Aristotle's Politics: Women, Slaves & Political Equality.

Aristotle's politics is not an easy book
to read and does not a book that I recommend others read lightly modern readers even readers with real sophistication in philosophy real sophistication and politics and a fairly robust background in ancient Greek writing modern readers will very often completely miss the point of the text and for large crucial portions of text in the book such as the chapter I guess I'm going to be discussing here today I am just discussing one portion of the argument as an example but it's much more than just an isolated example because the themes dealt with in this section of text we're talking about here slavery inequality relations between men and women husband and wife political inequality and how you constitute a republic these are very fundamentally tied into the knot of issues that Aristotle is addressing throughout the text as a whole so it's a crucially important passage in itself and it's also just one example of why it is that Aristotle is so hard for people to read and appreciate today even when so many talented translators have worked on this text backwards and forwards for generations and generations to render it into English German French almost every modern European language there are ways in which we deceive ourselves it's very easy to approach a text like this with an unexamined assumption of symmetry of intent what do you think these are my intentions as a reader these are my interests therefore I expect the author from the other the other side to meet to meet my expectations to mirror my intent so might my perspective in the 21st century maybe oh I'm looking for a really serious profound sober clear exposition of the most important ideas from political philosophy in each piece and that's what I'm expecting this book to provide me with so if I don't find that I may be disappointed or I may just be perplexed what if what I actually find is a book with a lot of sarcasm what if I find is a book with a lot of dense humor inside jokes and intentional use of paradox paradox in the classical sense of confounding the reader of saying to the reader the exact opposite of what they're expecting presenting the reader with impossible contradictory claims apparently just to befuddle or dazzle the reader Aristotle was not producing a dry sober text you're gonna see that in this example we're discussing okay he was not writing something to last a thousand years and thinking how how you perceive it I'm sure your cultural perspective in the distant future okay he was very much writing for the audience of his time he was writing for small groups of gentlemen who would sit around and read this out loud and laugh at the jokes there's a lot of humor and there were a lot of cultural references here that are just barely comprehensible today because we were lucky enough that the scraps of text being alluded to survive history in some cases they didn't survive okay so um I'll give the citation in the description to where this the the descriptive text below this video that this whole passage starts around 1259 in the manuscript pagination there's a system of keeping track of pages that's universal to although all the serious editions okay so um we have the passage of text here about the relationship between husband and wife and we're told repeatedly in a somewhat confusing way that the inequality between husband and wife is very much like the inequality in a republic in a polity it's very much like the type of inequality written into the Constitution of the type of mixed Democratic and aristocratic society that Aristotle is describing for us throughout the work as well so we already know he's talking about marriage he's talking about slavery in exactly the same part of the text he's talking about this type of inequality but he's not even talking about it as an allegory for inequality in society so he's very much talking about it as an example of as tied to intimately and profoundly the type of inequality in society so we're told repeatedly that there's a relationship between husband and wife that's very much like the relationship between a politician and the public in this society there's some inequality between husband and wife but he's not saying this is a simple biological in quote he is not saying men are born superior and women are bore through know what what does he actually say the inequality between man and wife I'm paraphrasing here reminds us of the saying of a Massif about his foot pan period in your translation it may say the emperor amasses of egypt it may say foot bath instead of foot bath you can be reading for several pages in a row here in English and in a sense the better the translation the English is the more baffling and incomprehensible this will be to you because the more the translator is smoothed it over the less you'll realize that the author is being intentionally paradoxical and provocative we're lucky we get the joke because the joke being made here the saying of a masses of Egypt is preserved in Herodotus and it's in part of the text that parotid us that survived thousands of years of history some parts of the text did not so if if those chapters of Herodotus had perished and the flames had been lost history we wouldn't know for a fact that we do know that this is a very provocative frankly snarky joke that he's making what is aristotle really saying but the inequality between man and wife and at the same time the inequality between political leaders and the members of the public they lead the story about a masses that he completely presumes his audience the type of refined gentleman engaged in political life in Athens who would read this in the time the audience he's