Other Political Animals: Aristotle and the Limits of Political Community

* An early version of this paper was presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. I would like to thank all the participants, especially my co-panelists, Kate Daley and John Sanbonmatsu, and our panel discussant, Laura Janara, for their insightful comments.

Abstract

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the human-animal distinction among political theorists, suggesting a possible sea change in how relationships between animals and humans are understood. Yet despite this interest, Aristotle’s famous dicta that “man is a political animal” and that only “beasts and gods” might live without politics persist as the best-known statements on humans and animals and how they relate politically. This essay draws on Aristotle’s biological writings in order to qualify these statements, outlining two opposing threads in Aristotle’s thought: one where humans are seen to be similar to other political animals and hence capable of sharing in political community, and the second where humans are seen to be unlike other animals by virtue of their relation with the divine. I argue that the problems that inform Aristotle’s way of understanding the similarities and differences between humans and animals and between members of a political community challenge recent theoretical attempts to include other animals in the human political community. 

Notes

* An early version of this paper was presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. I would like to thank all the participants, especially my co-panelists, Kate Daley and John Sanbonmatsu, and our panel discussant, Laura Janara, for their insightful comments.

1. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Random House, 1990); Martha C. Nussbaum, “Beyond ‘Compassion for Humanity’: Justice for Nonhuman Animals,” in Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006); and Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and The Open, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. George Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. George Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

3. All references are to Aristotle’s Politics (Pol.), trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 1253a1–6, 1253a24–30, and are hereafter cited in the text. Indeed, Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), opens with the claim: “The whole of the Politics thinks through the meaning and implication of the idea that human beings are political animals” (1).

4. All references are to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (NE), trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1097b11, 1162a16–19, and 1169b16–19, and are hereafter cited in the text.

5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 27; Alkis Kontos, “Domination: Metaphor and Reality,” in Domination, ed. A. Kontos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 214; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 550; Jacques Rancière, Dissensus, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 37, 92, 206. Opposing this trend, see David J. Depew, “Humans and Other Political Animals in Aristotle’s History of Animals,” Phronesis 40.2 (1995): 162, and Carnes Lord, “Aristotle’s Anthropology,” in Essays on the Foundations of Aristotelian Political Science, ed. Carnes Lord and David K. O’Connor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 53.

6. Aristotle, “History of Animals” (HA), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume One, the Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 488a6–10; translation modified; hereafter references to HA are cited in the text. Both the Oxford Revised Translation and A. L. Peck render politika as “social.” On the problems of conflating the social and the political for understanding Ancient Greek thought, see Arendt, The Human Condition, 22–38.

7. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 299, 318.

8. Wolfgang Kullmann, “Man as a Political Animal in Aristotle,” in A Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. David Keyt and Fred D. Miller Jr. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 96–97.

9. Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, 27, and The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 338–39, 349.

10. Aristotle, “On the Soul” (OS), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume One, 402a6–7; Cf. in the same volume: “Parts of Animals” (PA), 641a28–31; “Sense and Sensibilia,” 436b12; “On Sleep,” 454b25; “On Youth, Old-Age, Life and Death, and Respiration,” 467b24; “Generation of Animals” (GA), 778b33–34; hereafter references to OS, PA, and GA are cited in the text.

11. For other similarities Aristotle discusses in his biological writings in comparison to Darwinian accounts, see Larry Arnhart, “Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals,” Social Science Information 29.2 (1990): 477–557.

12. Jean-Louis Labarrière, “Imagination humaine et imagination animale chez Aristote,” Phronesis 29.1 (1984): 22.

13. Aristotle, “On Memory” (OM), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume One, 449b28–30; hereafter references to OM are cited in the text.

14. Cf. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 12–13, 36. Though Sorabji argues that Aristotle denies opinion (doxa) to other animals, based on the apparent relation between opinion, belief (pistis), and reason (logos) sketched in OS III.3, it seems that what Aristotle is describing there is not so much the capacity for opinion as such, which may indeed include other animals, but the particular way in which humans form opinions.

