Aristotle’s deployment of the notion of need seems a good deal less critical than Plato’s in the Republic. Aristotle, to put it bluntly, just offers us assertions about what is natural - and not especially convincing assertions. It would be nice to be able to say that these assertions were at least well rooted in Aristotle’s philosophical biology. But as my close look at Politics 1252b28-36 has already suggested, honesty compels us to regard them as little more than bolt-on additions to his serious science.
Plato, by contrast, does not offer us mere assertions about need; instead, he offers us an explanation of why such assertions cannot establish much even about, say, the kind of family structures that are genuinely needed in the good state. A passage we have already touched on, Republic 369b-372e, demonstrates this by working out, more as a step in the dialectic than as anything like Plato’s own considered view, a simple outline account of the good city the development of which is explicitly driven by the (commonsense) notion of need: ‘‘What will make the city, apparently, is our neediness’’ (he hemetera chreia, Resp. 369e8). This ‘‘city of pigs’’ is contrasted at length with the truphosa polis (372e4-373e6), the city which goes beyond ‘‘the limit set by our needs’’ (373e1) and is therefore exposed to the greatest evils that can come to states, including war (373e3-7). How then are we to locate the true limit set by our real needs?
Plato pointedly does not answer this question. He moves on, instead, to discuss the nature of the good soldier (374a-d), and then the nature of the good ruler and his education - the discussion that takes us into the heart of the Republic’s concerns. The point of this significant silence is that, at this stage of Plato's inquiry, there is no way to fix the boundary between our true and our merely apparent needs - any more than a good response to the Real Life Objection could begin by just asserting a demarcation between what is and what is not really ‘‘Real Life.’’ At 373e it may seem to Socrates and Glaucon and Adeimantus that the development of the luxurious city out of the city of pigs is as inevitable and indeed as ‘‘natural’’ as any other development. Plato is, of course, convinced that it is neither inevitable nor natural. But he does not think that he can prove that simply by stipulating a content and scope for the notion of need. To show it, he thinks, requires a journey to a viewpoint on philosophy that will change the way we look at everything:, namely, the journey to the Form of the Good that the central books of the Republic take us on. There can, for Plato, be no ideologically innocent account of need, any more than there can of‘‘Real Life.’’ To a Platonist, Aristotle’s attempt to help himself to one must seem at best naive.
Aristotle’s use of the notion of self-sufficiency is equally exposed to objections. The guiding idea of the argument is that a natural limit to political development has been reached when we arrive at the point where human living becomes self-sufficient. Now for something to be a self-suffident unit in Aristotle’s sense is for it to be able to provide, by itself, for all its own needs. So clearly the objections to Aristotle’s notion of need that I have just raised are also objections to his notion of self-sufficiency. But that is not the only or even the main difficulty about Aristotle’s notion of selfsufficiency. That notion is hopelessly unclear anyway - and unclear in both directions, so to speak.
In the one direction (toward smaller units than the polis), Aristotle is famous for saying that the life of contemplation is self-sufficient: ‘‘he te legomene autarkeia peri ten theeretiken malist’ an eie’’ (Eth. Nic. 1177a27-8). So it is his own view that the individual human can be self-sufficient. Aristotle’s adherence to this view is not restricted to the Nicomachean Ethics: the Eth. Nic.’s package of views about the contemplative life is briefly reaffirmed at Politics 1325b17-22. So either Aristotle should have accepted that the truly self-sufficient unit was not the city-state but the (enlightened) individual; or he should have further explained his notion of self-sufficiency in order to show how it fitted the polis better than the individual.
We could respond that there is a distinction between personal and political selfsufficiency: the ideal of self-sufficiency that is achieved by the contemplative individual is one sort of autarkeia, the ideal that is achieved by the teleia polis is another. But this suggestion merely prompts the question ‘‘Why just these?’’ If there can be two Aristotelian ideals or notions of self-sufficiency, why not three (perhaps counting as the third the self-sufficiency of a world trade-system - more about that in a minute)? Why not four, or five, or as many as you like?
Going in the other direction (toward larger units than the polis), international trade was hardly an unknown phenomenon in Aristotle's day, and not all of it was trade in unnecessary luxury items. Thus every polis in Aristotle’s famous collection of constitutions will have been a polis that was not, economically, a self-sufficient community. So either Aristotle should have accepted that the truly self-sufficient unit in politics was not the city-state but the international trading community of city-states and other states (including Egypt, Persia, Carthage, China? And the states that traded with them?); or else he should have further explained his notion of selfsufficiency in order to show how it uniquely fitted the polis.
Perhaps Aristotle means that the polis is the terminus of a natural process of development because it is the smallest self-sufficient political unit - rather as, in the metaphysics of the Categories, individual substance is the least abstract and most concrete thing to which predicates can be applied ( Categories 2a34-6). This suggestion, like the parallel suggestion in metaphysics, merely prompts the question ‘‘Why stop there?’’ We have been given no argument that the natural process of development is completed when we reach the smallest viable self-sufficient state. Why couldn't someone retort that the natural process of association goes on beyond the level of the polis, and that these smallest possible states are themselves merely raw material for an ever wider union - such as, to give one obvious example, Alexander's empire? (There is a well-known irony in the idea of a ‘‘resident alien'' philosophy professor, sitting in Athens writing out an eight-book defense of the Greek city-state as exemplified by Athens, just as his most famous pupil Alexander was busying himself with the final and permanent destruction of the Greek city-state in general, and the Athenian city-state in particular.)
