the result of a masculine generator successfully mastering “female” matter to produce a male. But, of course, as many have noted, this model is haunted by the necessity of the feminine “role” and the birth of female offspring.35 This chapter has aimed to contribute to this conversation by focusing on the relationship between Aristotle’s conception of the political work of producing excellent citizens, a work that begins before citizens are even born, and his conception of the political necessity for the private ownership of property, that is, the connection between his eugenics legislation and his approach to possessions. The need for such an approach is apparent if, again, we observe that Aristotle is operating with a conception of property that begins in a natal scene and a conception of natality that is motivated by the anxiety of ownership—will this that is mine but not me remain mine or will it exceed me, threaten me—an anxiety expressed in the connection between offspring and interest that is tokos. The concern exhibited here invites an exploration of Aristotle’s contribution to a larger cultural trope: the tension between natality (the terms, material and ontological, of one’s birth) and politics (how one pursues living well). In Chapter 6, I explore this contribution by returning to the ontological and ethico-political significance of that most vivid form of attachment, what Aristotle will call the “greatest of good things for cities,” philia (Pol. 1262b9), in order to deepen our exploration of Aristotle’s thinking about the sources and mixture of desire, self-regard, love of honor, acquisitiveness, and vulnerability that motivate one to call something “mine” and to consider something as “one’s own.” 35  See, e.g., Bianchi (2014), Connell (2016).

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The phrase “what is one’s own” evokes the very construction that Aristotle criticizes in his discussion of private ownership in the Politics, namely, Plato’s Socrates’ claim, in the Republic, that that polis is best governed in which its citizens say “my own” and “not my own” about the same things (Rep. 462c). Saying “my own” would seem to mean laying claim to something, acknowledging and announcing that one’s fate has been tied to this thing, that what happens to it also happens to oneself. The discursive character of this assertion, that it is a saying, is made all the more striking in Aristotle’s maintenance of it precisely as he is criticizing Socrates’ claims about saying my own. For Aristotle, and contra Plato’s Socrates, philia is diluted by common ownership, a criticism he sees as most vividly made if we attend to common ownership’s creation of the condition in which “the father least of all says ‘mine’ of his son” (Pol. 1262b15). And yet, if we follow Aristotle’s analysis of the relationship by means of which one can say of a child that it is one’s own, what emerges as an exemplar of this experience of “one’s own” is not the father’s relation to the child, but the mother’s, whose love is greater because “giving birth is a greater labor, and [mothers] know more that they are their own” (EN 1168a25–6).36 Following Aristotle’s understanding of the political significance of philia, then, requires us to trace not only the connection he posits between family life and ownership, but especially the connection between the maternal bond and political life, wherein we can observe the relationship between the conditions of human birth and the capacity for human attachment to oneself, to others, and to things.

36  ἐπιπονωτέρα γὰρ ἡ γέννησις, καὶ μᾶλλον ἴσασιν ὅτι αὑτῶν.

6 Natal Longing and the Maternal Bond When Aristotle turns to provide an account of the deepest forms of human attachment from which friendship arises, he elides two characters one would otherwise have expected him to hold apart: mothers and poets. In fact, it is the particular nature of maternal affect as Aristotle characterizes it—both willing to sacrifice social recognition of status and yet able to extend into the most intimate forms of shared suffering—that provides the basis on which we should understand the most powerful forms of friendship that ­sustain human communities. Aristotle’s emphasis on the active character of maternal love and labor complicates the picture of female passivity present elsewhere in his work.1 It is tempting to cast this tension between the activity of the “mother” (hē mētēr) and the passivity of the “female” (to thēlu) as one between meaning and matter, with the mother understood as a social and political category, and the female as material and biological. And yet, the “mother” already troubles these distinctions. Defined both by the embodied act of embodying and by the conventions of the name—that is, understood both in the sense of one who has given birth and of one who is called mother, a pos­ition that could be occupied by someone other than the one giving birth—hē mētēr tracks across human and non-human animal worlds, across “biological” and symbolic concerns, and, in Aristotle, across ethico-political and zoological texts.2 Following through on

1  For an account of this complication within the Generation of Animals, see Connell (2016). 2  For a concise critique of Arendt’s handling of the materiality of birth, see O’Byrne (2010) 105. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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these complications will allow us to explore Aristotle’s work on the affective conditions and supports for political life. Doing so will indicate a few fruitful points of intersection between ancient and contemporary political theorizing. Aristotle’s account of maternal affection illuminates an implicit connection between the affective bases of production and ownership on the one hand, and those of the most cherished forms of human intimacy, trajectories that tie the connection between mothers and poets to an explicitly political theorizing that I would like to explore.3 Both rely on a kind of attachment, one that is illuminated by the mother’s attachment to the child as Aristotle configures it. For the child has a double valence, as both product/part attesting to the labor and being of its source, and as “another self,” loved and cherished for its own sake.4 And what I take to be utterly decisive is that Aristotle’s alignment between mothers and poets prohibits us from distinguishing between these two valences on the basis of anything like artificial versus natural interests, as both valences respond to the reproductive mandate and both technē and phusis are articulated within a nexus of reproductive terms.5 As Nicole Loraux observes, Greek conceptions of generativity conjoin nature and artifice as well as divide them; the earth serves as both clod and clay—a dual role reflected in the close linguistic ties between agricultural terms and sexual reproduction—and figures a fecundity that holds together both sexual reproduction and technē as two expressions of

3  Here my interest is less in discerning what civic philia is, a matter that has received much attention and debate, than in following the political significance Aristotle grants to familial philia, and especially to maternal attachment. For debate on the former issue, see, for instance, Cooper (1990), Annas (1990), Yack (1993), Schollmeier (1994), Simpson (1998), and Nagel (2006) 181–6. 4  Here we should have in mind the tensions that give rise, in Plato’s Symposium, to the replacement of an acquisitive model of love, in which one seeks to possess what one desires forever, to a creative model of love, in which one desires to create in the presence of the beautiful. 5  We see this in Plato as well, of course: see for instance the assertion in his Statesman of a connection between the divine gift of technē and the emergence of sexual reproduction; see Brill (2016). Loraux (1996) locates it also more broadly in Greek literature in the tension between two treatments of the fecundity of the earth: as source of all that grows and as material.

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a larger source of coming-to-be.6 Or, as Aryeh Kosman puts it, for Aristotle, animals too “are grown from seed.”7 This chapter will trace Aristotle’s construction of maternal love as a paradigm of the active character of philia and follow its contribution to the outline of a larger model of generativity that runs through his understanding of the maternal bond, of sibling affection, and of virtue friendship and informs his conception of the activity of thought itself. I thus aim to show that a detailed account of Aristotle’s understanding of maternal action and affect is necessary not only in order to attend to the full range of his other-selves moral phenomenology but also for understanding the perpetual self-actualization that is thought thinking itself. I will begin by charting in detail Aristotle’s use of the mother as a figure that illuminates certain essential features of his ethico-political thought, starting with his alignment of mothers and poets and then looking more broadly at the exemplary status motherhood receives in his account of friendship (Section  6.1). This will allow for a focused discussion of the dynamics of familial philia and its significance for the polis (Section 6.2). I will then turn to locate Aristotle’s use of the figure of the mother within the context of the Platonic ap­pro­pri­ ation of larger tropes in the Greek philosophic imaginary surrounding human reproduction and self-production, where we will see that the significance of Aristotle’s claims about maternity extends not only to his thinking about the polis but also to his thinking about thinking (Section 6.3). This final section will thus highlight the implications Aristotle’s conception of the maternal bond has for our understanding of the proper objects of first philosophy itself.

6.1  Mothers and Poets The connection between poets and parents is drawn explicitly in a passage from Aristotle’s exploration of friendship in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, in the course of explaining what appears 6  Loraux (1996) 1–3.

7  Kosman (2013) 266 note 13.

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as the paradoxical fact that those who do favors love those to whom they do favors more than those who receive the favors love them. The answer is that those who do favors are the more active party, and, in acting, are more affirmed in their being, and, in loving their being, love too the opportunity to affirm it. The recipient of their favors provides just such an opportunity. The figure Aristotle selects to illustrate this principle is the artisan: And this is the very thing that happens with artisans, for every one of them adores his own work more than he would be adored by the work if it became ensouled. And perhaps this occurs most of all with poets, since they are excessively adoring of their own poems, loving them like children. But what occurs with those who do favors seems like such a case; for the one the good is done to is the work, and they adore this more than the work adores its maker. The reason for this is that one’s being is choiceworthy and loveable for everyone, but we are by activity (that is, by living and doing), and the work is, in a certain way, its maker at work; so he loves the work because he also loves to be [toutou d’ aition hoti to einai pasin haireton kai philēton, semen d’ energeia (tōi zēn gar kai prattein), energeiai de ho poiēsas to ergon esti pōs; stergei dē to ergon, dioti kai to einai]. (1167b35–1168a9)

That poets resemble mothers even more than fathers is suggested in Aristotle’s subsequent description of the nature of philia, wherein love is treated in close proximity to poiēsis: And loving seems like making [kai hē men philēsis poiēsei eoiken], and being loved like receiving, so loving and the things that accompany friendship belong with those having the greater part in action [tois huperechousi de peri tēn praxin hepetai to philein kai ta philika]. And everyone loves more what comes to him with toil, as those who have made money love it more than those who have inherited it; but receiving a favor seems to be without effort, while doing a favor is an exertion. And for these reasons mothers love their children more; for giving birth is a greater labor, and they know more that they are their own. (1168a19–27)

