Nature, Custom, and Reason as the Explanatory and Practical Principles of Aristotelian Political Science Author(s): James Bernard Murphy Reviewed work(s): Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Summer, 2002), pp. 469-495 Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1408910 . Accessed: 18/07/2012 10:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Cambridge University Press and University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Review of Politics. http://www.jstor.org Nature, Custom, and Reason as the and Practical Explanatory Principles of Aristotelian Political Science James Bernard Murphy According to Aristotle, nature (physis),h abit or custom (ethos),a nd reason (logos)a re the first principles of social explanation as well as the first principles of moral excellence. Just as we explain the order found in a polity as the product of natural,c ustomary,a nd rationallys tipulated kinds of order,s o we become excellent persons through our good natural potential, the development of that potential in right habits, and sound ethical reflection upon those habits. For Aristotle, nature and convention are not mutually exclusive; rather, nature, custom, and reason form a hierarchy such that custom presupposes nature, but cannot be reduced to it, while reason presupposes custom, but cannot be reduced to custom. It is argued thatAristotle'sa ccounto f social orderi s superiorb oth to the prior Sophistica ccounts and to the account inAquinas. BecauseAristotler oots the ordero f deliberateh uman action in the order of nature and the order of custom, he focuses his ethical analysis not on the abstract freedom of choice but on the concrete freedom of the person who must act. The best and most illuminating approach to Aristotelian political science would be an actual empirical investigation of politics oriented to a pressing normative concern-for example, a study of the effects of economic polarization on democratic participation. Such an Aristotelian political science would be at once empirical and ethical-in stark contrast to both our contemporary philosophical ethics, which generally lacks a concern for the empirical context of moral excellence, and our contemporary social sciences, which either lack a normative dimension altogether or degrade practical reason into an instrument for the satisfaction of desire ("rational choice"). Presumably anAristotelian political science would rejectb oth our apolitical ethics and our amoral political science; it would combine a rich empirical analysis of how the concrete circumstances of choice shape the capacities of individuals to variously realize or ruin the genuine goods of human fulfillment. Such a political Thanks are due to Marcus Fischer, Roger Masters, Ian Lustick, Ted Miller, David Peritz, MarkM urphy,R obertAudi, Ronald Beiner,W alterN icgorski and the anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts. 470 THE REVIEWO F POLITICS science would attempt to interpret and explain individual ethical choices in their political contexts: How does our democratic regime, for example, shape our marriages and our families, our ways of teaching and worshiping? Or, more generally, how do our political and economic institutions promote or frustrate excellence of practical deliberation among our citizens? At the same time,Aristotelian political science would attempt to interpret and explain the political choices of communities in terms of the ethical character of their members: Does our political reluctance to send troops abroad reflect a lack of martial virtue among our citizens or a healthy popular skepticism about foreign adventures? Do political proposals for tax-cuts reflectw idespread greed among our citizens or prudent doubts about the wisdom of government spending? Or, given the reluctance of our citizens to sacrifice a measure of individual liberty for the common good, do proposals for universal mandatory national service make sense? In lieu of such an actual study, I will merely identify three basic principles of Aristotle's political science and show how they are at once explanatory and practical. Political science, on his account, is explanatory because it has as its object of inquiry the natural, customary, and rationally stipulated kinds of order found in human affairs; at the same time, political science is practical because it makes citizens good by enabling them to deliberate wisely about the natural, customary, and rational dimensions of human excellence. Put briefly, according to Aristotle, the first principles of explanation are the variety of kinds of order found in human affairs: natural, customary, and rationally stipulated order; at the same time, the first principles of moral excellence, are