Aristotle says something about this second objection at 1280a25-b10. The difference between an economic relationship and a political relationship, he suggests there, is that an economic relationship is only for the sake of life, whereas a political relationship is for the sake of the good life. The suggestion is, presumably, that the city-state ‘‘is self-sufficient in respect of virtue’’: the polis is uniquely the context in which we have all the resources that we need to achieve full virtue (perhaps, of the active rather than the contemplative kind), and where we have those resources in a way in which they are not available at any lower level of political organization.
We only need to develop this suggestion to see how unpromising it is, whether we apply it to Aristotle’s society or to our own; though it is surprising how much rose-tinted idealization of the Greek polis we will have to see past in order to get the point. As any reader of Thucydides’ Histories will quickly gather, the idea that politics is not the practice of virtue but merely the art of the possible is as much a classical Greek idea as a modern one. As any reader of Sophocles’ Antigone will see, Aristotle’s idea that the state is there for the good life, the family only there for the sake of survival, can quite easily be stood on its head - even in a classical Athenian context. What Antigone shows us with stark clarity (and it is not the only classical Greek drama to do so: compare, for instance, the Oresteia, or Sophocles’ Philoctetes) is that the state and its imperatives can easily become the most important obstacle to an agent’s practice of virtue; and that the Athenians of Sophocles’ time knew this perfectly well.
The idea that engagement in the public life of the state is necessarily more an exercise of virtue than life at more local levels of association, such as family life, therefore deserves little credit either from us or Aristotle, who was in no worse a position to be critical of it than we are. The idea that life at more global levels of association than the polis is necessarily less of an exercise of virtue does not deserve much credit either, as any supporter of the United Nations or the European Community might point out. But this too is not just a modern point, it is a point that Aristotle was in a position to see. Presumably the exchange of philosophical ideas is a form of association for the sake of the good life if anything is. But the Athenians’ practical cosmopolitanism about philosophical exchange was proverbial - as St Luke reports (Acts 17.21), and as Plato repeatedly illustrates. Athenians like Socrates would talk philosophy with anybody, and learned as much from foreigners like Protagoras and the ‘‘Eleatic Stranger’’ as from fellow citizens of the Athenian polis like Glaucon, Adeimantus, Phaedo, or Theaetetus. Plato, then, gives us a picture of ethical interaction and mutual instruction that is at least panhellenic in its scope. The idea that there can be fruitful ethical debate with an even wider scope is presented repeatedly by the Athenian playwrights. Euripides’ Troiades (415 bc), for instance, is a sustained meditation on the wrong done by the Greeks to the Trojans, with a studied contemporary reference to the Athenian city-state’s rape of the city-state of Melos (416 bc). The meditation is presented, moreover, by characters who are both barbarians and women, and so presumably have a double dose of Aristotelian natural inferiority.
I suspect that Aristotle is only led in the first place to talk of self-sufficiency as an ideal in ethics3 and political theory because of the strong analogy with his talk of independence as a criterion of substance in metaphysics (see e. g. Metaphysics 1029a28). The analogy does little real work in political theory unless we take seriously an organic conception of the state. Plato takes that conception seriously, with familiarly sinister consequences for any conception of individual freedom worthy of the name. Aristotle, to his credit, usually does not. Of course he does sometimes gesture in the direction of the organic conception; as for instance in the opening lines of the Politics, where we are supposed to derive the priority of the polis over the individual from a hierarchy of tele of a familiar sort (1252a1-7); and again a little later, where Aristotle tells us that the individual is related to the state as part (meros) to whole, and that the state is ‘‘prior in nature’’ (phusei proteron) to the individual (1253a27). If it is to be taken as more than mere metaphor, such talk is bound to conflict with the deeper substantial individualism of Aristotle’s metaphysics.
The fallout of that conflict includes, apparently, the series of philosophical problems that I have reviewed in this section. Aristotle should not have sought, and did not need to seek, to make self-sufficiency the mark of the naturalness of the city-state. Indeed, in order to defend the polis in a way that is true to his own most important commitments, Aristotle did not even need to be a naturalist about the polis in the sense that this section has explored - the sense of taking the polis to be the natural endpoint of a process of development toward complete self-sufficiency. The conclusion about the naturalness of the polis that is (from Aristotle’s own point of view) really worth having is, I suggest, not a point about self-sufficiency at all. It is only the thesis (which Aristotle of course accepts) that living in poleis contributes in a distinctive and nonreplaceable way to individuals’ eudaimonia. But this thesis could be true without the much stronger thesis about natural self-sufficiency that Aristotle tries to argue for. Suppose it is agreed that no particular form of human association is any more natural than any other is. Even then, we can intelligibly discuss the question which sorts of friendships or associations best contribute to eudaimonia. After all, in just the same way we can intelligibly discuss the question which board-games we find most worthwhile. This is possible even though we all agree that the only relevant natural fact is that it is human nature to devise and play some sort of games; that no board-game is any more natural than any other; and indeed that all board-games are paradigms of conventionality. Even, to take Aristotle’s own favorite example, chess (1253a8).
This conclusion brings us back to the second way of spelling out the details of an Aristotelian political naturalism that I identified at the end of the second section: namely, by working up an account of the human good such as that offered by Martha Nussbaum under the name of‘‘the capability approach.’’ I look at this line of thought in the next section.
World History