read his work they're gonna stop and laugh out loud at this series of very provocative statements being made here about husband and wife and the relation between the house owner and its slaves and a politician in the public oh yes the Emperor a Mascis of Egypt a man who was reviled by his subjects because he called himself a king but he was born and raised a commoner just as they just as they themselves were so what did he do as the story goes as the legend goes if there's any historical truth to this I doubt it but whatever the story goes that there was a golden foot bath or foot pan as this true there was a something that everyone who came to visit everyone in the court knew well they all washed their feet in so I guess this was a foot bath at the entrance to the world chambers or something of that sort and the text in ta'rhonda says that he broke it up into pieces and he assembled the pieces into an image of a God and then he said to them he said to thee I said to the assembled multitude who followed him he said all of you now worship that God that used to be a footbath in the same way you should recognize that I now on the king I now emperor of Egypt even though I used to be a commoner this is a bizarre and provocative image but if you think for one minute that Aristotle truly believes that chunks of gold torn apart from a footbath genuinely constitute a God that ought to be worshipped you're crazy okay that cannot be the purpose of this passage of text it cannot be that Aristotle is saying to you deadpan serious with no humor in the same way that the people of Egypt worshiped this footbath as a god in the same way wives should respect their husbands as their superiors that is ridiculous it's intentionally ridiculous he's being paradoxical provocative snarky sarcastic he's writing with a sense of humor and it's a very strange sense of humor that's very difficult to appreciate today so what is Aristotle saying positively about the relation of husband and wife here I would say it's not an over interpretation to suggest that he's pointing to the extent to which the inequality between husband and wife is a social convention in our modern terms and it is even a laughable social convention in the same way that this emperor in Egypt presenting a footbath as a god is a laughable social convention and yet because people believe in it it's powerful because people believe in the leadership of the king he is therefore a king and not a commoner a difference that is not biological it's not magical it's not the bowl of the gods it's just social convention and it's even a laughable social convention okay in the same way the inequalities he's talking about here husband to wife mastered a slave political leader the people being led were being given of their direct indication here that the real purpose of this text is not what it would seem at first glance at first reading okay now when you know that and to give another brief warning here throughout this whole text Aristotle is absolutely hating on Plato there's a lot of really really negative snarky remarks about place just a couple a couple pages later um to really take apart the extent to which he's joking when he says to speak in general terms and to maintain the goodness consists in a good condition of the soul or in right action or of anything of the kind is to be guilty of self-deception far better than such general definitions is the method of simple enumeration of the different forms of goodness as followed by gorgeous okay so gorgeous is gorgeous with with a G this is a this is a famous dialogue of Plato now this whole passage this whole passage fellow it's just sort of next page over from what I've just quoted you this bizarre joke about the emperor of Egypt and it's and it's golden foot bath being made into a God okay there's a lot of sarcasm and snarky remarks if paradox him seeing the exact opposite of what he really means it is impossible for me to imagine that in this context and when there's so much said against Plato through the whole text Plato is the butt of every joke Plato is insulted and denigrated constantly - there it is impossible for me to imagine that his point here is deadpan serious to indicate that Plato what Plato is saying is right in the gorgeous it's much more likely to be the opposite or it's some more complex the joke that we have to really unpack reading the paragraph before and after and say okay what is he really alluding to here in gordias and what is he really saying in making this intentionally of a fuss Kotori statement about ethics alright he's capable of being clear when he wants to be clear and he's capable of being mysterious when he wants to be mysterious this is an intentionally provocative paradoxical statement and the idea was that people at that time they knew were lucky we have this text so if Plato's dialogue the gorgias had disappeared in lost history we'd never be able to know what he's really talking about okay but in this case the text does exist we can look it up and we can try to puzzle out what is he really saying here and again this is part of the same argument he's talking about the inequality between men and women the inequality between owners and slaves okay the very next sentence after this bizarre allusion to Plato which again I assume is somewhat sarcastic and insulting towards Plato because we have a statement that absolutely must be a joke okay now most people and I think even most translators if they're working fast they miss this joke and I'll mention briefly when I was a very young man I read the tragedy of Ajax so the tragedy of Ajax is an ancient play written by Sophocles that's quoted here by Aristotle so I think I read it for the first time probably when I was