Thomas L. Pangle - Aristotles Teaching in the Politics

Thomas L. Pangle is the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieus Spirit of the Laws.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01603-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01617-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pangle, Thomas L., author.

Aristotles teaching in the Politics / Thomas L. Pangle.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-01603-0 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-01617-7 (e-book) 1. Aristotle. Politics. 2. Political sciencePhilosophyStudy and teaching. I. Title.

JC71.A7P37 2013

320.01'1dc23

2012036971

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

Aristotles Teaching in the Politics

THOMAS L. PANGLE

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London

INTRODUCTION

Aristotles Teaching in the Politics: this title announces, in a fuller way than at first appears, the present books distinctive approach. For teaching is meant in a twofold sense. This studys leitmotif is that the political-philosophic substance about which Aristotle seeks to educate us cannot be disentwined from the artfully educative activity in which Aristotle is engaged, and into which he seeks to draw us, throughoutan enactment which he presents as a model of how a political philosopher ought to teach, in lecturing and in writing. In other words, Aristotles public theorizing about political practice is a highly self-conscious form of political practice, of intervention in political life. We cannot learn the most important lessons the philosopher seeks to teach, about both political theory and political practice, and about the fraught relation between theory and practice, unless we maintain a constant attentiveness to the politic and exemplary manner in which he reaches out to, and enters into dialogue with, potential studentswho he knows to be of varying abilities and needs, and embedded in or contending with divergent and clashing regime-contexts. Previous modern scholarship has for the most part failed to understand the sinuously instructive path of the Politics because interpretation, with rare exceptions, has not recognized nor risen to the challenge of the philosophers psychologically subtle and multi-level, playfully serious and civically responsible mode of educative communication.

THE CHALLENGE OF INTERPRETING ARISTOTLES LECTURES

The rhetorical form that Aristotle chose to employ for his written communication, in that portion of his writings that has come down to us in nonfragmentary condition, was the lecture (akroasis), revised for publication as a treatise and yet, we learn from him that knowing much gives occasion for doubting more. One sees him often deliberately covering himself with such thick and inextricable obscurity that one cannot pick out anything of his opinion. It is in fact a Pyrrhonism under an affirmative form (cf. Robinson 1995, 70). Pascal, in his assessment of Aristotles political writings, was not so extreme. But in the course of rightly insisting that scholars tend to be blind to Aristotles (and Platos) subtly and richly comic turn, at least in their political-philosophic writings, Pascal was led to suggest that Aristotle (as well as Plato) had in the end no serious political theory: When Plato and Aristotle amused themselves by composing their Laws and Politics they did it for fun. It was the least philosophical and least serious part of their life. Indeed, it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to speak of it as if of a great thing, it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to moderate their madness so as to make it as little harmful as possible (Penses no. 533, in Pascal 1963).

These characterizations of Aristotles manner of writing by thinkers and writers of the first rank provide a much-needed corrective to a great deal of contemporary scholarly interpretation. Yet these appraisals are, in my judgment, (deliberately?) one-sided. Aristotle, I mean to show, has constructed his text in such a way thatif the puzzles he has placed on the surface are taken seriously and then wrestled with, in good-humored doggedness, so that we become his partners in the dialogue that Aristotle means to draw us intowe are put on a trail that leads away from skepticism. The path leads to an eventually purified knowledge of the nature of politics as shaped by the aspiration to virtue (the originary social science that was called for by Husserl 1965, 93). And that knowledge, for all its jocosity, has implications of the utmost seriousness for human existence.

The methodological digressions that Aristotle has inserted in the first few pages of his Nicomachean Ethics provide illuminating, if somewhat Delphic, clues as to the didactic nature of his lecturesand as to the multilevel audience he conceives as the intended or envisioned recipient. His first digression on method Instead, he adds that the good things also have some such variability (he does not say the good things elicit any such disagreement as do the just and noble, nor that the good things seem to exist only by convention and not by nature). The variability in the good things that he has in mind he specifies as follows: Harms to many people result from the good things: for some have been destroyed on account of wealth, and others on account of courage. Therefore, two things are very desirable. First, in speaking about such things and on the basis of such things, to show the truth [only] roughly and in outline (the exact truth, as a good thingthe exact truth about the just and the noble, perhaps especially the exact truth that emerges from an investigation into the great disagreement the just and noble containmay be harmful to some or to many). Second, in speaking about things that apply only mostly, and on the basis of such things, to draw conclusions of that [same] sort. The philosopher goes on to indicate that in speaking thus he will offer something closer to the persuasive speech one accepts from an artful rhetorician than to the demonstrations one requires from a mathematician: such a very imperfect degree of precision is what the peculiar nature of the business [pragma] displays. In a subsequent explicit repetition (NE 1098a2631), the philosopher characterizes his writing on morals by comparing it to what is of moment to a carpenter, in contrast with a mathematician: both seek what is right [orthen], but the former to the extent useful for the task, while the latter seeks what it is; or what sort of thing it isbecause he is a contemplator of the truth. Aristotle thus prods us to see that in his moral and political writings his concern to be a contemplator of the truth must be considerably alloyed by practical concerns.

The other major point that Aristotle makes in his first methodological digression is an admonition (which is not without its comic aspect) concerning the audience whom he has in view first and foremost. He in effect sets the scene in which we must imagine the succeeding lectures taking place. A young man, he declares, does not belong in this audience. Young men should leave, or should read no further. The proper audience comprises those among their elders who will judge nobly becauseunlike some of their peers, as well as the youngthey have the kind of unscientific knowledge (