Commentary
Aristotle saw far and in detail. The Stagyrite’s “Parts of Animals” catalogs the proboscises of flies and the teeth of ants, all examined without a microscope; his natural eyesight was almost superhuman. A biology syllabus today can do without the “Parts of Animals.” But no political philosophy syllabus can do without Aristotle, for what he saw and recorded in the “Nicomachean Ethics,” the “Politics,” and the “Rhetoric” amounts to the fundamental grammar of the human political endeavor. Mark Blitz writes in his important new study, “Aristotle’s Political Philosophy”:
“Aristotle’s view of ethics and politics is powerful because it uncovers what still, or necessarily, belongs to common understanding and action. … He makes evident what these phenomena are and how they first appear to philosophical reflection.”
In so justifying his inquiry, Blitz avoids encouraging a naive, untutored textualism that discounts the need for deep learning. His own book is a commentary and essay on these three central political works of Aristotle, and it is itself indebted to a particular interpretative tradition. Blitz draws attention to the “dense scholarly and religious fog that surrounds [Aristotle’s] views and has only recently begun to be dissipated.” As his language of “uncovering phenomena” suggests, the interpretative tradition that has sought to deliver Aristotle from Aristotelianism is phenomenology: Blitz nods especially to Hegel, Heidegger, and Leo Strauss. He has devoted years of learning to each of these authors, and his achievement in this book follows closely on his 2021 study, “Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena.”
This latest book offers a lucid analysis of every major passage in Aristotle’s political writings. It is the fruit of Blitz’s many years of teaching this material, and it will especially benefit those who, like me, regularly introduce Aristotle to new students. Comments such as “Aristotle intends to uncover reasonable guidelines for choice” make clear what is at stake in reading the “Ethics.”
Blitz’s prose can be as sparse and luminous as Aristotle’s Greek: “Aristotle’s recognition of our imperfections, without ire or excuse, is visible … in his discussions of shame.”
Following the guidelines laid down in the “Rhetoric,” Blitz provides a “taxis” (ordering) in three parts, creating a beginning, middle, and end: These are titled “Virtue,” “Politics,” and “Speech,” each corresponding to one of Aristotle’s treatises. Blitz pairs summaries of key sets of passages with sections labeled “Discussion,” which draw out the difficulties and importance of the argument. The “Rhetoric” is frequently neglected, even among those who write on Aristotle’s politics. Yet it is where Aristotle gets the most specific about the tactical day-to-day of politics: how to give a speech according to its genre, paying due regard to its audience. The speaker (“rhetor”) must consider the passions in play, and how to turn hearts from one to the other so that fear of loss gives way to hope for victory and results in high-hearted action.
Blitz invokes Aristotle’s own epilogue to this treatise—“I have spoken; you have listened; you have [the case]; you judge” (1420b1-2)—noting wryly, “There is something rhetorical in the Rhetoric.”
How could there not be, if Aristotle and we with him study not merely to gain knowledge but “so that we may become good” (“Ethics” 1103b27-28)?
Blitz’s work also has a practical goal: He seeks to vindicate Aristotle’s categories so that we moderns, especially we Americans, may see our politics and our pursuit of the human good more clearly. He rightly indicates that the fathers of American constitutionalism understood themselves as founders in Aristotle’s sense. Blitz weaves in passages showing how Aristotle’s apparently outmoded vocabulary remains indispensable for clarifying our actions to ourselves and revealing our institutions’ purposes. Our dominant regime type today understands itself to represent justice itself: “Liberal democracy claims to overcome or negate the essential conflict at politics’ heart. Indeed, it is thought to be universally applicable and or proper.” In fact, liberal democracy promotes a particular human character and way of life, aiming at “happiness understood as the satisfaction of desire, or pleasure as the relief from unease, limited (only) by others who also enjoy equal rights.” Unlike Alexandre Lefebvre, who has celebrated regimes that promote autonomous choice for the satisfaction of desire, Blitz laments that “the choice of excellence” has become more difficult in such regimes.
He sounds a Tocquevillian note by pointing to “federalism and voluntary associations” as means to reproduce self-government at the vast scale of the United States. Despite the practical tension between our egalitarian political institutions and our inegalitarian economic ones, “the universal human height made clear in equal natural rights” and “the human spiritedness expressed in private enterprise” need not be mutually exclusive. Here, Blitz’s choice to write unburdened by many footnotes can do him some disservice—his mostly Straussian citations do not include such major figures as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, who would argue that Aristotle’s priority of the city over the individual and his common good worth sacrificing for are unintelligible to us today. Pierre Manent points to the nation-state as the political form that can appropriately translate the classical city’s common deliberation toward noble action in light of modern circumstances and the transcendent dignity of the human person.