still a teenager and then later in life I went back and read it again and again it was really meaningful to me during a certain phase of my life assumed it so I knew the tragedy of Ajax quite well so there is a quote here that's less than a full sentence long from Sophocles in the tragedy of Ajax and I've spoken to many many people including one of my ex-girlfriends was a very memorable dialogue one of my ex-girlfriends quoted this passage of Aristotle to me as proof that Aristotle was a misogynist that he had a tremendous a negative view of women so he follows up this snarky remark about Plato by saying quote we must therefore hold what the poet Sophocles said of women quote a modest silence is a woman's crowd closed whoo the very first time I read this passage in Aristotle I laughed the translator here doesn't get the joke if you can look at peer-reviewed research there are peer-reviewed articles that some of the scholars get the joke some don't if you know the context he's quoting this is hilarious because the actual situation is that Ajax is receiving advice from a woman that would have saved his life the situation and the tragedy that's unfolding here is he's saying no no no he refuses to listen to this woman and what she's saying to him is 100% true and profound and good his faith and he's saying he's basically telling this woman to just shut up while he proceeds to destroy himself and it leads it leads to his death so the slightly psychologically complex scenario it's not worth unpacking here Aristotle isn't just making a joke here this reveals that his intent as an offer as an author in this whole paragraph he's 180 degrees the opposite what a dry humorless reading of the passage would suggest to us you might well presume just reading this in English straight that he means to suggest to you in a humorless way that women ought to be silent he means the opposite he's saying very directly to his audience of the time he wasn't writing for people thousands of years later he was writing for the type of learning gentleman in Athenian society who probably would have seen this drama by Socrates by Sophocles performed live again and again year after year they didn't have that many that many new plays so they've probably seen it before many times they'd hear the line and know it and know this is the story of a man who's destroyed a man who dies because he ignores good advice from a woman that it's outrageously funny for him to suggest in this context that the the relationship to women and men are so loved so that women do have good advice that men should listen to women and if men ignore women's advice at least their destruction okay now I know how easy it would be for people to regard what I'm doing in this video as some kind of politically correct excuse making for as though I know how easy it is for people to hear something like this and think oh here's this guy with a beard in the 21st century who's just trying to reinterpret Aristotle to make Aristotle less misogynist than he is to make Aristotle seem like he cares more about the slaves that he really does or something no no no no no the ultimate purpose of the Oddie are the argument I'm presenting to you here apart from just being a warning about how hard it is to read and understand Arizona is the argument that we must read ancient texts with a complete sense of detachment about the intention of the author the intention of the author really matters and if you come to a text like this just even with the expectation um this is going to define for me you know what made Athenian democracy so great what made democracy nation Athens so great why do you assume that's his interest why do you assume that's his objective that's not Aristotle's objective I've made other videos talking about the political conditions he lived in he was in a very difficult situation he wasn't from Athens right he was from Macedonia he had a direct connection to the political authorities in Macedonia the Macedonian Empire what was going on with Alexander the Great with the wars there being fought at that time his political agenda his personal interests why he's writing this particular book what his thesis is they have nothing to do with your expectations as a reader and you're frustrated expectations they won't just lead to you being disappointed with the book they will lead to you being 180 degrees wrong about the meaning of the book passage by passage and above the book as a whole a veer large percentage of this book is a thesis on the meaning of equality and how it is we can have in some sense a politically equal society a society built on political equality when that society includes such radical inequalities as the relationship to imperative child husband and wife slave owner enslave King and the general population figure like Alexander the Great at that time to some extent King to some extent a military general but if you want to say how is it that we comprise a semi Democratic Society with all those contributions and even though I've only presented you with these examples for this particular purpose here I think you'll agree if you take the time to read this text as a whole you actually cannot understand the thesis of the book without taking seriously the challenge of just those few passages that rely on such a close reading of other ancient texts that are alluded to in just half a second but that half a second is the author winking at you letting you know just how sarcastic he really was just what a strange provocative sense of humor he brought to the task because his task wasn't writing a book that would last 2,000 years and his task was writing a book that would capture the attention and interest of the audience that was alive at that time