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This connection surely has some of its source in the Platonic ­feminizing of poetry. But what Aristotle explicitly emphasizes, several times, is not the feminization of poetry but the “poeticizing” of maternity, an alignment of maternity with both action and making; this too has its poetic background in the parallel between battle and labor. Think, for instance, of Euripides’ Medea’s claim that she would rather stand in battle three times than give birth to one child (l. 214). The great labor Aristotle describes here is designated by a term, epiponos, that elsewhere in the Nichomachean Ethics explicitly evokes action, in the context, for example, of Aristotle’s discussion of courage (refusing to flee from great labor, 1116a14) and of friendship (the toil of helping many people, 1170b25). The labor that results in the birth of a child, then, appears to stand in two worlds; its generativity is both a making and a doing. The mother, in turn, would seem to embody both production and action and to complicate the distinctions between poiēsis and praxis that Aristotle will elsewhere assert (see, e.g., 1140a2–5). The privileged relationship between motherhood and friendship had already been asserted a bit earlier in Aristotle’s investigation of friendship, in a passage in which motherhood is treated as an exemplar of the active character of loving: “But friendship seems to be more in loving than in being loved. A sign of this is that mothers delight in loving; for some of them give up their own children to be brought up, and love just in knowing them, not seeking to be loved in return, if both are not possible. It is sufficient to them if they see their children doing well, and they love them even if their children, in their ignorance, give back nothing of what is due a mother” (1159a28–33).8 A corresponding passage in the Eudemian Ethics gives us at least one example of the circumstances in which a mother would give up her child:

8  δοκεῖ δ’ ἐν τῷ φιλεῖν μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν τῷ φιλεῖσθαι εἶναι. σημεῖον δ’ αἱ μητέρες τῷ φιλεῖν χαίρουσαι· ἔνιαι γὰρ διδόασι τὰ ἑαυτῶν τρέφεσθαι, καὶ φιλοῦσι μὲν εἰδυῖαι, ἀντιφιλεῖσθαι δ’ οὐ ζητοῦσιν, ἐὰν ἀμφότερα μὴ ἐνδέχηται, ἀλλ’ ἱκανὸν αὐταῖς ἔοικεν εἶναι ἐὰν ὁρῶσιν εὖ πράττοντας, καὶ αὐταὶ φιλοῦσιν αὐτοὺς κἂν ἐκεῖνοι μηδὲν ὧν μητρὶ προσήκει ἀπονέμωσι διὰ τὴν ἄγνοιαν.

Natal Longing and the Maternal Bond  235 And loving is more closely connected to friendship than being loved is, whereas being loved is connected to what is loveable. Here is an indication: if a friend cannot achieve both, he would prefer to recognize the other than to be recognized—as women (like Andromache in Antiphon’s play) do when they give their children away to others. For wanting to be recognized seems to be for one’s own sake and to be aimed at experiencing, rather than doing, something good; but recognizing the other is for the sake of doing and loving. This is why we praise people who stand firm in their love for those who have died, since they recognize the other but are not recognized.  (EE 1239a35–1239b2)9

In a mother’s love for her child Aristotle sees an action so enamored of its own exercise as to neither require nor seek recognition, an action that revels in its creation without need of acknowledgement. That is, Aristotle’s construction of maternal love limns a generativity whose excess is balanced by the very sacrifice of recognition it makes possible. The balance between fecundity and order that nature achieves in the relationship between hyper-fecund king bee and sterile drone is presented here as achieved within the figure of the mother herself, who chooses to give up social and political standing out of the very abundance of her love. In this, maternal love seems to operate as a magical force; exposure to it serves as a site of exposure to a mystical generativity. But we should also note that the example Aristotle offers of its very abundance is one in which no such encounter occurs, in which the child does not come to know the being from whom it was born, in which the birth mother is that about which the child is ignorant precisely because of her sacrifice of recognition. The mother’s love is not diminished by the fundamental injustice of not receiving its due, as though her love exceeds the economy of justice. And if the condition of natality introduces an inalienable debt—the debt the child owes to their parents is like that owed to the gods, and cannot

9  See also: “When it is possible to be together and to do well everyone chooses it. But when they are not possible at the same time, it is perhaps like when Heracles’ mother chose for him to be a god rather than to stay with her and be a slave to Eurystheus” (EE 1245b30).

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be repaid: “there is nothing a son can do that is worthy of the things that have already been done for him, so that he always owes a debt” (EN1163b22)—the mother’s capacity and willingness to eschew recognition marks a kind of alleviation.10 For not only is it a debt that cannot ever receive its due, a debt both existential and, because it is constitutive, ontological; it is also a debt whose holder does not care to receive her due nor even, in certain circumstances, to receive recognition. To find any comparable activity we would have to reach into the furthest horizon of noble deeds for Aristotle, the willingness to surrender the performance of a noble deed to one’s friend, something that occurs only amongst the best (EN 1169a35). Aristotle does not linger over the radical challenge to the econ­ omies of honor and justice posed by the mother’s willing leave-taking of recognition of her status. And yet, the greatest heroes are undone by the loss, real or perceived, of honor. The mother’s willingness to court what destroyed Ajax and what nearly destroyed Achilles is noteworthy. And it is precisely her willingness to forgo recognition that is celebrated as the greatest sign of the action and strength of her love; that is, she can be praised because part of her virtue resides in her willingness to choose her own exclusion. We can and should see here an early figuring of the densely problematic trope of maternal sacrifice, but right now I am more interested in exploring a bit further this challenge to the code of honor, to the attachment to title and status, and to the symbolic framework (the system of meaning and value) that undergirds it.11 And I would like to do so by focusing on the relation between this challenge and the attachment that the mother does maintain. For her willingness to give up her child is not the only mark of the exceptional character of maternal love. As we observed in Chapter 1, in his consideration of whether or not it is possible to be a friend to oneself, Aristotle identifies mothers as particularly prone to “share in pain and 10  See also: “And there is friendship in children for their parents, as in human beings for gods, for something good and superior, since parents have done the greatest good for them; for they are responsible for their being, and being raised, and for the being educated of those who become so” (EN 1162a4). 11  See also Ward (2008).

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enjoyment” (1166a9),12 and amplifies this tendency toward the sharing of affect in a passage from the Eudemian Ethics we discussed there: We will take it as a sign of affection to share in the sorrow [sunalgein] of one who is suffering, not for something else (as slaves toward the master who, in suffering, is harsh) but for their sake, just as mothers with their children and the birds who share each other’s sorrow [sunōdinontes]. A friend especially wishes not just to share in the pain [sullupeisthai] of a friend, but to share the same pain, such as sharing thirst [sundipsēn] when he is thirsty, if possible, and if not then as nearly as possible. The same account applies to joy; it is a sign of friendship that one feels joy not for something else but because the other feels joy. (1240a33–1240b1)13

Aristotle’s use of the mother’s sharing in the sorrow of her child in order to emphasize the friend’s desire to share the same pain of a friend evokes a long-standing literary emphasis on the intensity of maternal attachment and suffering that is depicted especially clearly in the work of Euripides.14 For Aristotle, too, the mother is exemplary not only in the intensity of her action (her love), but also in the intensity of her passion.15 And this passion is expressed not 12  See also the claim just a few lines earlier that a friend “wants the friend to be and to live, for the friend’s own sake, which is the very thing mothers feel toward their children, and which friends who are in conflict feel” (1166a4–6). Here, the mother’s desire to share the suffering and enjoyment of her children, her desire for intimacy, does not seem to threaten, in Aristotle’s mind, her interest in the well-being of her child for the child’s own sake, and here again we hear an echo of that same impulse that allows her to give up her child. Note, too, the ease with which Aristotle moves from talking about mothers to talking about friends, seemingly outside of the familial context. Also, compare with a passage from the EE in which fathers are mentioned because, while they want good things for their children, they do not choose to share their lives with them but do so with others (EE 1240a29–30). 13  See, e.g., the male pigeons who share the females’ birth pains (sunaganaktesis) in HA 613a1. 14 See, e.g., IA 917–18; Pho. 355–6; Tro. 757–60; fr. 1015K as well as discussion and sources in Loraux (1998) 36–9; Foley (1993) 120–3; Dué (2006);  and Holmes (2007) and (2008). 15  Another source of their connection with poets, as Mark Payne has argued, see Payne (2013). Or, as David Konstan puts it, “the afflictions of those nearest to us are perceived as ours rather than another’s” and this would be particularly so for the mother, “his paradigm of natural and selfless love” (Konstan (2001) 50 and 59).

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only in her desire for her child to be, but in her desire to share in the affective and perceptual life of her child to the most intimate degree. Here Aristotle is courting another densely problematic trope, that of the “smother mother” and the shadow of maternal narcissism, figured by the “pantheon” of the monstrous feminine: Scylla and Charybdis, the devouring Laestrygonian queen, Pandora’s unfillable stomach/womb, Clytemnestra’s blood lust, Medea’s rage, etc.16 In the mother’s desire to share the suffering of her children we encounter an un-thematized broaching of an af­fect­ive current that would seem to disrupt the very boundaries and differences the polis is designed to protect. And yet, if we follow Aristotle’s description of the deepest forms of friendship, this is a current that, far from simply destroying political community, creates the conditions for the shared perception that proves decisive for both political community and friendship. We can see the political significance of the mother’s desire to share in the suffering of her children more clearly if we view it in its connection to the intimacies of shared life discussed in Chapters 1 and  2. There we observed the intertwining of shared affect and shared perception in world-building, and observed also that Aristotle’s delving into the deepest forms of attachment and their sources repeatedly produced reminders of human animality. Aristotle’s invocation of the animal in his description of the mother’s desire to share her children’s suffering—his alignment between mothers and birds—is no accident and calls to mind the zoological lens also at work in his Politics, which we traced in some detail in Chapters  3 and  4, as well as the already well-established trope of eliding “the female” with “the animal” hyperbolized in Semonides’ infamous “Females of the Species.” We also noted that the sharing in perception presents a politically salutary complication of a cap­ acity (perception) that humans share with all animals that is sufficiently significant as to mark humans as distinct (Pol. 1253a14–18).

16  A theme well-attested in contemporary scholarship on sex and gender in the ancient Greek world; see, for instance, the now canonical discussions of these characters in Zeitlin (1995), Foley (2001), and the discussion and bibliography in Holmes (2012).

