Abstract

Aristotle's Politics: Living Well and Living Together, Eugene Garver's third book on key texts of the Aristotelian corpus, charts the relationship between politics and philosophy through careful detailing of Aristotle's text. In other words, Garver reads the Politics for us. This is an achievement in itself given the gravity of both Garver's and Aristotle's thinking. Garver's reading elaborates the arguments of the Politics in order to establish a claim for what he calls “political philosophy.” His reading offers a methodological defense for a form of thinking that is itself not necessarily either “practical” or “political,” at least as scholars of rhetoric would tend to understand these terms. But Garver gives us a clue to his understanding of political philosophy when he describes Aristotle's “most impressive achievement” in the following way: The Politics “shows how to construct a constitution and a way of life ethically superior to the citizens who comprise the state” (3). Garver thus reads the paradoxes of politics and philosophy as generative rather than aporetic, seeking in the Politics something more than the mere realization of the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that the regime (politeia) is the container in which the bare life of the individual is transformed into the life of a citizen.Garver situates political philosophy through a logic of praxis that implicates statesman and citizen in starkly different registers. Politics is not just about the one but also the many. While this statement may be a truism of the Rhetoric, Garver takes up the Politics in order to articulate the question of the many in a way distinct from a certain rhetorical conception of politics and political practice. Garver brings to bear a political philosophical vocabulary that is guided by the statesman (politikos) rather than the citizen (politeis) or judge (kriteis). The statesman will utilize rhetoric as a practice, as Garver notes, but it is far from clear that the statesman is meant to approach political philosophy from a rhetorical perspective. Garver marshals a series of distinctions highlighting Aristotle's unique conceptualization of the polis, a structure straddling the disjunct between artificial and natural forms of being. This conceptualization figures the polis as both artificial and natural but will come to be understood by Aristotle, according to Garver, through the terms of political philosophy. Chapter 1 deals with the “natural” relationship between master and slave memorably defined in the first book of the Politics. Taking up this “most notorious feature” of the Politics, Garver argues that the concept of natural slavery is not so much a prescription but a description: it is a way to delineate the features of politics and to distinguish them from other forms of relation, such as the family (oikos). In contrast to those modern commentators who focus on Aristotle's references to “natural” slaves, Garver argues that Aristotle's primary concern is actually with the master (despotes), who is unique in that his capacity (dynamis) extends into two tasks rather than being confined to one: first, the administration of inferiors (slave ownership) and second, participation with equals (politics): “The same person is both master and citizen,” Garver notes, and “the principal problems of politics… come from that fact” (26). For Aristotle, Greeks are both uniquely suited for political life and uniquely susceptible to the desire for domination and tyranny (27–28; 33). The drive toward mastery characteristic of the despotes also characterizes the Greek citizen more generally.If the Greeks, whom Aristotle celebrates as the only ethnos capable of meaningful citizenship, are also the only ‘natural despots,’ then politics calls for a structural response to this excess (pleonexia): “Slaves have the wrong nature…. Despots have the right nature, and yet still degenerate without… proper political circumstances” (33). This claim's double-sidedness positions politics not just as a possibility but also as a deep and persistent problem that political philosophy is enlisted to solve. Both sophistical rhetoric (Rhetoric 1354a10–30) as well as the individual and social forms of the polis, then, have a capacity for misrecognizing the sources of political legitimacy. Political philosophy, rather than rhetoric as an “art of character,” as Garver's previous book on the Rhetoric describes it, becomes the response to this problem of politics.Aristotle's Politics relies on the interplay between the search for proper political circumstances and a certain conception of the human. Thus the Politics appeals to a variety of characteristics of the human being, including philia (friendship) and thumos (spiritedness). But these human characteristics become a call for a mode of cognizing and organizing the forms of life that exist within the polis (34–37). The polis, it seems, does not constitute but rather only expresses the relationship of spirit, knowledge, desire, and virtue. Aristotle describes, taxonomizes, and interweaves these concepts. For example, as Garver notes, “You need both thumos and intelligence to be guided to virtue. The conclusion, but nothing leading up to it, talks about virtue. They are connected through citizenship. Without thumos and intelligence, one cannot be political. Without being