nature, custom, and reason. Many interpreterso f Aristotle have observed that his political science combines explanatory and practical dimensions, but no one has yet shown how Aristotle's account of nature, habit, and reason bridges these two dimensions. A focus on how these three principles function in his ethical and political thought will greatly advance our understanding of how Aristotle links the explanation of social order to the quest for human excellence. To reveal what is distinctive about Aristotle's understanding of social order and of practical deliberation, I will sometimes compare the views of Aristotle and of Thomas Aquinas on these topics; Aristotle and Aquinas agree enough to make a comparison possible, yet they differ enough to make the NATURE, CUSTOM AND REASON 471 comparison illuminating. What we shall discover is that in both thinkers there is a close connection between their understanding of the kinds of order in human affairs and their understanding of ethical and political deliberation. I will offer my own critical appraisal of that comparison as well as engage in some broadly Aristotelian reflections on political science. Political Science as Explanatory: The Kinds of Human Order In the very language Aristotle uses to refer to "good social order" we see the close connection between his explanatory and his normative concepts. He speaks, for example, of various kinds of "good social order" with terms such as eukosmia,e unomia,a nd eutaxia: here kosmos (Politics 1299b 16) connotes natural order, nomosc onnotes customary or legal order (NicomacheanE thics1 112b 14), and taxisc onnotes deliberately stipulated order,a s in the order of battle (Politics1 326a 30).1T hese kinds of good social order both describe the complex order of a polity and evaluate that order. Aristotle has a number of terms for various species of order but no generic or abstract term. Thomas Aquinas learned from Augustine's De Ordinet o consider generic "order"a s the object of scientific inquiry. As he says in the prologue to his commentary on the NicomacheanE thics:" to be wise is to establish order. The reason for this is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason, whose characteristic is to know order."2A ccording to Aquinas, order, in the sense of a pattern, system, or structure, provides a basis for descriptive and explanatory inference. A leading contemporary theorist of order understands it in the same way. Order, says FA. Hayek, is "a state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements of various kinds are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole to form correct expectations 1. Bekkern umbers from Greek text:E thicaN icomacheae,d . L. Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894); Politica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957). All translations and all paraphrases from the Greek are mine. 2. S. ThomaeA quinatisO peraO mnia,e d. RobertusB usa SI (Stuttgart:F riedrich Frommann Verlag, 1980), vol. 4, Sententia Libri Ethicorum( Prologue, n.l). All translations and all paraphrases from the Latin are mine. 472 THE REVIEWO F POLITICS concerning the rest, or at least expectations which have a good chance of proving correct."3T his broadly philosophical conception of order contrasts sharply with the narrowly ideological conception of order in mainstream social science, where order in the sense of social stability or peace between nations is usually assumed without argument to be the goal of all scientifically informed public policy. We might contrast the philosophical and the ideological senses of order by observing that there are kinds of order that are not in the least orderly. In the Aristotelian tradition, the kinds of sciences of human affairs are grounded in the kinds of order in human affairs;4t hus, the adequacy of an account of the diverse kinds of human sciences depends upon the adequacy of the prior account of the diverse kinds of order. In the first part of this article, I will outline an account of the kinds of social order-an account rooted inAristotle and developed by the Spanish Jesuits of the sixteenth century, the economists of the Scottish Enlightenment, and their heirs.5 I will then attempt to show the superiority of this broadly Aristotelian account of social order both to the prior Sophistic accounts and to the subsequent account inAquinas. In the second part, I will argue that because Aristotle roots the order of deliberate human action in the order of nature and the order of custom, he focuses his ethical analysis not on the abstract freedom of choice but on the concrete freedom of the person who must act. Where Aquinas emphasizes the radical freedom of human choice and the autonomy of ethics from politics, Aristotle emphasizes the limited 3. F A. Hayek, Law,L egislation,a nd Liberty,v ol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 36. Hayek here draws on Stebbing:" When we know how a set of elements is ordered we have a basis for inference."L . S. Stebbing,A Modern Introductionto Logic( London:M ethuen, 1950),p . 