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Aristotle’s comments about motherhood in his account of ­friendship remind us that achieving this partnership requires the oikos as well as the polis, or, perhaps better, it is a particularly vivid example of the interpenetration of the two accomplished in shared rearing customs—shared forms of trophē and paideia—and cultivated by what Aristotle considers to be the most significant dimensions of legislation: legislation pertaining to the production and education of children (Pol. 1337a8).17 It is this shared perception and shared affect that Socrates tries to attain with his dissolution of the private family and the community of pleasure and pain he envisions arising from it. And while Aristotle is explicitly critical of Socrates’ m ­ ethods for attaining this form of sharing, that such sharing be attained he too insists is necessary for a flourishing city, and its absence a clear sign of degeneration.18 Thus, shared affect is politically significant because its connection to the essential actions of community-building—shared life, shared perception, and shared knowledge—indicates that the web of meaning and value by which a polis operates requires not only the shared perception logos makes possible but also a capacity for shared suffering. The political significance of shared affect is made even clearer by its role in the limit to one’s community of friends that shared life marks out, because “it becomes difficult to share joy and pain [to sugchairein kai to sunalgein] intimately with many people, for it is likely to fall to one to rejoice with [sunēdesthai] one and grieve with [sunachthesthai] another at the same time. Probably it is better not to seek to be friends with many people, but however many as are sufficient for sharing life” (EN 1171a10). This applies to the polis as well, both with respect to its greatness19 and its size.20 Shared affect 17  In pointing to this interpenetration I am not claiming that the household as such serves as the paradigm for the polis (for the flaws in this claim see Lockwood (2003), Ceder (2000), and Swanson (1992)), but simply that the household is the first site in the generation of citizens, and the place in which certain attitudes toward what is one’s own first germinate. See also Nagel (2006). 18  See Chapter  2 for an extended discussion of Aristotle’s critique of Socrates on these lines. 19  “For there exists a certain task [ergon] of a city too, so that the city most capable of bringing this to completion is the one that must be supposed the greatest” (Pol. 1326a13). 20  “But there is a certain measure of size in the city as well, just as in all other things—­ animals, plants, instruments: none of these will have its own capacity if it is either overly

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thus indicates an affective envelope within which politically s­ alutary philia generates and grows and outside of which it is destroyed. It proves indispensable to Aristotle’s efforts to mark out both the essential features of the polis—its existence as a partnership in the perception of what is just and unjust—and the fundamental limits of human intimacy and political community. The mother, as Aristotle constructs it, thus seems to stand both inside and outside the polis. Inside, insofar as her attachment to her children provides a particularly vivid example of the shared suffering and pleasure at work in philia. Outside, because of her ability to eschew recognition—and the economy of honor and justice on which a polis depends—for the sake of the well-being of her child. And yet, this outside resonates with the furthest horizon of noble friendships, in which the friend will sacrifice even the performance of noble deeds to his companion. In this sense both the mother and noble friendship mark an outside that is inscribed within the heart of the polis. We should follow this connection a bit more closely.

6.2 Familial Philia and Political Attachment The connection between maternal love and those friendships that Aristotle describes as strongest, best, and most politically salutary— the friendships of the virtuous—is brought out even more vividly in Aristotle’s description of familial philia, from which three orders of loving emerge: the love the parent has for the child, the love small or excessive with respect to size” (7.4.1326a35ff.). According to Aristotle, the problems that seem to arise from private ownership, and that make common ownership seem attractive, arise not from a lack of partnership in property but from “depravity” (mochthērian). But surely depravity is not indifferent to mode of ownership. Indeed, as Aristotle moves on to diagnose the conditions in which manner of ownership gives rise to trouble, he places increasing emphasis on a lack of virtue and on desire. This is evident in his assessment of Phaleas of Chalcedon’s claim that the possessions of citizens should be equal: “For one ought to level desires sooner than property; but this is impossible for those not adequately educated by the laws” (1266b30). He goes on: “Nor do human beings commit injustice only because of necessary things . . . they also do it for enjoyment and the satisfaction of desire . . . The greatest injustices are committed out of excess, then, not because of the necessary things—no one becomes tyrant in order to get in out of the cold” (1267a2ff.). And later, “the wickedness of human beings is insatiable . . . For the nature of desire is without limit, and it is with a view to satisfying this that the many live” (1267b1).

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the child has for the parent, and the love siblings have for one another. It is worth charting in some detail the characteristics of these orders. Aristotle begins by offering a preliminary formulation of the different modes of loving proper to parent and to child: “Friendship between relatives seems to be of many forms, but they all come from the paternal kind; for parents love their children as being something that is of themselves [hoi goneis men gar stergousi ta tekna hōs heauton to onta], and children love their parents as being something from which they come [ta de tekna tous goneis hōs ap’ ekeinōn ti onta]” (1161b16–19).21 Then he marks out a series of differences with respect to the degree of love each one experiences. Parents love their children more than their children love their parents because: a) “parents know what comes from them more than their offspring know that they are from these parents” (1161b19–21); b) “and what begets is more attached to what is from it than ­offspring is to what made it [kai mallon sunōkeiōtai to aph’ hou tōi gennēthenti ē to genomenon tōi poiēsanti], for what comes from itself is its own [to gar ex autou oikeion tōi aph’ ou], as is a tooth or a hair or anything else to one who has it [hoion odous thrix hotioun tōi echonti]; but to that its source is nothing of its own, or only less so [ekeinōi d’ ouden to aph’ ou, ē hētton]” (1161b21–4); and c) “And parents love more in length of time, since they love [stergousin] their children as soon as they come into being, but children love their parents after some time has gone by, when they get understanding or perception” (1161b24–6). Aristotle then observes that “from these things it is clear why mothers have greater love [ek toutōn de dēlon kai di’ a philousi mallon hai mēteres]” (1161b26–7)

21  The entire passage cited here is EN 1161b16–1162a1: οἱ γονεῖς μὲν γὰρ στέργουσι τὰ τέκνα ὡς ἑαυτῶν τι ὄντα, τὰ δὲ τέκνα τοὺς γονεῖς ὡς ἀπ’ ἐκείνων τι ὄντα. μᾶλλον δ’ ἴσασιν οἱ γονεῖς τὰ ἐξ αὑτῶν ἢ τὰ γεννηθέντα ὅτι ἐκ τούτων, καὶ μᾶλλον συνωκείωται τὸ ἀφ’ οὗ τῷ γεννηθέντι ἢ τὸ γενόμενον τῷ ποιήσαντι· τὸ γὰρ ἐξ αὐτοῦ οἰκεῖον τῷ ἀφ’ οὗ, οἷον ὀδοὺς θρὶξ ὁτιοῦν τῷ ἔχοντι· ἐκείνῳ δ’ οὐδὲν τὸ ἀφ’ οὗ, ἢ ἧττον. καὶ τῷ πλήθει δὲ τοῦ χρόνου· οἳ μὲν γὰρ εὐθὺς γενόμενα στέργουσιν, τὰ δὲ προελθόντος χρόνου τοὺς γονεῖς, σύνεσιν ἢ αἴσθησιν λαβόντα. ἐκ τούτων δὲ δῆλον καὶ δι’ ἃ φιλοῦσι μᾶλλον αἱ μητέρες. γονεῖς μὲν οὖν τέκνα φιλοῦσιν ὡς ἑαυτούς (τὰ γὰρ ἐξ αὐτῶν οἷον ἕτεροι αὐτοὶ τῷ κεχωρίσθαι), τέκνα δὲ γονεῖς ὡς ἀπ’ ἐκείνων πεφυκότα, ἀδελφοὶ δ’ ἀλλήλους τῷ ἐκ τῶν αὐτῶν πεφυκέναι· ἡ γὰρ πρὸς ἐκεῖνα ταυτότης ἀλλήλοις ταὐτὸ ποιεῖ· ὅθεν φασὶ ταὐτὸν αἷμα καὶ ῥίζαν καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα. εἰσὶ δὴ ταὐτό πως καὶ ἐν διῃρημένοις. μέγα δὲ πρὸς φιλίαν καὶ τὸ σύντροφον καὶ τὸ καθ’ ἡλικίαν· ἧλιξ γὰρ ἥλικα, καὶ οἱ συνήθεις ἑταῖροι· διὸ καὶ ἡ ἀδελφικὴ τῇ ἑταιρικῇ ὁμοιοῦται.

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and reiterates the mode of loving proper to parent and to child: “Parents, then, love children as themselves (for things that come from themselves, by being separated, are a sort of other selves), while children love their parents as being by nature from them” [goneis men oun tekna philousin hōs heautous (ta gar ex autōn hoion heteroi autoi tōi kechōristhai), tekna de goneis hos ap’ ekeinōn pephukota]” (1161b27–30, my emphasis). He then immediately turns to the third order of loving, that between brothers, adding: brothers love one another by being by nature from the same [ek tōn autōn], since their sameness with them makes a sameness with one another, whence they speak of the same blood or root or such. So they are in a certain way the same, though in divided selves [eisi de tauto pōs kai en diēirēmenois]. And shared upbringing and what is according to age contribute a great amount to friendship [mega de pros philian kai to suntrophon kai to kath’ hēlikian], since it is ‘age mate with age mate,’ and those who are alike in character are comrades [kai hoi sunētheis hetairoi], which is why brotherly friendship is like that of fraternal association [dio kai hē adelphikē tēi hetairikēi homoioutai]. (1161b30–1162a1, my emphasis)

The first two orders of loving that Aristotle identifies here stand in an asymmetrical relationship to one another, stemming from the differing senses parents and children have of one another and themselves. Parents know themselves to be a source more than the child could ever know that it has a source, and thus, the child’s status as child is filled with a sense of mystery about itself, and its love of its parents is tempered with the limit those parents indicate of the child’s sense of what is its own (and its efforts at self-creation and self-preservation). The parents do not belong to the child in the way that the child belongs to the parents, and this is made abundantly clear in the child’s relation to its sibling, with whom the child must share its source. The symmetry between siblings, in turn, is perpetually threatened by the incursion of hierarchy—the eldest, the favorite, etc. And while Aristotle emphasizes here the sameness of siblings, identifying this sameness as a source of their love for one another, we

