Each of these men was inspired by the events that were unfolding in their own countries when they came up with their philosophies of politics. It is therefore important to consider the historical circumstances that produced this thinking.
Plato wrote The Republic and other works at a time in which he saw what he believed to be the worst extravagances of Athenian democracy. Events such as the trial of the sailors who fought at Arginusae as well as the public decision to have his beloved mentor, Socrates, put to death, convinced Plato that democratic rule simply translated to the will of the uneducated, unenlightened, brutish masses in the most important arena of civil life—the making and executing of politics. Instead, Plato argued that a truly just ruler must understand truth as it really is, not as his senses or emotions lead him to believe. To do so, a truly just ruler must come to conclusions about truth through his powers of reason, so that he may make the best decisions for the entire polis.
Aristotle was less concerned with the personal element of politics (although he wrote extensively on individual ethics, so these concerns were still on his mind), focusing more on the nature and organization of constitutions. He lived and worked in Athens when the city-state was arguably at the height of its power—having just defeated Persia in a fifty-year war. Aristotle identified three primary types of constitutions that constitute society—monarchy, aristocracy, and polity—depending on whether supreme rule is exercised by a single individual, a small group, or the many, respectively. Neither of these forms, in his view, was better or worse than the others, but they each had their own perversions—tyranny, oligarchy, and extreme democracy. The goal of politics for Aristotle was to maintain a balance in order to prevent the “natural” forms of politics from slipping into something more abusive.
Cicero came to power during the reign of Julius Ceasar, and thus his time saw the beginning of the collapse of Roman republicanism. He also witnessed Ceasar’s murder, and came to employ his talents in defense of this very same Republic. Cicero hoped to preserve constitutionalism and prevent Rome from spiraling into lawlessness and the chaos that political intrigue produced. This is also evidenced in his success in putting down the “Catilinarian Conspiracy” sometime in the 50’s BCE. Therefore, at its most basic, Cicero believed the role of politics to be the preservation of the state and protection of the rule of law.
For all three writers, politics was part of philosophy. As a subject, philosophy was divided into three parts, namely:
Logic: the study of how to think
Physics: the study of the natural world
Ethics: the study of how humans should act
Ethics itself, the study of morality or how humans ought to live their lives, was itself subdivided into three areas:
Ethics: the study of morality with respect to the individual
Economics: named after the Greek term "oikos" (household) which addressed household management or family level behavior, including what we now know as economics
Politics: the study of morality with respect to the "polis" or city state as a whole
For Plato, to know the good was to do the good. The path towards virtue was through knowledge. In human terms, goodness required a soul governed by reason with the will and emotions subordinated to the goals set by the reason. A state should be like the soul writ large, led by those who were most knowledgeable (reason), with a law enforcement branch similar to the will, and a general populace thought of like the emotions which needed to be governed for its own good. An ideal state was one which would most set preconditions for the individual to progress towards virtue.
Aristotle, who was Plato's student, also saw the state as establishing a precondition for human flourishing or "eudaimonia". Like Plato, he saw education as important to creating virtuous individuals. Aristotle was also similar to Plato in seeing culture as important, but unlike Plato, who banned art and poetry as inflaming irrational emotions, Aristotle saw the arts as essential to the polis because they functioned as a sort of training for the emotions. Knowledge of politics was also important to creating a well regulated state and Aristotle engaged in a major project of collecting , analyzing, and comparing the laws of different city states to discover what the best political systems were. Unlike Plato, whose work was grounded in first principles, Aristotle's approach was thus more empirically grounded.
Cicero was very strongly influenced by Plato. The Romans were just in the process of recovering and editing the Aristotelian corpus at this period and Aristotle was far less influential. Cicero's Rome was far larger and more cosmopolitan than Greek city states and Cicero himself was deeply involved in Roman politics, serving in the principal Roman offices of quaestor, aedile, praetor, and consul. For Cicero, rather than politics being subordinate to philosophy, philosophy was a tool for helping politicians understand and do their duty better and return Rome as a nation and the Romans as individuals to an earlier state of virtue, grounded in both individual morality and Republican government.
First, let's define "politics" as these three would have understood or used the term. The word "political" comes from the Greek word politikos, meaning "of, or pertaining to, the polis." (What's a polis? It refers to a city-state.)
Let's begin with Aristotle, who compared the role of a politician to that of a craftsman. Like a craftsman, he wrote, a politician works within a system, producing and maintaining, keeping things running smoothly by following a certain set of rules. For Aristotle, the politician's rules are laid out in a constitution. The constitution, not the individual politician, is the ruling authority. As he writes in Politics:
Since we see that every city-state is a sort of community and that every community is established for the sake of some good (for everyone does everything for the sake of what they believe to be good), it is clear that every community aims at some good, and the community which has the most authority of all and includes all the others aims highest, that is, at the good with the most authority. This is what is called the city-state or political community.
Now let's focus on Plato. Plato didn't believe that human beings could be trusted to make the best choices for themselves. He opposed the concept of democracy, because he believed that tyrants could easily rise to power if they exploited the public, and that too many individual people make decisions based on their own personal interests. For Plato, politics existed to provide structure for a public, and to protect the people.
Cicero considered politics through another lens: he was interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics. Politics, he believed, were more important than philosophy. But he used philosophy as a means to achieve his own political goals. For Cicero, the point of politics was to communicate philosophical ideas and arguments to a public that wouldn't otherwise understand (or care to understand) them.
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