228. It is surprising that Hayek, a leading modem theorist of order, should nowhere, to my knowledge, cite either Aristotle's triadic conception of order or the seminal contribution of Thomas Aquinas. Hayek is thus clearly not within the Aristotelian tradition even if he can be illuminating of it. 4. Aristotle lists a variety of human sciences when he says that, in addition to ethics,w e need to consider legislative science and constitutional law "to complete the philosophy of human affairs (perit a anthropeiap hilosophia)."S ee Nicomachean Ethics1 181b15. 5. In the analysis of Aristotle's account of the three kinds of order, I draw freely on my book, TheM oral Economyo f Labor:A ristotelianT hemesi n Economic Theory( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), chaps. 2 and 4. NATURE, CUSTOMA ND REASON 473 freedom of the human person and, hence, the dependence of ethics on politics. In the third part, I offer a few broadly Aristotelian reflections about why political science must combine explanatory and normative principles. Finally, I note that although Aristotle distinguishes theoretical (or explanatory) inquiry from practical (or normative) inquiry, his own inquiries always combine both elements. What is distinguishable in thought is not always separable in reality: distinguerp our unir.6 In book seven of Aristotle's Politics we find this cryptic passage: "In order to become good and wise (agathosk ais poudaios) requires three things; these are nature, habit, and reason (physis, ethos, logos)."7F ew sentences in the Aristotelian corpus, I think, are as richly suggestive as is this one or as much in need of both interpretation and imaginative reconstruction. Obviously each of these terms, nature, habit, reason, is at the center of Aristotle's conceptual vocabulary; what is less obvious is that this ordered triad is echoed throughout his writings. From the immediate context we can see that Aristotle is speaking in the first place of the components of moral and intellectual self-realization:w e must begin with the right natural powers and dispositions, we must cultivate these powers and dispositions into the right habits of character,a nd we must use reason to reflectively adjust our habits in light of our stipulated moral ideals. In this model of human self-realization, our habits presuppose human nature but cannot be reduced to it, just as our stipulated rational ideals presuppose our habits but cannot be reduced to them. Aristotle extended his triad beyond individual self-realization to the actualization of the political community. Thus, he says in many places (e.g., Politics 1332b 8-11), the legislator, in the deliberate stipulations of law (nomos),m ust take into account the natural capacities of his citizens as well as their social customs (etheo r agraphoin omoi). In the subsequent Aristotelian tradition we find this triad employed in the analysis of several other social 6. Throughout this paper I interpret Aristotle according to a procedure of philosophical reconstruction,w hich combines literal exegesis with a more creative exploration of his thought in the contexts of the Aristotelian tradition (chiefly ThomasAquinas) and of contemporaryd ebates in social theory See the discussion of the method of "reconstruction"i n Fred D. Miller's Nature,J ustice,a nd Rightsi n Aristotle'sP olitics (Oxford:C larendon Press, 1995), pp. 21-22. 7. Politics 1332a38. 474 THE REVIEWO F POLITICS ~ ~ ~ ~ I institutions. In jurisprudencew e find many variants of expressions for natural, customary, and stipulated or positive law.8 In logic we find John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas) asking "whether the division of signs into natural (naturale),s tipulated (ad placitum), and customary (ex consuetudine)is a sound division."9 By natural signs he means those signs that relate to their objects independent of human activity: smoke is a sign of fire. By customary signs he means those signs that arise from the collective and nonreflective practices of human communities: napkins on a table are a sign that dinner is imminent. By stipulated signs he means those signs whose meaning is deliberately appointed by an individual, as when a new word is introduced. Although Poinsot does not refer to Aristotle in his discussion of the threefold division of signs, I argue that he is offering here an interpretation and extension of Aristotle's nature, custom, and