The Nature of the Polis in Aristotle's Physics and Politics

In what way is nature an analogy for the polis? Natural things actualize themselves through their own interior principle of motion (Physics, Book II, Ch. 1). Unnatural things do not possess this interior principle of motion, they come to be through an external force. Aristotle regards artifacts as the paradigm for the unnatural. A table is unnatural even though it is composed of wood, which is natural. The composition of the table (wood) does not make it what it is, for then it would be natural--a table does not generate itself in the same way a tree does. An artifact is that which has no integral principle of unity, whose unnatural existence is imposed on the natural.

This distinction between what is natural and unnatural will now be applied to the polis. At first, it may seem as though a state is unnatural; that human beings are naturally in a state of nature and are domesticated by society. Yet Aristotle says that man is a social animal, and therefore he does not consider the society of the polis an imposition, but the expression of something proper to man. From this it also follows that the state is not merely a collection of individuals without a principle of unity. The state has its own character beyond a bare collective. This distinctive character of the state might be its internal principle of unity, and if this be found, the state will be established as natural.

Socrates found that internal principle in unity. He proposed that all property be held in common (for the guardians, at least), so that all men have the same relation to both the means of production and that which is produced. Further, he proposed that even wives and children should be held in common. Thus all men, at least in the guardian class, would be indistinguishable in their relation to things and to people.

Aristotle objects to this schema on what first appears to be merely practical ground. In regard to property he points out that all men will not care for common property as they would their own property. This is a psychological observation, but it also gets at the nature of property. Property is what one uses to accomplish ones purposes, and ones own purposes have a practical priority over that of the collective.

His objection to wives and children being held in common at first seems less plausible than his objection to common property: what if a son strikes his father? He would not know that it is not merely another citizen he assaults, but his father. At first appears a culturally relative objection, for it depends both on the Greek taboo against striking ones father and it assumes the same categories of father and son that Socrates sought to do away with. However, here Aristotle is recognizing that people must maintain their nature in a political system.

These two objections Aristotle raises against Socrates are based on his destruction of the intrinsic principle of unity of the polis. The polis obviously cannot be absolutely complex, its parts must have something in common for there to be a polis. But Socrates goes to the other extreme: the polis may not be a total unity either. If the polis was without difference it would be an individual, not a polis (Politics, Book II, Chapter II). If the it were a total unity it would suppress or subvert the natures of the men that make it up, and would violate the nature of man. The polis must provide the opening within which individual natures fulfill themselves, but it must have its own fulfillment as well. The natural principle of the polis is therefore the tension between unity and complexity.