Aristotle. The Quiet Empire

Aristotle was not Athenian. Hold on to that – his whole story grows from it. He was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small town on the Chalcidic coast, far to the north. His father Nicomachus was personal physician to Amyntas III of Macedon – the grandfather of Alexander the Great.

Which means from early childhood Aristotle lived at court. He knew Macedonian kings personally. He knew how absolute power works, what a monarch looks like up close. This is an entirely different education from the one Athenian youth received, for whom aristocracy was their own grandfathers and democracy was their own assembly.

When Aristotle was seventeen, he went to Athens and presented himself at the Academy. He was seventeen. Plato was past sixty. Plato had already written the Republic. He had already made three trips to Syracuse. He had already seen his philosopher-king plan break against reality three times. He was an old man surrounded by brilliant younger ones.

Aristotle was the best of them. Plato called him "the Mind." Diogenes keeps a sharper token of the same standing – Plato's own line that Aristotle "kicked us off, as foals kick the mother that bore them." Aristotle was not merely intelligent. He was, literally, the mind of the Academy.

He stayed twenty years. Seventeen to thirty-seven. The period when most men found their own lives, he spent as a student.

Plato died in 348. The question of who would lead the Academy became urgent. The obvious candidate was Aristotle – the most intelligent, the longest-serving, the most influential of the students.

He was passed over. The leadership went to Speusippus, Plato's nephew. The choice was partly familial, partly doctrinal (Speusippus was closer to the late Plato, the mathematical Plato), and partly because Aristotle was a Macedonian, and Athens at that point was already openly anti-Macedonian. Philip of Macedon was becoming a threat.

Aristotle left. He gathered his notes, his students, and went to Assos, a small city in Asia Minor ruled by the tyrant Hermias – also a former student of the Academy. There he lived three years and married Hermias's niece. This was not a purely intellectual emigration. It was openly political. Athens had pushed him out; the Macedonian allies took him in.

In 343 he was summoned to Pella, the capital of Macedonia. Philip was looking for a tutor for his thirteen-year-old son. Alexander.

Aristotle was forty-one. Alexander was thirteen. What passed between them in the following years we do not know precisely. The fact survives that Aristotle was tutor to the future conqueror of the known world. Alexander carried on campaign an edition of the Iliad that Aristotle had prepared. They say Alexander paid extraordinary sums to collect specimens of plants and animals from across Asia for Aristotle's research. They say Alexander wrote a complaint to Aristotle accusing him of having published in a book ideas Alexander considered his own private education.

Did any of this have philosophical weight? Voegelin doubts it. Aristotle did not turn Alexander into a philosopher. He did not save him from tyranny. Alexander remembered from Aristotle not content but manner: systematic method, documentation, libraries, the ambition to know everything.

But symbolically: a philosopher raised an emperor. Plato had failed at this three times. Aristotle did it. For two and a half thousand years afterward this would shape the image of the philosopher as the one who stands beside the throne, even if not on it.

This account is missing two years. Between Assos and Pella, before Aristotle ever set foot in a royal schoolroom, he vanished onto an island. From Assos he crossed the strait to Lesbos and settled beside a shallow inland sea the Greeks called the gulf of Kalloni – Kolpos Kalloni, twenty kilometers long, all but cutting the island in two. Beside him was Theophrastus, a native of Eresos on that same island; he had been called Tyrtamus, and it was Aristotle who gave him the new name – "Divine Speech." Legend keeps the image: two philosophers walking an olive grove, dividing the living world between them. One takes the plants, the other the animals. So botany and zoology are born.

For before there was a library, there was the lagoon. Here, at the water, Aristotle did what no one before him had done: he took a living creature and opened it, to look. He described how the male catfish of the Macedonian rivers guards its eggs for the better part of two months and will not leave even when it is hooked – and twenty-three centuries later Louis Agassiz got the same catfish from the same river and confirmed that the description is exact; the species was named Silurus aristotelis in his honor. He noticed the strange pale arm of the octopus that it slips inside the female – and only in the nineteenth century did naturalists grasp that it is a detachable organ that carries the sperm. And cracking a hen's egg on the third day of brooding, he saw the heart before the rest of the body.

D'Arcy Thompson called these years "the honeymoon of his life." Here is the source of everything. The quiet empire begins earlier than the colonnades of the Lyceum – beside a shallow Aegean gulf, where one had only to walk down to the shore to find a whole world no one had ever looked at before.

In 335 Philip was dead, Alexander on the throne, and Athens was under Macedonian pressure. Aristotle returned to the city that had once pushed him out and founded his own school. He named it for the grove sacred to Apollo Lyceus: the Lyceum. The lyceum you just finished is named after that same address – you spent your school years in a building that carries the epithet of a Greek god.