Unlike Manent, who applies Aristotle to modern politics through his Christian interpreters, especially Thomas Aquinas, Blitz suggests that Christianity is apolitical and perhaps even anti-political.
Introducing Aristotle’s catalog of the virtues, he writes, “Neither Christian virtues nor Kantian moralism suggest that the statesman’s life is one of moral excellence or even a human peak.”
Are the pious too plagued by the fear of dirty hands to act politically? Are they so spiritually democratic as to cut down greatness, and so focused on the goods of the hereafter that they do not value the peace and justice possible here below? For Blitz, “Christian virtues and faith … are not exemplified by, or indeed, may conflict with, great pride and other virtues”; he points to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Abraham Lincoln, and President George Washington as exemplars of this statesmanly pride.
While these three were not all pious Christians, they certainly did not see God-fearing humility as incompatible with a magnanimous desire to rule justly and sternly. Washington returned to Mount Vernon and refused burial in the Capitol; Lincoln called a whole nation to humbly forgo vengeance in his Second Inaugural Address; and Churchill portrayed the Nazi threat as one of neo-pagan “libido dominandi.” Charles de Gaulle makes it even harder to see Christianity as opposed to statesmanship. The general certainly did not lack for self-assertion, frequently fraying his allies’ patience; he did not flinch from inflicting death in war or executing assassins; but he also showed constant tenderness to Anne, his daughter with Down syndrome, who would not have survived under Aristotle’s proposed provisions for infanticide.
Blitz rightly distinguishes the French Revolution and its descendant revolutionary totalitarianisms from “revolution” (“metabole”) in Aristotle’s sense. But in attributing the distinctive quality of 1789 to “the originality of the universality of religion … and its revolutionary understanding of happiness,” he minimizes the French republicans’ self-understanding that they were returning to a classical “polis.” When Robespierre promised his fellow Montagnards that they were waging the last war against tyranny before ushering in perpetual freedom, he was immanentizing Christian eschatological hope. The Revolution’s universality flouted the Christian tradition’s acknowledgment of bounded polities with legitimate coercive authority and self-defense. Blitz acknowledges that Aristotle’s ancient city may have gone too far in attempting to shape the moral lives of its citizens, because “it is prudent to limit the activities of often harmful governments,” but he does not credit Christ with limiting the claims of politics on the conscience.
“Aristotle’s Political Philosophy” sees Aristotle clearly, and Aristotle saw politics clearly. At several points, Blitz draws trenchant implications from Aristotle’s insistence on civic education in the good city for the dire state of our own civic education. As new centers and schools for civic learning blossom across the United States’ state university campuses, Aristotle’s account in “Politics” VIII suggests how wide and deep the civic curriculum must be. Young citizens need to know not just the city’s philosophical principles—not just its laws, customs, and history, but also its understanding of beauty.
Poetry and especially music are essential: “Those who listen to imitations experience similar passions, and virtue is connected to enjoying correctly. One should learn and become habituated to correctly judging and enjoying decent characters and beautiful actions.”
It therefore follows that a movement to renew civic education should hire not just political scientists and historians, but also scholars of literature, art history, and perhaps even music.
Yet seeing politics accurately is not always enough to cultivate a decent politics. Blitz closes with Aristotle’s portrait of intellectual virtue: The philosopher, pursuing the contemplative life, needs the city to secure his leisure, but he is finally most concerned with the things that do not die. But instead of portraying the city as a booster rocket that the philosopher jettisons once he has attained escape philosophy, Blitz emphasizes the philosopher’s attention to and respect for politics.
“Self-sufficiency for the city, and therefore the harmony of its complex parts especially in peace, including the ethical virtue of rulers and their prudence, is what is virtuous and in this way imitates the self-sufficiency and harmony of the cosmos and the god and of true philosophy,” he writes.
Politics is noble and instructive because it offers an image of the whole. Yet Aristotle’s knowledge-as-self-sufficiency leaves something out: the generous knowledge born of loving attention to the good of the other, the bond between the philosopher, the statesman, and the citizen that completes wisdom. I see this in my students, working professionals in Washington, pursuing a political philosophy MA at Hillsdale on nights and weekends. Those busiest in the active life are often the most serious about the contemplative life, bringing the charity and courage that drive them into public service into the classroom and their reading of the great books. Aristotle may not fully account for that mutually reinforcing pursuit of justice and wisdom. Cicero and his Christian interpreters go further down that road.
Reprinted from Civitas Outlook, a publication of Civitas Institute
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
