I fondamenti del sapere politico. Aristotele contro Platone?

• Published in: Teoria politica (Milan, Italy) pp. 23 - 34
• Main Author: Vegetti, Mario
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Italian
• Published: Marcial Pons 2018
• Subjects: Political Knowledge; Plato; Politics; Aristotle; Republic
• ISSN: 0394-1248; 1972-5477

The naturalization of politics is the most evident and most productive anti-platonic aspect of the scientific construction of Aristotle who, starting from his definition of man as a «naturally political animal» (EN I 5.1097b11; Pol. I 2.1253a2-3), conducts a spectacular work of simplification and normalisation of the study of political phenomena, attributing the underlying principles to the field of historically conditioned subjectivities and relying on the methodology of natural sciences for their pursuit. Plato followed a very different path when, adopting a narrative method, he outlined different profiles of the evolutionary processes concerning political communities and their institutions. He did so by pointing out in each of these processes the role of human decisions, which in turn depended on factors of social psychology and public or private education. Book VIII of The Republic —the most relevant text on political decadence in Plato’s approach— offers an explanatory model that connects indissolubly the matters of the soul with the metabole politeion, producing an intense psychologisation of political events. However, the perfection of the kallipolis, from which constitutional models where moving away by intentionally becoming more and more degraded, was the consequence of a «founding» and artificial choice, the desired effect of a constructive logic. Relying on the rule of conformity of the kata physin, according to both a descriptive and prescriptive application, and on the teleological model, which by nature operates aiming of the best, Aristotle could instead establish a necessary connection between the end inscribed in the nature (zoological and anthropological) of man and human political developments, which are mediated by deliberation. Through this epistemological re-foundation, Aristotle could reject, in Book II of Politics, the subversive ex-novo project attempted by Plato, making a very intense use of the lexicon of «necessity» and «impossibility» to defend, in the name of nature, family, and property. However, there is a second way of reading the comparison between Plato and Aristotle concerning the foundations of political thought, starting from Book III of Politics, in which Aristotle is keen on crossing the threshold between the (epistemologically reassuring) regularity of the processes driven by nature and the instability of the historical-political world. This happens as a result of his own theoretical work, which makes visible the weakness of the nexus linking the descriptive point of view with the regulatory one. Emerging from the taxonomy of political regimes to distinguish the correct forms from the ones deviating from the strategic path imprinted by nature (Pol. III 6.1279 a17-20; Eth. nic. VIII 12.1160 a3), the concept of «deviation» (parekbasis) seems to be the decisive turning point: here the difficulties of explaining political processes on the basis of nature become evident, the prohibition of identifying positive forms of legality with exemplary models of justice, the emergence of a rift between the good man and the citizen spoudaios, which seems to open a deep breach between ethics and politics. This essay explores the possibility of ascribing a partial recovery of the normative instance (after closing for Plato the door of political projecting), to Aristotle, for purposes entirely internal to theoretical construction: defining a desired model of ariste politeia, functioning as a useful term for comparison and evaluation of what happens in real historical processes, allowing at least to measure the amount of «deviation», potentially present in all historically existing regimes. This interpretative hypothesis has an important methodological implication: it presumes the constant presence of a theoretical work that is somehow organic, which crosses all the books of Politics, giving rise to many different research questions and constituting their common horizon. The author intends to argue that the theoretical movement in discussion problematically connects the naturalistic foundation of book I, the analysis of the parekbaseis and their consequences in Books III and IV, and finally the normative re-foundation of Book VII, without fearing to compare and to make interact texts belonging to research themes as well as writing periods quite different from one another.