reason.10 Finally, FA. Hayek employs this triad, at least implicitly, in his analysis of the three kinds of order: "Yetm uch of what we call culture is just such a spontaneously grown order [custom], which arose neither altogether independently of human action [nature] nor by design [stipulation], but by a process that stands between these two possibilities, which were long considered as exclusive alternatives."1H ayek's distinction between the spontaneous order of custom and the designed order of stipulation is drawn from Adam Ferguson: "Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of 8. Thus the author of the RhetoricaA d Herennium( II, 19) lists the departments of ius as: "natura, lege, consuetudine, indicato, aequo et bono, pacto." Ulpian famously distinguishes (Digest1 . 1. 1) ius naturalei,u sg entium,i us civile.A nd Cicero (De Inventione2 .53.160) deploys theAristotelian scheme in his famous passage on the evolution of law from principles of nature to deliberate statutes: "Law (ius) initially proceeds from nature, then certain rules of conduct become customary by reason of their advantage;l ater still both the principles that proceeded from nature and those that had been approved by custom received the support of religion and the fear of the law (lex)." 9. John Poinsot, Tractatuds e Signis [1632],e d. and trans.J ohn Deely (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 269. 10. For a critique and reconstructiono f Poinsot's doctrine of signs, see James BernardM urphy," Nature,C ustom, and Stipulationi n the Semiotico f JohnP oinsot," Semiotica8 3 1/2 (1991): 33-68. 11. F A. Hayek, "Kinds of Order in Society" [1964], in The Politicizationo f Society,e d. Kenneth Templeton,J r.( Indianapolis:L ibertyP ress, 1979), p. 509. NATURE, CUSTOM AND REASON 475 any human design."'2H ayek gives pride of place, however, in the discovery of spontaneous social order to the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina, who explained that natural price "results from the thing itself without regard to laws and decrees, but is dependent on many circumstances which alter it, such as the sentiments of men, their estimation of different uses, often even in consequence of whims and pleasures."13 Following the lead of the theorists of order from Aquinas to Hayek, therefore, I will now reconstruct Aristotle's triad in terms of three fundamental concepts of order: there is the natural order to physical, chemical, and biological processes; there is the customary order of habitual social practices; and there is the stipulated order of deliberate design. In Aristotelian political science, the unit of analysis is an institution or practice (some stable pattern of human action or interaction) and the level of analysis is natural order,c ustomary order,o r stipulated order.O ur three kinds of order form the three dimensions of every human practice or institution, meaning that explanation must involve analysis at the levels of the sciences of nature, the sciences of custom, and the sciences of rational stipulation. Thus the study of language involves the natural sciences of psychology and physiology, the customary sciences of linguistic drift and analogy- formation, and the rational sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Each of these levels of analysis is crucial to the explanation of the complex order we find in language. We can now see that, despite his seminal contributions to the sciences of order, Hayek tended to confuse the unit of analysis with the level of analysis: he thus assigned the "market" (which is not itself a single institution but a metaphor embracing a huge range of institutions and practices) exclusively to the spontaneous order of custom.14 12. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh:A . Millar and T. Caddel, 1767), p. 187. 13. Luis Molina, De iustitiae t iure( Cologne, 1596-1600),t om. II, disp. 347, no. 3. Cited in Hayek, Law,L egislationa, nd Liberty1, : 21 and 151. 14. "Suchs pontaneous orders we find not only in the working of institutions like language and law.. .but also in the relations of the market" (Hayek, "Kinds of Orderi n Society,"p . 509). True,H ayek does not explicitly deny that marketsi nvolve stipulated order, but his explanatory claim that markets were essentially spontaneous underpinned his normative claim that market order ought to be left alone. For Hayek to admit as a matter of description that markets always also embody stipulated order would weaken his normative arguments for laissez-faire. 