15. Contra Stephen Clark who maintains that “beasts” cannot make “semantic sounds of a distinguishable sort.” Stephen R. L. Clark, Aristotle’s Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 23.

16. At 263d of the Statesman, trans. J. B. Skemp, ed. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), Plato’s Eleatic Stranger also speaks of the crane as being phronimon, suggesting it may have been a commonly held view. However, Aristotle’s account of capacities such as imagination, memory, and voice could serve as a philosophical basis for such views. We might liken this to what Martha Nussbaum refers to as Aristotle’s attempt to philosophically “save” appearances and the ordinary. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 242, 260.

17. Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 51–53.

18. On the antinomies of nature and law, see Cornelius Castoriadis, “Value, Equality, Justice, Politics: From Marx to Aristotle and from Aristotle to Ourselves,” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): 260–339.

19. See Patchen Markell, “Tragic Recognition: Action and Identity in Antigone and Aristotle,” Political Theory 31.1 (2003): 6–38, and Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 3; Cf. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 382.

20. He does, however, come close to this thought. See Pol. 1281b15–20.

21. For differing interpretations of the Ancient Greek understanding of agency specifically in terms of the ‘voluntary,’ see Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 2, and Victoria Wohl, Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

22. Aristotle, “Rhetoric,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, the Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1374a36–37; hereafter cited in text as Rhet.

23. Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal, 143–44.

24. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, 980a21–27; hereafter cited in the text as Meta.

25. Cf. Victor Caston, “Aristotle’s Two Intellects: A Modest Proposal,” Phronesis 44.3 (1999): 215–16; see also 211–12, 224. Despite these interpretive differences, Caston’s argument does not detract from the points I am highlighting here and subsequently.

26. Lloyd P. Gerson, “The Unity of the Intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima,” Phronesis 49.4 (2004): 370.

27. This is not to suggest that deliberation is completely separable from desire. Nussbaum points out that deliberation is a form of desire, and desire is involved in all animal movement. See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 275.

28. Here again Aristotle uses the word therion, this time to describe the creature without trust. Unlike the occurrence of therion in the passage noted above, here it seems possible to substitute therion for zoon without major problems, as Aristotle makes pistis dependent on other intellectual powers he holds to be unique to humans.

29. Recall, Aristotle, Pol. 1281b15–20.

30. For an account of Aristotle as an anti-democrat, see Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), chap. 5.

31. Nussbaum even entertains the idea that the passages in Book X of the NE where Aristotle extols the contemplative life as highest were inserted by a later editor. See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 377.

32. Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Josiah Ober, “Aristotle’s Natural Democracy,” in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2005); Steven C. Skultety, “Competition in the Best of Cities: Agonism and Aristotle’s Politics,” Political Theory 37.1 (2009): 44–68; Jeremy Waldron, “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book III, Chapter 11 of Aristotle’s Politics,” in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays ed. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2005).

33. Nussbaum, “Beyond ‘Compassion for Humanity’,” 328, 350.

34. Nussbaum, “Beyond ‘Compassion for Humanity’,” 362.

35. Nussbaum, “Beyond ‘Compassion for Humanity’,” 361.

36. On the arbitrariness of biological “complexity,” see Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 17.

37. Nussbaum, “Beyond ‘Compassion for Humanity’,” 371.

38. Stephen R. L. Clark, “Apes and the Idea of the Kindred,” in The Great Ape Project, ed. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

39. Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 33, 31, 25, 30–33, 38.

40. Wendy Brown, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights,” in Left Legalism/ Left Critique, ed. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 431.

41. Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 115.

42. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 602–3.

43. Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality, trans. Howard Rouse and Andrei Denejkine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 193; Cf. Christoph Menke, Spiegelungen der Gleichheit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 175.