a political animal, one cannot be guided to virtue. And conversely, only people who can be guided to virtue are fully political animals” (36).These distinctions are crucial to Garver's emphasis on the relation between Aristotelian politics and the logic of political philosophy, which calls for a politics structurally irreducible to economic contract, instrumental rationality, or individual liberty (37–41). Making political societies coincide with the nature of its individuals is not Aristotle's task, as it was for Plato. Such a task is incoherent for Aristotle's polis—a community made up of different elements linked only by constitution and citizenship. Garver notes Aristotle's recognition of the community's inherent diversity, both in its definition (i.e., that a polis is made up of different parts rather than single essences) and its composition (the a polis contains good and bad, strong and weak, few and many).Garver takes up the Politics' discussions of property and education to distinguish Aristotelian politics from its Platonic and modern variants. The moderns and Plato take opposing sides on property: for moderns, private property is the sine qua non of the well-ordered community; for Plato, it signals its absolute disunity. Aristotle takes up the space between the two, arguing that each side commits a political category error. Aristotle, Garver reminds us, “sees no right to private property”; its virtue lies in its use, not its possession (50). Against Plato, Aristotle sees public use of private property as a method for bringing people of different kinds together under the name of the political community, which imbues them with common purpose (49–50). This common purpose leads to a discussion of education: temperance, generosity, and “the virtue of liberality” (51–52). Education is crucially communal; it highlights “what people must share” (53). It reframes self-sufficiency, changing greed to generosity, arrogance to humility, and selfishness to sharing: “Self-sufficiency is redefined when we add liberality to temperance, transforming it from economic to ethical and political self-sufficiency” (57). This type of self-sufficiency is misrecognized; it is a basis for Aristotle's critique of Plato—“even Plato neglected education,” Garver says—and his description of the constitutions (55–56).But education is not a comprehensive good. For Aristotle, it is a quality that follows from constitutional design and the more narrow education of political philosophy. Garver's argument is predicated on a turn to the philosophical understanding of the political constitution. The shift brings us to the ground of praxis, wherein rhetorical scholarship might find itself more—for Garver, too—confident. This ground is the move from politics as techne—whose paradigm is the externalizing viewpoint of the Republic—to politics as phronesis (56; 58–63). Garver describes this shift in political understanding as “from making to doing…. The state cannot be a work of art” (45). The state's—particularly the ruler's—task is not to make the relation between ruler and ruled by “form and matter” (i.e., to posit political equality irrespective of practice) but to instill “self-replicating” virtue, whereby “we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions” (56). Here, the form of the polis–especially its constitution—tends toward a theory of right rather than toward a theory of the good. Garver insists that this recognition of right over good in politics is not due to the modern “fact of pluralism,” á la Rawls. Instead, it has to do with the aims of the polis, which are distinct from (though related to) the aspirations of a virtuous man, who aims toward individual good (57).Hostile to the modern division between the public and the private, Garver argues that for Aristotle, “civic participation never means casting aside and bracketing one's particularity. We never leave behind life in pursuit of the good life” (57). The modern argument views the good life as unencumbered, starting with Locke and Mill through to Rawls's justice as fairness. In contrast, Garver argues Aristotle offers us a different wager: it “encumbers” us with an aim toward the good life, while “unencumbering” us by refusing the “alienation” internal to distinctions of public and private (57–58). What emerges, for Garver, is a “comprehensive” view of political action affirming the relevance of “self-regarding”—private—activity.Arguing for the polis as a complex yet common conceptual form, Garver pins the “comprehensiveness” of an Aristotelian politics to a set of “incomplete” definitions that often appear circular, such as “citizen,” “constitution,” and “state.” In calling the normative basis of politics “incomplete,” Garver's intention is not so much to reconcile Aristotle's thinking with the basic problem of multiplicity as to affirm that the Politics can be seen as part of the political philosophical project of living well. For Garver the incomplete character of the polis is not a damning indictment of the relationship between ethics and the commons (koinon). Unlike in the Ethics, where a single good life is defined (and all others dismissed), in the Politics, Aristotle presupposes plural constitutional arrangements: These “disagreements and errors generate the variety of constitutions, including good constitutions…. There is no ambiguity for Aristotle