476 THE REVIEWO F POLITICS Yet market practices involve all three kinds of order: natural propensities toward exchange, customs of fairness and good faith, as well as deliberate stipulations defining what can and cannot be exchanged. How does this triad differ from the more familiar dichotomy of nature and convention? First of all, the concept of convention collapses the important distinction between the tacit social order of custom and the individually designed order of stipulation; when something is described as conventional we do not know if the claim is that it was deliberately stipulated or that it arose spontaneously. Second, ever since Antiphon set nature and convention in opposition, they have usually been treated as mutually exclusive alternatives; some Sophists championed nature while others championed convention.'5 Indeed, no set of concepts has so dominated social theory, from ancient times through the present, as the nature-convention dichotomy. One prominent contemporarys ocial theorist, G.A. Cohen, asserts:" The Sophists' distinction between nature and convention is the foundation of all social criticism."'6Y etAristotlei nsists that nature, custom, and stipulation are mutually inclusive and form a nested hierarchy such that every social institution or practice has a natural, customary, and stipulated dimension. Finally, the opposition of nature and convention serves a reductive explanatory strategy: either the claim that what seems to have rich symbolic and moral meaning, for example, marriage, is really just a biological strategy for reproductive fitness; or the claim that what seems to be rooted in a strong natural impulse, for example, marriage, is really just a cultural construct.A ristotle seems to reject such reductionist strategies as when he observes in the NicomacheanE thics:" Now some think that we are become good by nature (physei),o thers by habit (ethei),o thers by being taught (didake)."'7A s we discover from the parallel passage in the Politics, Aristotle thinks that each of these views is right but also incomplete: we need nature, habits, and reason. 15. Antiphon and Callicles champion physiso ver nomos;f orAntiphon see Die Fragmente der Vorsokratikere, d. Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz (Berlin: WeidmannscheV erlagsbuchhandlung,1 954), frag. 44A. 16. G. A. Cohen, KarlM arx'sT heoryo f History( Princeton:P rincetonU niversity Press, 1978), p. 107. 17. NicomacheanE thics1 179b20. NATURE, CUSTOM AND REASON 477 I In accordance with Aristotle's explicit logic of classification, I have thus far treated nature, custom, and rational stipulation as three species of the genus "order."B ut this genus-species logic does not indicate the serial and hierarchical relations among our three concepts: nature is prior to custom and custom is prior to stipulation. Aristotle, however, offers an alternative logic of classification, which is most clearly illustrated by his analysis of the kinds of souls. Here, instead of defining the genus "soul" and the species of plant, animal, and human souls, Aristotle says that the plant soul is living (that is, nutritive and reproductive), the animal soul is living plus sensitive, and the human soul is living and sensitive plus rational.18 Aristotle implicitly treats nature, custom, and stipulation as such a hierarchy: "In every case the lower faculty can exist apart from the higher, but the higher presupposes those below it."19 Nature represents the physical, chemical, and biological processes of the cosmos; nature can and did exist apart from human custom and stipulation. Human custom is rooted in the physiology of habit but transcends habit by becoming a social system of norms. Custom presupposes nature, but custom can exist without being the object of rational reflection and stipulation: language existed before grammarians. Stipulation is the synoptic order deliberately imposed upon the pre-reflective materials of custom; reflective stipulation always presupposes custom. We have thus far treated "nature"a s the causal properties that are actualized by custom and stipulation, but does not Aristotle also describe the full-blown actualization of a thing's potential as natural?20A full discussion of Aristotle's many senses of "nature" would be out of place here, but I will only observe that Aristotle does sometimes distinguish what is "by nature"( physei)f rom what is "accordingt o nature"( katap hysin).2W1 hat is broadly "by nature" might be either according to nature (if it realizes its end) or contrary 18. De Anima 414a29-415a13. 19. R. D. Hicks,A ristotle:D e Anima( Cambridge:C ambridge University Press, 1907), p. 335. 20. Ronald Beiner brought this passage to my attention (Politics 1252b32): "naturei s an end: what each thing is-for example, a human being, a horse, or a household-when its coming into being is complete is, we assert, the nature of that thing." 21. See, for example, Physics 193al-2 and Generationos f Animals7 70b9-17.