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can imagine an ambivalence native to this relationship, too, one from which both familial and political dysfunction emerge. The sibling is hated because it reminds the child of its limited claim over the parents, loved because it soothes this very experience of limit by sharing it with another; it is at once a sign of one’s limitations and a consolation for them. A politics based on fraternity will find itself grounded in the perpetual reiteration of this ambivalence. That we are to imagine such a politics is invited by Aristotle’s text, which links the sibling relationship to the controversial institution of fraternal organizations.22 Indeed, it is the sibling relationship that serves to make the most explicit link between oikos and polis in this passage. And yet, Aristotle traces here a shared inner logic to the attachments of parents, especially mothers, to their children and siblings to one another. Each confronts the other as “another self,” a confrontation that serves to connect familial philia to the most noble form of friendship, in which two decent people view one another as other selves. We can now begin to see how the ambiguity of the “other selves” trope that we outlined in Chapter  1 is reiterated at the level of the family, such that we can imagine inflection on the side of the “selves” whereby the other person is encountered as a part of oneself—like hair or nails, states Aristotle—and imagine further that this would be intolerable to the person being viewed in this way. A slightly less instrumental but nonetheless problematic and oppressive version of this inflection would be the encounter with another whereby the other is viewed as a means to see and understand oneself. In any case, both possibilities give rise 22  This is not to elide the friendship between brothers and that between citizens (on the difference, see Lockwood (2003)), but simply to note that the alignment between brothers and comrades translates the fraternal relationship into the political realm. A similar alignment is evident in the Eudemian Ethics: “There is proportional friendship, like that of a father, and arithmetic friendship, like that among brothers. The latter is very close to the friendship among comrades, since they too compete for privileges” (EE 1242a5). A helpful passage on the political significance of these clubs comes from Aristotle’s discussion in Politics 5 of the methods of tyranny established by Periander of Corinth and in use also in the rule of the Persians (Pol. 5.11.1313a36ff.), a discussion we addressed in Chapter 2. But while here heteireiai support high thoughts and trust, at other times they have been seen as more politically insalubrious, as with the implication of Androcides’ heteireia in the infamous defacement of the Herms in 415 bc, and the role of such clubs in the regimes of the Four Hundred and the Thirty Tyrants. They create lines of affiliation and allegiance that can either support or undermine the regime.

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to forms of rebellion proper to them. If we shift inflection to the “other” we could imagine again at least two possibilities. For one, the encounter with another self as an encounter with one who has the same claim to selfhood as myself. And, closely related, an encounter with another with whom I share both an end (becoming good) and means (noble deeds) and each, for this reason, become like one another.23 Given this set of possibilities, the mother’s more pronounced sense of the child as her own has the potential to exacerbate the more tyrannical dimensions of the parental asymmetry of affection. Within this formulation, we can see too how the child’s love for the mother could turn to hatred, to a rejection of the source, of the unmeetable obligation, of the limit placed by it upon what the child can call its own. And from out of this hatred also a kind of longing, a desire for reabsorption, for participation in the generative power that is one’s source, a desire to overcome the separation with one’s source and to become one’s own mother. We shall explore the political implications of this limit in greater detail in Section  6.3. For now, I simply observe that such ambivalence runs across gen­er­ ations and genres in Greek literature.24 To belong to another, to experience a limit with respect to what one can call one’s own residing at one’s very inception—it is, for Aristotle, precisely how one negotiates the boundaries of what is one’s own that forms political communities and deforms them, creates political bonds and breaks them. And while it is up to citizens to contend with this tension, the “other selves” some of them will encounter in their friendships recall the attachment arising from the maternal bond. We can thus read in Aristotle’s formulation of the mother–child relationship the bonds that create the possibility for political community and the ambivalence that threatens them, at once the foundation of the polis and the source of its instability.25 In his understanding of maternal 23  See Whiting (2008). 24  For a collection of ancient Greek sources displaying this ambivalence and the “great anxiety” about the maternal bond and reproductive life, see Hong (2012) 71, as well as Murnaghan (1992), Demand (1994), and Lefkowitz and Fant (2016). 25  Here I am just extending to Aristotle the general argument in Irigaray’s reading of Hegel’s use of Sophocles and the “eternal irony of community.”

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affection we encounter an echo of the natal alienation informing Aristotle’s argument for private ownership. Both accounts include a displacement of maternal labor: in the elision of maternal nutriment with a gift of nature in Book 1, and, here, in the mother’s sacrifice of recognition out of the abundance of her love. Our study in Chapter  5 of “first” property brought to light the matrix of terms connecting maternity with poiēsis and with ownership. We now need to linger a bit longer with Aristotle’s construction of the role of the mother. A certain plasticity accompanies this role in Aristotle’s work, a role that stretches through both extremes of animality, from the mothers of beasts to the divine givers of birth, figured not only in the goddesses Ge, Demeter, Hera, etc. but also, and controversially, in Zeus himself. To some extent this plasticity can be explained by historically specific conditions of childbirth and childrearing. From what we can gather, maternal mortality rates suggest that it would be common for a young woman to marry into a household with very young children from a previous marriage whose upbringing she would supervise; she, in turn, risked handing her own children over to another mother upon her death in labor.26 And, among social elites, the hiring of caregivers who were primarily responsible for a child’s day-to-day upbringing was ubiquitous.27 Indeed, aspects of what I am calling plasticity have already been thematized by Loraux and Ernoult as the plurality of mothers.28 The kind of attachment Aristotle marks out as maternal here could and often did extend beyond the woman who gave birth, even if, as Aristotle suggests, the attachment of the giver of birth is most vivid.29 But we shouldn’t ignore an ideological element here; there is not only an acknowledgement that caregiving duties can be shared but also a sense that women are interchangeable and replaceable, that any one woman holds a place that could at any time and for a variety of reasons be occupied by another. These other 26  For general studies of motherhood in ancient Greece see Demand (1994), Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell (2012), and Lefkowitz and Fant (2016); see also Keuls (1993) for an effort to locate motherhood within broader cultural constructs; and Morris (1987) for estimates of population replacement and maternal mortality rate in the ancient world. 27  See Hong (2012). 28  Loraux (1996) and Ernoult (2005). 29  E.g., Phaedra’s nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus. Note also the practice of surrogate parenting amongst horses that Aristotle observes in History of Animals.

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­ others—stepmothers, nurses, aunts, older sisters, cousins, etc.—fill m Greek literature as both stand-ins for the giver of birth and signs of her erasure. Nor should we ignore the possibility of certain liberating aspects of this plasticity, even if they were not recognized within “official” ideology and fantasy. It is the plasticity that adheres to the role of the mother that seems to account for her exemplary status in Aristotle’s ethics. This plasticity needs to be viewed in the context of larger philosophical and cultural constructions of motherhood, where we find traces of it, for instance, in the surrogate mother and in the trope of autochthony (Ge giving Erechtheus to Athena), where it serves an impulse to deny the human mother. To properly understand Aristotle’s thought on the mother, especially the connection between motherhood, activity, and being, we need eyes trained to see its place in the context of larger cultural constructions of motherhood. Such a project far exceeds what can be accomplished in a single chapter, let alone a section. In the next section, I focus on Aristotle’s position vis-à-vis the dialectical counterpart to the erasure of the human mother, that is, on the Platonic appropriation of the language of reproduction and generativity for philosophy.

6.3  From the Other Mother to the Mother as Other Early on in the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates sketches a portrait of the true-born philosopher whose death represents not something to be feared, but rather the consummation of his life’s passion, moving this passion beyond the realm of philia, of affection for wisdom, to the realm of erōs, to the ardent pursuit of being (see, e.g., Phd. 67e–68b). When he does so, he draws to being the very attachment and anxiety that accompanied the erotic ideal; he entangles his vision of philosophy in a larger cultural poetics that knots and unknots dynamically around a particular vision of hyper-generativity whose earliest representative was the trope of the spontaneously fertile and fecund earth, a maternal model. He thus enmeshes his vision of philosophy in the history of this image, in the play of poetic

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am­biva­lence and mastery whereby female generativity is taken over by a masculine model, where the fertile earth becomes the clod that must be sown, that “calls out for rain” in Aeschylus’ formulation, or the materiality that longs for form, in Aristotle’s.30 The very strength of the efforts to cast this fecundity in masculine terms attest to the force of the trope that they are formulated to replace.31 This is a poetics that proves very useful to Plato, and his own specific intervention is ambivalent and complex. Willing neither to cede the deep pleasures of thinking to a hyperbolic masculinist model, nor to jettison the cultural currency of the bearers of this model, Plato chooses instead to appropriate both those bearers (Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus, Theseus, etc.) and the trope of the fertile earth mother in his portraits of philosophy and the philosopher. He retains the vision of excessive fertility,32 of the source that exceeds all that of which it is the source, the demonic excess that so startles Glaucon, the source of all life and generation, the nurse and nurturer of the soul in the Phaedrus. At the same time, he recasts the traditionally masculine warrior motif in terms of the love of this source—for example, in the Phaedo, he and his interlocutors are like Heracles and Iolus, in the Phaedrus Zeus is the god the lovers of wisdom most resemble. And he does so in order to attract the interests of those young and privileged men who would be asked to identify with these figures, simultaneously arrogating to their Herculean labors the labor of giving birth. “You are suffering the pangs of labor, Theaetetus, because you are not empty but pregnant” (Theaet. 148c, see also 151b), Socrates tells his dubious young friend, a form of labor in which men are filled with pains and ­trouble, “much more than are the women” (151a).

30 Aeschylus, Agamemnon ll. 1602–5; Aristotle, Phys. 192a20–25. 31  Occasionally, we can see the signs of this replacement, as when Socrates figures the power of the sun, the child of the good, as both generator and nurse, as the source of ­generation, growth, and nourishment (kai tēn genesin kai auxēn kai trophēn) (Rep. 509b). 32  Or at least he retains the woman as fertile field trope, but in need of cultivation, see Theaet. 149e: “Do you think the knowledge of what soil is best for each plant or seed belongs to the same art as the tending and harvesting of the fruits of the earth, or to another?” “To the same art.” “And in the case of a woman, do you think, my friend, that there is one art for sowing and another for the harvesting?”

