Aristotle, Politics book 1 | Four Relations of Rulership | Philosophy Core Concepts

hi this is dr. Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason IO where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well in politics book 1 Aristotle is going to make a very fundamental distinction between four different types of rulership he thinks that these are not only distinguishable from each other so that we ought to keep this distinction in mind but he also thinks in point of fact that many people tend to mix these up or to have confused and mistaken understandings about these including in some cases entire cultures entire people's so this is an incredibly important distinction with many implications both for the politics as a whole and also for Aristotle's ethics so it's very important to you know make this distinction early on in the book and to follow out what some of these implications are first before we do that though let's look at the actual passage it's very short where he brings us up he tells us that people are mistaken who think that the the nature or the structure however you want to put it of these four different sorts of rulership and the people associated with them are the same we have political rule the politico in' and that would be run by somebody who we translate sometimes a statesman or state's person this is a type of rulership in which citizens are engaged with each other and either vote somebody into office or choose them by Lots power is being exercised over somebody who is recognized as in other respects being one's equal then we have monarchic own rule and there's different kinds of monarchies that Aristotle will discuss and we could even think of you know some other degenerate forms of monarchy you know that we discussed as as tyranny as approximating this boss ali khan although in general we want to think of the good form of monarchy and then we have what we can translate as household rule this would be the head of the family or head of a entire larger household that is hueco no Mekong and then we have masterly rule the sort of thing that involves actual slavery the dis faulty continent and what there's a word that we get despot from so you can imagine that this is not quite the same thing as monarchical rule and he tells us that those who think that these are all the same are fundamentally mistaken now who might be people who think that these at least in part or even in whole are all the same sort of power structure anybody who thinks that all power by its very nature is despotic involves something like slavery they would fit in with this and in his own time Aristotle criticizes the people who he calls the barbarians which would include all non Greeks and even perhaps some of the Greeks for Aristotle quite frankly because they don't recognize the fundamental difference between as he says a little bit you know inaccurately women and slaves so the relation between husband and wife is for them according to Aristotle the same thing as a relationship between master and slave the same sort of power is being exerted the same structure of relationship the same type of top-down rule is being imposed and Aristotle says we'll see this is an example of how the barbarians actually get things wrong they don't real he doesn't say that women are on the same level as men but he does think that it has to be a different kind of rulership that would fit more into household rule or depending on who the the woman is and who the husband is it could even be sort of like an analogue to political rule but it's mostly gonna fit into this household rule and he talks about a few other ways in which people often get this mixed up he says that some people think that the difference between these various forms of rulership or authority is one of greater and smaller numbers so as we move from say the master/slave relationship or from the household relationship which are on a lower level up to the political level where we have an entire people or a political community underneath one person several people whoever is in charge they think of this as just you know the the household writ large or the master/slave relationship writ large so that everybody becomes slaves of the monarch or we're all part of this is a very common phrase here over in America we're all part of one big family Aristotle would say no no the political community is not a family the family belongs down here and he would say the political community definitely should not be structured in the same way as the relation between master and slave is these are fundamental mistakes in his view so he says that as to the statesman or the political ruler and the royal ruler they think that one who governs as the sole head is royal and one who while the government follows the principles of the science of royalty takes turns to govern and be governed is a statesman and they says that's not actually true you could in fact have a monarch a single ruler but it could be political rule think about you know the office of the president here in the United States as the head of state granted there's many other things going on as well but as the head of state they are something like the Aristotelian monarch but they are elected it is political rule likewise just having a number of people doesn't necessarily make it political rule so there's a few other things that he says about this a little bit further in politics book 2 he says we can use this this mode of parsing these relationships out to understand the relationship between people and also parts of our own psyche or soul or personality if you like so he says in studying human beings we must consider a person who's in the best possible condition in regard to both body and soul and if we do that what we're going to see is that the body is ruled by the soul if things are the other way around then the soul rules the body for instance people who are driven by addictions or who have moral vices or anything along or people who are lack self-control anything along those lines would be problematic because the body is in charge so he says the human being is a living creature and we can discern in there the rule both of Master and States person how so says the soul rules the body with the sway of a master in an ideal circumstance that should be the relationship between the soul and the body according to Aristotle the soul commands the body obeys the body doesn't get to ask questions the body doesn't get to make exceptions the body is not part of the deliberative process the soul decides and the body has to obey now you can say what's the penalty if the body doesn't obey and that's a little bit of a problem with the analogy there with slavery of course if you don't obey you you incur some sort of usually bodily circumstances that are going to be quite horrific and arbitrary but notice here that Aristotle is saying there are some cases in which this sort of seemingly arbitrary despotic use of power is in fact what is called for we're going to see that not all slavery is actually just slavery according to Aristotle but that's a topic what about the parts of the soul Aristotle thinks that we have a higher and lower part of the soul there's a little bit more to his anthropology than that but that's enough for right now how does the higher part of the soul relate itself to the lower part of the soul does it rule despotic lis or should it rule in a different way he says that the intelligence the mind the intellect rules the appetites the realm of the desires and emotions with a constitutional or political rule or with a royal rule so these types of rule are not just about whether it applies to a whole political community it's about the structure the way in which power is being exercised and used so let's think about this for a moment as we wrap this up despotic rule slavery rule very easy to understand some people that's all they view power as or authority as somebody commands somebody obeys if they don't obey they get punished that's a very low-level kind of relation it's suitable for cases where you really can't reason with the thing that is being rule or the person who is being ruled you can't reason with your body you also can't reason with a computer and the parts of the computer can't reason with each other this is why you could think of the parts of the computer is in a master/slave relation to each other most human beings you can in fact reason with and so different kinds of relations are required household rule the economic a oriented toward some common good there is an imbalance in an in power but it's closer than the master/slave relationship there's also the possibility that at least some people in the household similarly with the political rule that people will step into new roles those who are ruled will eventually become rulers as a matter of fact one of the key things that Aristotle says both about the household and about political rule he really stresses this with political arrangements is that in order to be able to rule effectively you have to have learned how to obey and be ruled that's part of the process in the case of monarchy coal rule ideally it is being carried out for the good of all involved in the community when that's not the case when monarchic elizabe incurring out for the good of the ruler or perhaps his or her friends and family then it actually starts to slide into a relationship of despotism it quits being monarch achill and it becomes tyrannical instead which is essentially treating everybody as if they're slaves political rule is between people who are acknowledged as equals all of whom are to at least some degree rational capable of deliberation perhaps together perhaps on their own and they take turns according to some sort of Constitution some sort of arrangement something that allows them to say this is actually a fear use of power now we could think about all sorts of other cases and see if we can apply Aristotle's view point to them think about for example a workplace is a workplace more like master/slave relations more like a household more like monarchic alike political rule it really depends on the workplace doesn't it a coop for example would be political rule a terrible workplace to be in would be masterly rule a family business may in fact be part of household rule and may include other people who somehow come into the family as well it may also be monarchic old rule think about when you have a large corporation with a Board of Directors and a CEO at the top and all sorts of layers of hierarchy so each of these would have its own demands and its own way of structuring power and relations and what people can expect in the framework of these you know at a political rule you can expect a lot more than you can in despotic rule likewise household rule and in relation to despotic rule so it's very important to get this distinction down when going into Aristotle's politics but it also has some very important implications for Aristotle's ethics as well you

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 2,258

Rating: 4.9578948 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Sadler, Philosophy, Learning, Reason

Id: 3arcSpoM6hM

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018