Notice the symmetry. Plato founded the Academy at the western gates of Athens. Aristotle founded the Lyceum at the eastern. Two institutions at opposite ends of the city, both teaching philosophy – and both, fundamentally, not accepting what was in the middle.

The Lyceum had what the Academy did not: a library, laboratories, a museum. Aristotle was the first to systematically collect. Alexander, the legends say, supplied him with specimens from Asia. They say his school catalogued the political constitutions of the Greek cities – a hundred and fifty of them, perhaps more; the exact figure is disputed to this day, and no ancient number is secure. Of them all a single text has survived to our time: the Athenian Constitution.

Whatever the count, this is the first project of systematic comparative political science in history. And here it is worth seeing what Aristotle himself probably never said aloud: this is the same method with which he had opened animals at the lagoon. Gather everything within reach, then search the pile for recurring forms and their cause. He did to his politics what he had done to his zoology: the History of Animals is the Big Data repository of his day, and the gathered constitutions are its political twin. Plato built one ideal city in imagination. Aristotle gathered the data on all the real ones.

This is the founding difference. Plato is the poet of politics. Aristotle is its statistician. Plato hates democracy because he saw what it did to his teacher. Aristotle studies democracy. He classifies it. He distinguishes good and bad forms. He lists the conditions under which it is stable and the conditions under which it slides into tyranny.

He is not less wrong about politics than Plato. He simply thinks differently.

Aristotle's most famous sentence. Often mistranslated. The Greek is zōon politikon. Not "an animal that does politics." But "an animal that lives in a polis." An animal whose nature is to live in community.

A bee is also zōon politikon. So is an ant. Aristotle is not making some proud distinction for human beings; he is noticing a likeness. The human being is an animal that, like the bee, cannot live alone. Its nature is realized only in a group.

This is the key difference with Plato. For Plato the human being is a soul trapped in a body, longing back toward the sky, toward the Forms, toward the sun beyond the cave. The community is a means for the soul's correction. If society is bad – change society. If society is good – it is good only so the soul can grow.

For Aristotle, the reverse. A human is only human inside a community. An isolated human is either a beast or a god. Most isolated humans become beasts. Only the exceptional become gods. Therefore the central political task is to build the kind of community in which ordinary people can live well. Not an ideal community. Not "philosopher-kings." A realistic one.

Underneath all this lies the very first sentence Aristotle set at the head of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." For Jonathan Lear that line is a definition of the human: we are the animal drawn to understand. Here is the real distance from Plato. Plato's human is a soul in exile, aching for Forms it once touched; Aristotle's human is a living creature built to understand the world it actually finds itself in. And the whole of Aristotle unfolds from here. Every thing carries its form twice over – as what it has already become, and as the straining to become itself fully: an acorn is an oak held in potentiality, a child an adult held in potentiality, and to understand a thing is to see the end toward which it reaches. A cause, for him, is "that for the sake of which": form already at work in the thing. He forged the word for that being-at-work himself – energeia, from en-ergon, "in-work." Every electricity bill you pay is still itemized in a term one man coined in the fourth century BCE.

Books VII–VIII of the Politics are about the ideal polis. But it is a different ideal polis from Plato's. In Aristotle there is a middle class. There is private property. There are families. There is slavery (alas; this is the worst part of Aristotle and we will speak of it). There is moderation.

And here Aristotle leaves us a knot he never untied. The same creature that is "only human inside a community" is crowned by an activity that needs no community at all. The highest thing it can do is theoria, contemplation: pure understanding for its own sake. Self-sufficient and quiet, it produces nothing. Lear puts it sharply and honestly: the contemplative life "is socially parasitic" – it feeds on leisure that someone else won by labor, and by its nature it stands outside ethics. And yet it is exactly there that a person becomes fully himself, "since mind more than anything else is man." There is the paradox to set beside the bee: the creature made to live with others is crowned by the one thing that needs no one. Aristotle's quiet empire turns out in the end to be an empire of understanding, and its throne is empty of company.

Plato sets fire. Aristotle builds. This is part of why in Europe Aristotelianism beat Platonism in the Middle Ages. Plato is too radical. Aristotle is a better partner for the church, for the university, for the state. Aquinas did not pick him by accident.

If we are going to talk honestly about these men, we cannot hide the worst of them. Aristotle has two serious stains.

The first: slavery "by nature." In the Politics Book I, Aristotle writes that some people are born slaves. They have bodies strong like animals, but they lack the element of soul that gives the capacity for self-government. Slavery for them is fitting. It corresponds to their nature.

This is an argument Aristotle proposes seriously – and he does not refute himself. If you read the Politics you see that for him slavery is not an accident but a structural element of the right polis. Without slaves, free citizens cannot do philosophy, politics, war. Slaves free the free from necessary labor.