in the question of… the good life,… but from book 3 on, the Politics exploits the ambiguity in how good a good constitution must be” (70).From here out, Garver's text largely oscillates between varied forms of description: political, philosophical, and even at times rhetorical. But these descriptions imagine only a certain kind of statesman as their audience—perhaps even a certain kind of esoteric thinker. In chapter 3, Garver runs into the problem of political definition—or put differently, what he calls the basic “incompleteness of the normative” in the reading of Politics 3 (66–106). It is Aristotle's unique genius that he is able to smooth the discrepancies in form and function between constitutions, highlighted in Politics 3 and 4, into a justification for political philosophy (69–70; 73–76; 92). A certain form of thinking on political deliberation follows once the analysis of constitutions is wrested from the singular focus of the good ethical life (70). “Political philosophy can occur in the rest of the Politics once Book III has freed space for deliberation by showing how constitutional form has no natural or inevitable ties” to the other causes or ends of poleis (73). Such a statement allows Garver to retroactively intervene into the debate over what constitutes good constitutions in the plural. “The three true constitutions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ‘polity,’ have the same end, the good life. Yet they are different constitutions” (74; see 73–76). But it does not allow us to intervene into the question of the good life—and it only obliquely allows us access to a discussion of the good polis. The discussion of good constitutions thus thinks “a different kind of incompleteness,” namely, “the indeterminacy within each formula” of constitutions (91; see also 83–97). For Aristotle, both good and bad constitutions share a similar principle or “formula of justice.” They do so because Aristotle separates “two independent variables, who rules and for whom, while in the Republic those two were tied together” (85; see also 79–83). In the case of political communities, then, form (of the constitution) does not immediately line up with function (the good life of citizens); they are defined by cross-reference, not through a single or ultimate reference (77, 93). Crucially, it is both possible and necessary that the polis achieve a dignity that is separate from and that ranks above the dignity of its citizens.There is some slippage occurring here between polis, citizen, and constitution, and Garver highlights this slippage to guide us toward political philosophy (92–97). These slippages begin with the comparison of political and despotic natures and continue in the movement from the citizen to the constitution. The effect of such slippages is perennial problems for understanding the relation of rhetoric to politics. For Garver, political philosophy appears a preferable substitute to trying to sort out this relationship, satisfying the need for judgment (phronesis) while providing a way to think about the practical distinctions between good and bad constitutions in conditions where we live with “the impossibility of directly enacting the good” (97). What Garver calls the “politicization” of politics in book 3 turns out to be the study not of citizens and their virtues (or vices) but of poleis and their limited principles of justice. This is because it is the relationship between rule and principle that defines a polis rather than the relative virtue or vice of citizens (77–80). Indeed, citizenship is not, in the final examination, a question of virtue: “The purpose of citizenship surprisingly has nothing to do with the purpose of man and of the state, to live well. The function of citizens is to preserve the constitution” (80). Garver thus ties political theory to political philosophy by highlighting politics' artificial rather than natural means: it is “primarily aporetic and formal. It clears space for deliberation and makes politics autonomous” (105).To wit: “Politics III is political philosophy, carefully keeping to what political philosophy can achieve, and leaving to statesmen what is appropriate for statesmen” (103). The autonomy of politics seems prestructured by Garver's conception of political philosophy as “deliberation over the forms and functions of government” (70). Political philosophy also prefigures the rhetorical praxis of the statesmen, which Garver sees as the practical usage of reflections leading statesmen to both formulate actions and engage in persuasion. “The Politics presents dialectical arguments; in particular circumstances they become rhetorical arguments that require political, not philosophical, judgment” (104). This judgment will call for repackaging the framework of rhetorical persuasion. Garver's framing highlights for readers the obvious difficulty of reconciling philosophical with political being in many the aim of Aristotle's Politics. Garver's reading a between three forms of first, second, persuasion. in these is how Garver the relationship between political philosophy understood as a only the of the statesman and rhetoric understood as a not just the but also the judgment of the practical becomes the method by which the of phronesis in the with the inherent in the nature of politics. 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