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Plato’s eroticization of philosophy (the lover of wisdom approaches being as a lover approaches his beloved) produces a philosophic obstetrics in which Socrates plays the role of the barren midwife (Theaetetus), bringing to birth the children of soul that are to be more highly valued than children of the body (Symposium).33 Throughout, philosophy is portrayed as fecund, fertile, and philosophic natures, like Zeus, as capable of both being pregnant and impregnating.34 It is worth considering carefully the plasticity that accompanies Aristotle’s characterization of maternal affect in light of this larger philosophical appropriation of maternity. On the one hand, Aristotle here grants a significant degree of agency and potency to the human mother. On the other, even this agency is purchased by a willingness to sacrifice recognition of her status. Or, better, she is willing to sacrifice her status because of the strength of her awareness that the child is her own and the pleasure that accompanies this awareness. That is, she does not require recognition because her pleasure, her delight, stems from the well-being of her child, not the honor paid to her on the part of the child or anyone else. This is so because, even more so than the father, the mother knows the child is her own, even if the child does not. The mother’s privilege, then, is not just hedonic but epistemic. In this, the mother is a better knower, a stronger knower than the father, against all of Aristotle’s many resources geared toward mitigating this difference (e.g., his insistence on the generative element residing in the paternal seed, etc.). But it is also ontological, insofar as the pleasure arising from the well-being of the child, and, given what Aristotle has to say elsewhere about pleasure, the pleasure in the certainty of her knowledge that the child is her own, is also a pleasure in the affirmation of her being that the child provides. At the same time, he sows the seeds of a powerful ambivalence on the part of the child. For the epistemic position of the child is precisely one of uncertainty, that is, the child loves later in time because it takes the child longer to realize whence it came. The 33  See duBois (1994), Irigaray (1994), Brown (1994), Nye (1994), and Halperin (2016). 34  We cannot, of course, elide Socrates himself with the philosophic nature, as Socrates insists that his midwifery is related to his bareness. On the relationship between Socrates and the philosophic natures of the Republic, see Brill (2013).

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child’s understanding of itself as born arrives later than the mother’s understanding of both herself as source and of her child as her own. The child does not know itself to be a child at least for a time, and the dawning realization of its status as child will come into conflict with its sense of itself as its own—that which has come to be loves less than that which makes come to be. The child’s love of its parents as its source is tempered with the limit on its own generative power this source indicates, and we can see how a desire to emulate or even replace this source, a desire to be its own source, might arise. In familial philia, then, we see the outline of a certain existential position with respect to natality that evokes the alienated natality at work in Aristotle’s conception of first property, the position of the child, uncertain of its self and its status as child, a status the understanding of which is in a crucial way prohibited for the child insofar as the child does not, immediately, know its birth or know itself as having been born, as having come-to-be. This is an understanding that develops only with time, in what Anne O’Byrne identifies as the syncopated temporality in which my mother’s labor becomes my birth.35 Contrast this with the position of the mother, whose knowledge of herself as generative is so certain it requires neither the recognition nor the honor of others. In the other superlative character of the figure of the mother we find the desiderative stance that accompanies the epistemic—the desire to meld with one’s proper object, to undergo what it undergoes, and in doing so to further affirm one’s being. Thus, Aristotle’s construction of the maternal bond produces a very particular dynamic: the play between the mother’s desire to secure her child’s existence and the child’s desire to meld with the generative force that is its source; these impulses collide to produce a single reflexive generative power, both other- and self-generating. There are two other moments in Aristotle that echo this position. The first, we have already observed, is the relationship between two

35  O’Byrne (2010) 103.

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virtuous selves.36 But the intimacy the mother desires with her child, to undergo what it undergoes, to be affected as it is affected, to be as it is, reverberates beyond the relation between mother and child, even beyond the closeness of virtuous friends, to the most godlike forms of human activity: it rehearses Aristotle account of the relationship between mind and its proper object, whereby mind, in thinking, becomes what it thinks. Or, as Aristotle puts it in de Anima, “in the case of things without material, what thinks and what is thought are the same” (430a3–4),37 and “knowledge in its activity is the same as the thing it knows” (431a1–2),38 and in the Metaphysics, “thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object of thought, i.e., essence, is thought. And it actually functions when it possesses this object” (1072b20–5).39 To be sure, these are amongst the thorniest and most controversial of lines in the Aristotelian corpus, and have been the source of heated contention for millennia. It would be impossible within the scope of this chapter to wade deeply into the debate between “internalist” and “externalist” interpretations of active intellect, or the long-running discussions of the relationship between active and passive mind, or the theological implications of thought thinking itself.40 My point 36  Aristotle does observe a limit to the sharing of affect between virtuous friends, insofar as the suffering friend wishes to hide his suffering from his friend in order to not share it, while the friend desires just this (see EN 9.11). But this limit serves the larger point that there is something boundary-disturbing in the desire itself. 37  ἐπὶ μὲν γὰρ τῶν ἄνευ ὕλης τὸ αὐτό ἐστι τὸ νοοῦν καὶ τὸ νοούμενον. 38  Τὸ δ’ αὐτό ἐστιν ἡ κατ’ ἐνέργειαν ἐπιστήμη τῷ πράγματι. 39  αὑτὸν δὲ νοεῖ ὁ νοῦς κατὰ μετάληψιν τοῦ νοητοῦ· νοητὸς γὰρ γίγνεται θιγγάνων καὶ νοῶν, ὥστε ταὐτὸν νοῦς καὶ νοητόν. τὸ γὰρ δεκτικὸν τοῦ νοητοῦ καὶ τῆς οὐσίας νοῦς, ἐνεργεῖ δὲ ἔχων . . . (Tredennick translation). In the passage directly following this, Aristotle uses a reproductive image to refute the claims of Speusippus and Pythagoras that what is most beautiful and best is not present in the source of anything: “For the seed comes from other, earlier, complete beings, and what is first is not the seed but the complete being, just as one would say that a human being precedes the germinal fluid, not the one who comes into being from it, but another one from whom the germinal fluid came” (1072b31–1073a3). 40  A recent summary of these debates and helpful bibliography can be found in Miller (2012); see in particular the discussions of active intellect in Burnyeat (1992), (1995), (2002), and (2008), Brentano (1992), Kosman (1992), and Kahn (1992). My own thinking about the relationship between “active” and “passive” intellect in dA 3.5 has been recently spurred by the interpretation offered in Jiménez (2017) Ch. 4.

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here is much more limited. However we may parse Aristotle’s ­comments on “active intellect,” the relationship between thinking and perceiving, and the nature of thought thinking itself, Aristotle frequently places emphasis on thinking as generative: it is in the act of thinking that whatever mind humans possess ac­tual­izes, that thought becomes intelligible, and that knowledge comes to be the object it knows (e.g., dA3.4 and 5, Meta. 1072b20–5, EE 1244b21–1245a10). It is precisely the nature of human thinking as self-sufficiently generative action (as distinct from “merely” productive of external things) that Aristotle emphasizes in Politics 7: “Yet the active way of life is not necessarily in relation to others, as some suppose, nor those thoughts alone as being active which come to be from activity for the sake of what results, but rather much more those that are complete in themselves [tas autoteleis], and the sorts of study and ways of thinking that are for their own sake” (1325b16–21). As Stephen Menn suggests, this may very well be what is gained by describing the divine as alive; namely, the understanding that “its” nous is generative, and perpetually so.41 Of what divine mind is generative—its own flourishing? the cosmos? life? other minds? all of the above?—is, of course, an essential question, but here again my point is simply that any effort to answer this question is well served by attending to the broader context of Aristotle’s thinking about generativity and action and that this must include his account of the active character of maternal love, an activity that occurs alongside the desire for patiency, the desire to undergo what her child undergoes. Aristotle’s account of maternal love must, in turn, be located within the broader intellectual context of appropriating re­pro­duct­ ive capacity for philosophical thinking. The intimacy Aristotle asserts between mind and its proper object pushes further the ­long-running trope in Plato connecting thinking and giving birth, the fantasy by means of which philosophy is figured as a kind of birthing, a fantasy in which as both midwife and as follower of the 41  Menn (2012).

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logos the philosopher both assists in creation and is created, a philosopher’s autochthony.42 The desire of which the maternal bond is a particularly vivid expression, as Aristotle constructs it, is fulfilled by and finds its proper object not in the child but in thought. By these terms, Aristotle expands the connection Plato draws between philosophy and maternity. I want to be quite clear here. I am not claiming that Aristotle, going against almost everything that he says of women, thinks women should or even could philosophize.43 All Aristotle has really done here is taken a commonplace observation about mothers (that they powerfully love their children, wish well for them, and want to save them from pain and sadness) and used it to support a claim about the nature of friendship. I am suggesting, however, that in theorizing the relation between mind and its proper objects, in conceiving of thought thinking itself, Aristotle asserts a form of reflexive generation, and that in doing so he is locating himself within a broader cultural and philosophical trajectory which asserts that in philosophizing we become mothers to ourselves, realizing the fantasy of self-creation. Hence the connection between contemplation and self-sufficiency, a connection that gives rise to the question of whether the happy person needs friends. This is all to say that in his account of the maternal bond, Aristotle traces a generativity that extends beyond the relationship between poet and poem, and even beyond the relationship between virtuous friends, to the relationship between mind and its proper objects. My aim here has been to locate where Aristotle’s account of the maternal bond stands within this larger context. The differing valences by which this intimacy can be taken, the different senses in which one encounters another as “another self,” stretch to both ends of the political spectrum for Aristotle, from the “natural” philia in  the household to the most valued forms of chosen intimacy. 42  See, e.g., duBois (1988) and the discussion of Plato and the feminine in the second section of Tuana’s (1994) collection, especially the contributions by duBois, Irigaray, Brown, and Nye. See also Leitao (2012). See also notes 33 and 34 on Socratic barrenness. 43  While the peripatetic first book of the Oeconomica (1345a6–17) does suggest the possibility of husbands and wives philosophizing (perhaps even together) this hardly mitigates Aristotle’s frequent comments about the moral and rational inferiority of women.