Two thousand years later, plantation owners of the American South would cite this very passage of Aristotle to justify their institution. Aristotle does not bear responsibility for what others did with his thought. But he bears responsibility for what he himself thought – and here precision matters, because the truth is sharper than the easy charge. Aristotle was the first thinker to demand that slavery justify itself at all; before him it was a habit no one troubled to defend. And his own argument turns against nearly all the slavery he saw around him: he denies that law, or the will of the majority, or victory in war can give one man the right to own another. Since Athenian slaves were overwhelmingly the captives of other peoples' wars and the children of captives, he is in effect condemning almost all the actual slavery of his own city. The "slave by nature" survives only as a rare exception – and that is what makes the doctrine heavier: what on his own premises should have stood nearly empty, he propped up and left standing all the same. He saw the problem first – and did not walk out of it at the point where his own thinking had all but carried him across.

The second stain: women. Where Plato in Book V of the Republic said women could be guardians on the same footing as men, Aristotle said the opposite. Women, on his view, possess less of the capacity for rational judgment than men. Their natural sphere is the home. Their nature is to be ruled. In the family the husband rules over the wife as the free rules over the slave and the father over the child. For him this is not inequality but a difference of natural species of rule.

Again – he is not wrong by accident. He thought this. And his words shaped the view of women in Western thought almost up to the modern period. Twentieth-century feminist philosophy, from Beauvoir onward, still reads Aristotle with anger.

If we are to deal with Aristotle truly – and not as a plaster statue – we must hold both sides in mind at once. He was a genius of an order history rarely matches. And he was a man of his time, and did not exit his time at the points where he might have. This is not an excuse. It is a historical truth.

In the summer of 323 BCE Alexander the Great died in Babylon. He was thirty-two. He owned the known world. He left no heir.

The news reached Athens within weeks. Anti-Macedonian feeling, suppressed for years, finally broke out. The Athenians looked for a target. The Macedonian philosopher who lived in the city, who ran the Lyceum, the man who had once tutored Alexander – Aristotle – was the ideal target.

He was charged with impiety. The same charge that had killed Socrates seventy-six years before. The same formula. Aristotle understood how this worked. He knew what would come next.

They say he then spoke one of the most famous lines in ancient philosophy: "I will not let the Athenians sin twice against philosophy."

He left Athens. He went to Chalcis, on Euboea, to his mother's house. A few months later he died there at the age of sixty-two. A natural death, they say. Some say poison. Nobody knows for certain.

Notice: he did not stay. He did not drink the hemlock. He did not repeat Socrates.

Is this cowardice? Or is it a different philosophical position?

I think the second. Socrates made his choice because his death was his argument. Socrates was an Athenian – this was his city, his law, his death had to be inside that law. Aristotle was not an Athenian. He was a Macedonian in a hostile city. For him to die at the Athenians' hands would have been to add a second pointless death to the one already done to Socrates.

"I will not let the Athenians sin twice." That is not self-preservation. That is reverence for the event of Socrates. It is the recognition that Socrates' death was so vast that to repeat it would cheapen it.

And here – a second key thing. Aristotle did not die in prison. He died at home. At sixty-two. And everything he had written – and he wrote, probably, thirty complete books – survived. Spread. Was transmitted. Through the Arab world, through the scholastics, through modern science, we still live in his categories.

Plato burns memory. Aristotle builds infrastructure. Plato is drama. Aristotle is time. Time on his side.

An ordinary philosophical education presents Plato and Aristotle as "teacher and student in disagreement." This is not wrong, but it is not precise. More precisely: they played different games, both deliberately, both successfully.

Plato played for memory. He wrote books a person reads and lives through. He laid down images – the cave, the chariot of the soul, Er in the afterlife – that became the vocabulary of the Western imagination. The philosophical tradition remembers him because he left images that do not fade.

Aristotle played for infrastructure. He left no images. He left categories, classifications, methods. What you mean when you say "logic" is, mostly, Aristotle. What you mean by "biology" is, mostly, Aristotle. What you mean by "rhetoric," "poetics," "ethics," "politics" is Aristotle. He did not announce that he was founding these disciplines. He simply separated them, named them, described them. Two thousand years later medieval Europe will call him "the Philosopher," with a capital letter and no name. This is not flattery. It is the acknowledgement that he is the foundation.

Plato is a breakthrough. Aristotle is the forest of institutions that made the breakthrough livable.

If you want to understand any Western discipline, start with Aristotle. If you want to understand why disciplines have ever had people willing to die for them, start with Plato.

You need both. Neither alone explains what happened in Athens between 469 and 322 BCE.

And what happened then – that is Western philosophy. Everything else is footnotes.