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The ambivalence of the child, in turn, marks out the existential comportment from which the citizen must emerge, able to balance a sibling-like affection for others with the development of a stable individual character. And, as we have seen, this complicated play between intimacy and autonomy is native to Aristotle’s understanding of politics. Difference is an irreducible political necessity; what is equally necessary, however, is the attainment of some form of equality amongst the different, and in many ways the effort to attain this equality is synonymous with the political art. As we saw in Chapter 4, the many pitfalls to such a negotiation, the many ways in which it can go wrong, in which one can fail to properly ac­know­ ledge one’s place and that of others in the political community, are precisely what Aristotle catalogues in his account of the dissolution of regimes in Politics 5, regimes which are unstable on the basis of the error they make in the shared perception of the just and the unjust. In short, the political implications of Aristotle’s account of the maternal bond open up for us the depth of Aristotle’s psy­cho­ path­ ology of political life. What Aristotle’s comments about ­mothers suggest is that underlying the vulnerability we charted in Chapter  5 is a particular hermeneutic stance toward natality whereby what is understood as “me” emerges in the tension between my sense of belonging to others and my sense of what is mine, conceived both as what is most appropriate to me and as what I own. Again, I want to be very clear here. My point is not to defend Aristotle, or obscure or minimize the structural misogyny within which his thinking unfolds. Quite the opposite. Whatever agency the mother might win in this construction is purchased by the sacrifice of her social and political status as mother. If anything, Aristotle’s thematization of maternal generativity makes all the more violent the political appropriation of this generativity that is exemplified in Aristotle’s eugenics legislation, and all the more apparent the irreducible tension between philosophy and politics that Aristotle inherited from earlier thinkers: to treat generativity as the tool of politics conflicts with its treatment as a tool of philosophy and places the political bios and the philosophical bios in antagonism with one another, thereby also solidifying the founding role

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of this tension in the history of philosophy, a role inaugurated by the execution of Socrates for usurping the polis in generating fully fledged citizens from young men.

6.4 Conclusion Perhaps it is worth returning to Nietzsche’s comments about Greek “cheerfulness” and its source in a deep and profound pessimism.44 Perhaps the challenge with which much of ancient Greek literature confronts its audiences is to see that the opposite of life is not death but atrophy. The challenge is to affirm, however imperfectly, however fleetingly, however paradoxically, the sweetness of life without flinching at its horrors, without averting one’s gaze, without wilting. Indeed, to find this very gaze as the source of one’s strength, to resist paralysis and anaestheticization, to refuse the flight from consciousness, and to recover the deep pleasure of thinking as a way of animating one’s actions and one’s political life. But we would be remiss to overlook how this entire approach to human life emerges out of an anxiety about one’s being (the kind of being one is) that cannot be divorced from anxiety about one’s coming-to-be. The twin aspirations of self-generation and complete absorption in the object of thought are two sides of a single solution to this anxiety. And we also must see that, practically speaking, what this “solution” includes is a commitment to the complete political manipulation of reproductive life, perhaps most clearly seen in Aristotle’s eugenics legislation, but implied in the very conception of the work of politics for both Plato and Aristotle, namely, the generation of excellent citizens. When in Plato’s Crito the laws claim for themselves a status that both absorbs and exceeds human parents (50d1–3), or in the Republic philosophic rulers are to determine the proper number of citizen births (a project that is doomed to failure, 546a–547a), or in the Laws legislators are exhorted to do what they can to assure the same number of households via re­pro­duct­ive and inheritance legislation (740b1–d5), or 44  Nietzsche (1967).

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when Aristotle insists on the need for legislating population control and asserts the polis as the owner of citizens (Pol. 7.4 and 7.16; 1337a27–9), we see with particular clarity the conclusions each thinker draws from the alignment of generativity and power. And we can wonder what a model of politics might look like that did not have at its heart the deep ambivalence about human birth we have been charting here, that is, an ambivalence that stems from the repudiation of the ma­ter­ial conditions of human coming-to-be.

Coda Unlivable Life

What is attested to—with striking consistency—in the experiences of women who have found themselves subject to the recent wave of anti-choice legislation in the United States is that neoliberal eugenics is market-based as much as it is policy-based.1 Indeed, one of the most powerful messages to come out of the recent nexus of activism and scholarship on reproductive justice is that, as a tool for measuring oppression, a focus on the politicization of reproduction is empty without a robust analysis of its commodification. Moreover, where women are policed according to the public perception that they are insufficiently attentive to their children, criminally prosecuted for miscarriage, and imprisoned for self-administering abortificants, we encounter a society that has moved beyond the criminalization of pregnancy to the criminalization of the exercise of reproductive agency as such.2 Under such circumstances, to become pregnant, whether by choice or by accident or by assault, is to enter into a zone of simultaneous autonomy fetishization and suspension, a zone in which the amplification of one’s agency is, at the same time and via the intensified policing it attracts, a fragmentation of one’s agency. There are powerful grounds, then, for heeding Ashwini Tambe’s call to renew concerns about “the creeping ascendency of

1  Experiences most recently documented by Ross and Solinger (2017), Ross et al. (2017), and in University of California, Berkeley’s Reproductive Justice Briefing Book: A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change. 2  As evinced by a series of recent events receiving international attention; see documentation and discussion in Paltrow and Flavin (2014), Brooks (2018), and data compiled by University of California, Berkeley law school’s SIA team: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2016/01/SIA-Legal-Team-Infographic-on-Self-Induced-Abortion-.pdf. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Sara Brill, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sara Brill. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198839583.001.0001

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forced motherhood in the U.S.”3 And, as Irin Cameron points out, when we consider a post-Roe America, we must do so not as a return to pre-Roe conditions (in which, relatively speaking, few women were arrested) but in the light of contemporary American practices of mass incarceration and, I would add, the role those practices play in supporting white supremacy.4 The solidarity required to provide effective resistance to these punitive forces must recognize their differential economic, political, and ethical effects across racial and class boundaries. By increasing the precarity of maternity in the U.S., recent efforts to criminalize pregnancy and miscarriage provide an index for measuring the destructive character of what purports to be a “culture of life.” Indeed, they set the question of the political reception of life as such in new light; their analysis requires a shift of attention from the act of choosing to the horizon within which possible choices emerge, and to the structures that limit and define this horizon, lines of inquiry that have been developed and advanced in transnational feminist thought for some time.5 Recently, the scholarly tendency has been to query the political valence of life through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of the zōē/bios distinction in Aristotle, taking as established a connection he suggests between zōē and bare life. The present study has argued that this formulation fundamentally misconstrues the political valence of zōē and bios in Aristotle’s thought and has aimed to open aspects of Aristotle’s thinking that come to light if we set aside Agamben’s construction. I have argued that the commodification of reproduction does indeed have an ancient lineage, and a genealogical precursor in the ambivalence toward natality evident in several strands of ancient Greek culture. Aristotle’s particular contribution to this line of thinking illuminates the degree to which this ambivalence figures into some of the earliest conceptions of human political life. In order to see this, we have returned to the question of life in 3  Tambe (2015). 4  Cameron (2017). 5  E.g., Ginsburg and Rapp (1995) and, more recently, Khader (2018) and Arruzza et al. (2019).

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Aristotle’s thought and to the approach to natality that stands beneath it in order to excavate the notion of zōē that undergirds his political theory and which I summarize below. Emanating from the whole of the heavens, expressed most completely in the divine as the energeia of nous, zōē infuses the cosmos. The lives of animals derive from, cling to, and hang upon its force, some more precisely, others feebly.6 In their heating and cooling, waking and sleeping, growing and diminishing, in their stochastic unfolding, a rough pattern with starts and stops, paroxysm and spasm, paralysis and frenzy, mortal animals live with the everpresent possibility of interruption. These acts of living have their own unique pleasure, one that is intensified by sharing the acts of living with others. Because its expression in living beings takes more or less clear form, is more or less vivid, can be more or less complete, the possibility of having more life is ever-present, and it is this that humans desire, more life, not only in the sense of longer life but also in the sense of more intense living. Intoxicated by the pleasure of perception, mesmerized by the power of contemplation, humans follow the call to more life in a variety of ways: having children, making things, participating in political partnerships, devising ways to free up their time for politics and philosophy. In all of these pursuits, the sharing of life offers the desired intensification; political animals have a greater share in the pleasure of living, and most animals would, if circumstances allowed, tend toward greater sociality with one another. For the human, that most political of animals, the sharing of life includes the sharing of a perception of what is just and unjust that is granted by the possession 6  See dC 279a17–279b3: “It is clear, then, that there is neither place, nor void, nor time, outside the heaven. Hence whatever is there, is of such a nature as not to occupy any place, nor does time age it; nor is there any change in any of the things which lie beyond the outermost motion; they continue through their entire duration unalterable and unmodified, living the best and most sufficient of lives. As a matter of fact, the word ‘duration’ [aiōn] possessed a divine significance for the ancients; for the fulfillment that includes the period of life of any creature, outside of which no natural development can fall, has been called its duration. On the same principle the fulfillment of the whole heaven, the fulfillment that includes all time and infinity, is duration—a name based upon the fact that it is always—being immortal and divine. From it derives the being and life that other things, some more or less articulately but others feebly, enjoy.”

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of logos, and the installation of that shared perception within collective life as the ground of a political partnership. If divine zōē is the energeia of nous, human life is the energeia of logos. Bios marks the occurrence of life in a topos. The task of living in a particular place gives to animals a particular course or manner of life, and these manners vary depending upon the kinds of places. For political animals, the task of living in a particular place requires the work of others of the same kind. The diversity of bioi that characterizes the full field of living being is present in concentrated form in the plurality of bioi from which humans can choose, ranging from various modes of attaining sustenance to the primary ways of hunting for virtue. In the highest heavenly sphere, zōē has a circular route and thus the zōē of a heavenly object is its bios—there is no need to distinguish between zōē and bios. It is in the sublunary realm that it becomes necessary to distinguish manners of life from the acts of living itself, or rather, the diversity of topoi in the sublunary realm specify particular styles and manners of conducting the acts of living. In this realm, if zōē is a circle, bios marks a line. The circularity of zōē is maintained by the perpetual reiteration of life cycles; the linearity of bios approximates this circularity (bends toward it) by including actions that reproduce the kind. In human zōē, political life marks the attempt to mimic the cyclical, unending zōē of the highest heavens by creating a partnership of irreducibly different kinds whose bond begins in the sharing of life and ends in the commission of noble deeds, and which requires a form of expertise that sustains this partnership by ­engineering the perpetual replenishment of kinds and achieving their equality. The intensification of animal sociality in human life finds its zenith in the performance of beautiful deeds and the bloom of pleasure that accompanies them. This is what human life brings to the table; its exercise of the capacity of choice makes possible the selection of actions for the sake of the beautiful. Its nadir lies in the viciousness that political life exaggerates, a viciousness that can bring zōē and bios utterly at odds with one another and bios at odds with itself, that can produce living that is unlivable.

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That is, as objects of choice, zōē and bios speak to a particular way in which the human may be turned against itself, may select a style that threatens its living, and may also simply not choose its living. But here too we must follow through with a difference. For Aristotle, zōē is not quite the same object of choice as bios. While the capacity to choose a manner of life may be hidden from humans in a variety of ways and for a variety of reason—for example, family pressure to live in a certain way makes it seem inevitable and not an object of choice, extreme poverty forecloses the possibility of certain manners of life, etc.—bios remains within the realm of individual choice. Even though deep extra-individual forces limit the horizon of choices, and even though the manners of life themselves are reiterable and finite, Aristotle wants to maintain that the bios I choose will, in some sense be my own. Zōē, on the other hand, as Aristotle constructs it, holds an aspect that is impervious to one’s own choosing. For while I may choose to eat or not eat, reproduce or not reproduce, act or not act, think or not think, I do not choose my coming-to-be, the very conditions under which I am made as a living being, the impulse that animates reproductive life, “which occurs not from intentional choice but— as is also the case with the other animals and plants—from a natural striving to leave behind another one like oneself ” (Pol. 1252a28–30). One might approximate this choice by choosing to continue to eat and drink, by choosing to enact the values of one’s political community, by choosing friends who validate and affirm one’s being, but one’s coming-to-be is not up to one. For Aristotle, the best way of contending with this dimension of human natality is to bring coming-to-be under the umbrella of civic legislation, such that one’s genesis belongs to the polis itself, an entity that exercises its ownership of citizens in a variety of laws, but especially in laws pertaining to the production of human beings, in which it arrogates to itself the creation of zōē as an act of choice on the part of the city, and a civic duty on the part of its residents, who are required to farm out their sperm and wombs as liturgy to the polis. And so, we are back to the anxiety that undergirds the anti-natalist sentiment with which we began, an anxious response to the deep

Coda: Unlivable Life  261

egoic wound that you are not and never will be your own source, that your desire for self-generation will always be ultimately and finally frustrated; and we can observe the monumental amount of philosophical energy aimed toward concealing or combating this frustration. And we can observe the longing that this frustration creates, the natal longing for self-generation, for unity with one’s source, for perpetual action, perpetual generation. Beyond both the Oedipal and the anti-Oedipal, the desire to which Oedipus speaks is the desire to give birth to himself, a desire thwarted by the living, breathing presence of Jocasta, until he “replaces” her role as mother with the role of wife, attempting to subjugate maternity to matrimony up until the point at which she removes herself from the entire framework. And this, in turn, brings us back to zōē as an object of desire. We cling to life, invest it with our love, our erōs, our passion. For Aristotle, what goes under the name of self-regard may very well begin here, with the passionate attachment to life and living. Where coming-to-be has no grounding in necessity, that is, where your life could just as easily not have been, the attachment to oneself that is self-affection or self-regard is necessary to keep you alive once you are, just as your noble deeds are necessary to retroactively justify the extra-individual resources required for keeping you alive and well, resources that include the systemic exploitation of human labor. And from here, we can see how a love of zōē could turn to a hatred of zōē. The seeds of this hatred are internal to this model. Indeed, if there is any beauty in the vision Aristotle offers of the human attempt to replicate divine, circular zōē, this beauty makes all the more terrible the violence on which it rests, the parasitic character of citizen life and human happiness, the exploitation of labor it requires, the contingency of human life and the fantasies designed to console and conceal it, the production of unlivable life for many as the ground on which the flourishing of a few grows. The value in reading Aristotle’s zōē-politics, if there is any, lies in its uncovering of the connection between an understanding of life and a conception of property, between an emphasis on generativity and a structural devaluing of women, and in the sobering reminder that

262  Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

one can develop a detailed theory of justice while still maintaining a constitutive inferiority of women and “barbarians.” What these connections suggest is that effective resistance to these tendencies requires a solidarity formed by the awareness of the oppressive forces that emerge from a refusal to tolerate the anxiety of origin and a flight into a fetishized beginning.

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Index Achilles  88, 236, 247 Aeschylus  21, 25, 35, 36, 85, 148, 207, 247 Agamben, Giorgio  1–4, 7, 9–15, 20, 30, 130, 135, 226, 257 agelē 129 See also herd aisthēsis  50, 166 Ajax 236 animal  1, 2n2, 3n5, 5–9, 10n21, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 28, 30, 47, 72n55, 76, 77, 78, 97, 99, 103, 123, 126, 129, 130, 131, 136, 139–150, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 197, 202, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222, 227, 232, 238, 239n20, 258, 259, 260 animality  2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 27, 28, 77, 99, 122, 125, 126, 129, 135, 136, 137, 172, 175, 196, 197, 204, 220, 238, 245 dualizing 132 humans as  14, 16, 17, 26, 28, 29, 50, 75, 85, 89, 93, 99, 122, 126, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 147, 171, 189, 201, 214 non-human  29, 37, 58, 69, 70, 78, 84, 113, 129, 130, 131, 137, 138, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 200, 230 political  29, 38, 63n43, 75, 93n16, 94, 111, 112, 124, 125, 132, 133, 142, 151, 158, 170, 176, 202 sociality  2, 5, 77, 84, 112, 126, 127, 137, 142, 148, 169, 171, 197, 213, 259 animal life  1n1, 6, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 143, 146, 214 See also animal, animality, zōion anthrōpos  40, 131 anthropology  2n3, 30 ants  63, 129, 155 Apollo 25 archē  89, 188 Arendt, Hannah  7, 22, 30, 133, 135, 174n7, 230n2

aristocracy 178 Aristotle’s works de Anima  3n5, 15, 47, 50, 54, 139, 140, 145, 226, 250 de Caelo 4n8 Eudemian Ethics  3n5, 28, 37, 38, 45, 48, 51, 53, 63n43, 64, 66, 72, 77, 99, 234, 237, 243n22 Generation of Animals  5n10, 161, 228, 230n1 History of Animals  3n5, 28, 63, 94, 130, 131, 137, 140, 141n18, 143, 162n41, 171, 175, 201, 202, 245n29 Metaphysics  4, 7, 48, 54, 58n31, 139, 140, 250 Nicomachean Ethics  30, 37, 38, 40, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 63, 72, 76, 79, 171n1, 232 Parva Naturalia  3n5, 139 astoxenon 36 Athena  24–25, 246, 271 Athens  134, 171, 183, 268, 269, 271, 273 attachment  2, 6, 17, 21, 27, 31, 39, 43, 44, 73, 76, 78, 85, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 115, 125, 134, 175, 186, 200, 223, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 236, 237, 238, 240, 244, 245, 246, 261 Baracchi, Claudia  vii, 42n13 and 15, 70, 263 beast  9, 10, 44, 85n68, 93, 125, 131, 135, 136, 138, 220 bees  129, 137, 142, 152, 155–170, 172, 189 Bianchi, Emanuela  13, 22n52, 203n11, 228n35 biology 12 biological  2n3, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 123, 124, 131, 135, 173n2, 175, 202, 203, 230 bios  3, 5, 10n22–23, 11–20, 26, 28, 29, 30, 91, 123, 131, 136, 137, 141–146, 149, 158, 168, 169, 170–173, 177, 184, 185, 190, 198, 204, 208, 209, 226, 253, 257, 259, 260 Braidotti, Rosi  11

278 Index Butler, Judith  18n43, 51n23 business expertise  101, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 236, 237 cattle  8, 49, 51, 92, 103, 125, 126, 130, 151, 152, 169 Charybdis 238 children  22–25, 31, 37, 44, 67, 69, 71–76, 97, 102–106, 122, 146, 147, 153–155, 168, 169, 175, 194, 195, 197, 202–209, 218, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233–258 See also tokos citizen  2n2, 5, 28, 30, 36, 37, 55, 73, 80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 110, 111, 116–122, 165, 169, 172, 174, 176, 177–179, 183–185, 189, 191–195, 198–201, 204, 212, 213, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 239n17, 240n20, 243n22, 244, 253, 254, 255, 260, 261 citizenry  26n68, 36, 108, 190, 193 Clytemnestra 238 commodification  30, 207, 208, 211, 212, 223, 224, 256, 257 commodity  65, 86, 101, 205 cosmos  4, 33, 197, 213, 215, 223, 224, 228, 251, 258 cranes  129, 153, 154, 158, 169, 170, 172 democracy  26n67, 35, 36, 88, 112, 165, 171, 176, 178, 180, 183, 184, 186 dēmos  180, 182, 183, 190 Derrida, Jacques  10 desire  1, 5, 17, 21, 24, 26, 31, 45, 50, 53, 55, 59, 66, 67, 68, 73, 82, 95, 105, 111, 112, 116, 117, 125, 132, 135, 165, 188, 220, 226, 227, 228, 237, 238, 240, 244, 249, 250n36, 251, 252, 258, 261 dolphins 157 dualizers  13n36, 131, 132, 144 eagles  149, 154, 155 ecology  6, 29, 30, 146, 174, 179, 190, 196 ethics  2n3, 12, 16, 37, 38, 92, 108, 127, 137, 138, 148, 185, 246 ēthos  28, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145, 146, 148, 156, 157, 158, 173, 184, 209 embodiment  3, 7, 13, 26, 34, 142, 196, 204, 210 eubiotos  137, 144, 152 eudaimonia 137

Euripides  16, 17, 207, 234, 237, 245n29 eugenics  21, 27, 30, 142, 169, 202, 204, 223–224, 227, 228, 253–256 eu zēn  98, 113, 124, 137, 144, 220 family  3, 19n46, 28, 36n3, 44, 69, 77, 78, 87, 97, 101, 104, 114, 116, 151, 154, 201, 212, 229, 231, 232, 237, 239, 240, 243, 249, 260 father  22, 35, 97, 104, 105, 106, 168, 184, 207, 229, 243n22, 248 fish  150, 157, 158, 163, 169 Forti, Simona  193n22, 211, 212n20 Foucault, Michel  4, 20n49 friendship  1, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38, 40, 41, 47, 52–54, 59, 61, 64, 73, 75, 76–78, 92, 95, 100, 101, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 116, 124, 125, 134, 147, 148, 149, 150, 186, 188, 196, 202, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 252 virtue  39, 42, 43, 69,74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 92, 115, 124, 232, 240, 243 of use  39, 42 of pleasure  39 toward oneself  45, 66–71, 100 See also philia gamphonuchoi 145 goats  151, 169 gregarious  14, 63n43, 129, 131, 169, 190 Grosz, Elizabeth  5n11, 10n19 Heidegger, Martin  1, 7, 10, 135n11 herd  129, 151, 169, 214 Hesiod  23, 24, 25, 129, 148, 215 Holmes, Brooke  3n4, 10n22, 11n27, 26n68, 32, 93n17, 198n26, 237n14, 238n16 Homer  24n59, 71n53, 97, 129, 134, 207, 223 homogalaktas 97–98 homokapous 97 homosipuous 97–98 hormē  12, 14, 28, 93, 96, 100, 112, 115, 122, 132, 137, 179, 203 horses  75, 103, 152, 153, 197, 245n29 household management  101, 177, 208, 209, 212, 213, 216, 219–221, 226 human life  1, 2, 20, 26, 29, 53, 54, 82, 83, 99, 124, 130, 132, 133, 152, 153n34, 174, 189, 196, 208, 211, 214, 224, 250, 254, 259, 261

Index  279 intimacy  2n2, 5, 6, 28, 29, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 54, 55n25, 59, 60, 70–75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 91, 92, 101, 103, 104, 105, 118, 123, 125, 126, 137, 141, 142, 143, 153, 158, 169, 170, 177, 184, 186, 189, 196, 199, 210, 231, 237n12, 240, 250, 251, 252, 253 kakobios  15, 20, 144 karcharodonta 145 Keyt, David  1, 7, 8, 9, 130, 135, 187n16 koinōnia  40, 41, 79, 98 Kristeva, Julia  11 Kullmann, Wolfgang  2n3, 9n18, 10, 12, 173 kurios 88 language  5, 21, 29, 59, 63, 64, 65, 73, 90, 96, 101, 175, 200, 217, 219, 246 logos  2n3, 13, 22n55, 36, 51, 59, 71, 82, 83, 88, 94, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 166, 171, 175, 176, 189, 197, 239, 252, 259 Marx, Karl  86, 205 master  121, 185, 209, 210, 211, 212, 237 mastery  100n22, 129, 177, 186, 195, 211, 247 maternal bond  7, 30, 56n28, 205, 224, 229, 232, 244, 249, 252, 253 maternity  21–24, 232, 234, 245, 248, 252, 257, 261 matter  3, 8n14, 13, 20, 33, 40, 41, 62, 69, 70, 83, 85, 89, 99, 107, 127, 140, 143, 145, 167, 176n11, 179, 197, 216, 217, 220, 222, 226, 228, 230, 231 material  2, 6, 12, 13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 78, 84, 125, 131, 143, 191, 192, 208, 216, 222, 225, 226, 228, 230, 231n5, 250, 255 McCabe, M. M.  42n13, 53, 58, 61, 62n37, 63, 65, 70, 72, 74, 75 Medea  234, 238 mētēr 230 mind  31, 67, 69, 151, 181, 182, 196, 250, 251, 252 misogyny  27, 34, 148, 253 morphology  142, 144, 145, 166, 170, 172, 176, 213, 214 mother  5, 21–26, 30, 31, 37, 67, 71, 76, 84, 104, 106, 154, 156, 163n42, 165, 201,

204, 205, 207, 223, 224, 229–238, 240, 241, 243, 244–253, 261 motherhood  24, 232, 234, 239, 245n26, 246, 257 See also maternal bond, mētēr natality  6, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 84, 199, 200, 202n7, 204n11, 205, 222, 224, 228, 235, 249, 253, 257, 258, 260 natalism 20 anti-natalism  18, 20 natal longing  6, 19, 30, 230, 261 neoliberal 256 Nietzsche, Friedrich  254 nous  20, 251, 258, 259 octopus 138 Oedipus  18, 21, 261 oligarchy  88, 112, 165, 171, 176, 178, 180, 184, 186, ownership  6, 27, 30, 33, 65, 73, 94, 100–102, 108–110, 125, 194, 195, 204, 209, 211, 216, 217, 223, 224, 227–229, 231, 240, 245, 260 Pandora  23, 148, 167, 238 parents  21, 23, 44, 76, 103, 106, 122, 152, 154, 155, 183, 202, 225, 232, 235, 236, 241–244, 249, 254 philia  26, 38, 40, 44, 68, 73n59, 76, 77, 84, 100, 105, 106, 110, 114, 115, 117, 122, 123, 124, 125, 148, 186, 201, 202, 228, 229, 231n3, 232, 233, 240, 243, 246, 249, 252 See also friendship phronimos  141, 151, 152, 153, 156 Plato  4, 17–20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 33, 44, 45, 55n25, 61, 72, 73, 86, 87, 92n15, 96, 101, 102, 129, 144n26, 165, 168, 169, 175, 193, 200, 201, 216, 229, 231, 246–248, 251, 252, 254 Crito 254 Laws 169 Republic  55n25, 73, 83n67, 86, 87, 92, 101, 102, 109, 110, 165, 176n11, 180, 192n21, 200, 201, 229, 248n34, 254 Phaedo  18, 246, 247 Phaedrus 247 Symposium  61, 105, 231, 248 Theaetetus 247–248

280 Index pleasure  63n43, 79, 116 pleasure in the activities of zōē  5, 20, 41, 46, 50, 51, 53, 57n29, 59, 64–66, 74, 83–85, 201, 223, 254, 258, 259 as way of life (bios)  1n1, 8, 12, 171n1 friendship of pleasure  39, 101 sharing in  36n3, 43, 55n25, 72, 73, 79, 80, 81, 82, 239, 240 in ownership  109, 223, 224 maternal pleasure  248 polemos  130, 143n20 political bond  1, 2n2, 28, 31, 82, 94–96, 101, 108, 113, 114, 116, 125, 133, 158, 169, 176 political expertise  6, 95, 96, 192, 221, 224 political expert  26, 93, 177, 179, 197, 213, 222, 225n31 political life  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 39, 43, 55, 77, 86, 87, 88, 93n16, 99, 112, 114, 120–124, 129, 130, 132–134, 136, 137, 142, 168, 169, 171, 175, 176, 179, 187, 195–197, 202, 204, 205, 227, 229, 231, 253, 254, 257, 259 politics  2n3, 6, 8, 12, 16, 20, 21, 26, 27, 33, 38, 88, 95, 127, 133, 140, 174, 176, 185, 186, 198, 202, 204, 209, 210, 211, 224, 227, 228, 243, 253, 254, 255, 258 polis  2n3, 6, 21, 23, 26n68, 28, 29, 44, 55, 78, 80, 86, 87, 91–99, 105, 109–112, 115, 125, 129, 133–136, 137, 143n21, 169, 170–175, 177, 179, 185, 189, 190, 195, 196, 202, 212, 229, 232, 238, 239, 240, 243, 244, 254, 255, 260 politikē  130, 135n11, 191 politikon  21, 40, 130, 135n11, 173n2-3, 178, 191, 202 politeia  2n3, 20, 29, 86, 87, 90, 91, 95, 102, 110–112, 120, 124, 127, 132, 134, 136, 170–172, 174–179, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 195 praxis  141, 142, 145, 146, 158, 209, 234 pregnancy  145, 256, 257 property  6, 27, 30, 65, 108, 109, 116, 125, 132, 165, 204, 207, 208, 212–214, 216, 223–224, 226–228, 240n20, 245, 249, 261 psychopathology  87, 136, 227, 253

shared life  1, 2, 5, 6, 26–28, 36–38, 170, 238, 239 and philia  39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51–55, 59, 60, 63, 65, 71–73, 79, 82, 84, 85, 148 and politics  87, 92, 98, 110–112, 115, 118, 121, 124–127, 213, See also suzēn Sharp, Hasana  5n11, 10n19 Sissa, Giulia  26n67, 148 slavery  19n46, 24n60, 33, 208, 209 soul  4, 7, 14, 60, 61, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 81, 100, 118, 141, 145, 147, 194, 211, 247, 248 su(n)  36, 37, 62 sunaisthēsis  37, 50, 51, 62, 154 suggnōrizein  37, 54, 62 suntheōrein  37, 60 sumphilosophein  37, 41 sugchairein  37, 67, 72, 239 sunalgein  37, 67, 70, 72, 237, 239 sunēdesthai  37, 72, 239 sunachthesthai  37, 72, 239 sullupeisthai  36n3, 37, 71, 237 sunēmereuein  37, 121 sunētheia  36, 151 suzēn  1, 2, 10n23, 13, 14, 28, 36, 37, 38n6, 40, 41, 49, 53, 54, 59, 60, 67, 83, 84, 85, 87, 91, 92, 94, 100, 102, 107, 110–115, 122–126, 131, 135, 170

Scylla 238 sexual difference  147, 148, 157

Zeus  21, 25, 35, 36, 85, 97n10, 245, 247, 248 Ziarek, Ewa  11n25, 12

Tarentum 157 thumos  100, 101, 117, 118, 148, 192 technē  20, 231 thēlu 230 thērion  9, 135–136, 157 thēriōdēs 135 thēriōtēs 135 tokos  149, 204–205, 218, 227, 228 topos  11, 15, 131, 142–144, 146, 149, 158, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 190, 191, 196, 213, 259 trophē  144–146, 149, 158, 213–216, 239 tyranny  1, 92, 115–122, 125, 126, 165, 171, 178, 184, 186, 243n22 tyrant  89, 115–122, 125, 133, 188, 240n20 vitalism 5n10

Index  281 zōē  2n3, 3–6, 8–15, 20, 26, 27, 28, 33, 42n15, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 94, 123, 124, 129, 130, 136, 137, 197, 198, 204, 208, 210, 212, 257, 258, 259, 260 and bios  3, 10n22, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 257, 259, 260 philo-zōē  20, 261 miso-zōē  19, 20, 261

as object of desire and/or perception  17, 18, 52, 111, 261 zōē-politics  6, 26, 27, 30, 198, 204, 205, 261 zōion  2n3, 3n6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 53, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 142, 143, 147, 177 zoology  2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 28–29, 76, 84, 112, 122, 125, 127, 130–131, 136–137, 139–140, 143n22, 171–176, 195–196, 230, 238