Politics, it is often said “is a dirty game”. The increasing alienation exhibited by citizens around the world towards the political process certainly suggest they think it to be merely a dirty game. They would probably consider it extremely laughable that lofty ideas and ideals can be associated with the political game. But lofty ideals and ideas there are, even if they have to share a bed with political intrigue of the crassest kind. The crass is easy to see, for the lofty ideas though, one must look harder.
I will be doing a five-part series where we will be meeting some of the people though out history that have taken the hardest looks at the political process and have espoused its loftiest ideals. Why, you may ask do we have to examine ideas of so called sages from ages past in a world that thanks to the digital revolution, is swimming in oceans and oceans of data, conceivably on every topic under the sun? Because, as even any good data scientist will tell you (and this piece is actually being written by one), data is not insight. These great thinkers uncovered insights that transcended the times they lived in and thus, are in a position to help lift up the quality of contemporary public debate. So without further ado, let’s get right to it, starting with the great sage of ancient China, Confucius.
Confucius (551-479 BC)
The period running from about 771 to about 450 BC was a treacherous one in ancient China. At the time many small principalities were competing to become larger kingdoms at the expense of others. As a result, there was, to be found, strife, violence and assassination a plenty.
It was during these times that Confucius lived, and as an adult, he sought to bring some semblance of order to the perpetual chaos all around him by offering advice to a number of rulers of these principalities. In this he was largely spurned, and often got persecution as his reward. It was only with increasing time after his passing that he became China’s most influential sage.
As an ethicist, Confucius preferred an ethical code of personal virtue over one of rules and laws. What this means is that Confucius was less concerned about doing the right thing, and more concerned with being the right person, so that doing the right thing automatically flowed from being the right person.
To become the right person according to Confucian ethics, there are two possibilities. One is to become a gentleman, the other is to become a sage. A gentleman according to Confucius, is a highly cultured scholar devoted to public service. A sage well…a sage is the highest possible human ideal for Confucius. For him, a sage is not someone defined by a particular position in the social hierarchy. A sage stands apart from it or rather, transcends it. Becoming a sage, he thought, would take more than most humans had to give. He counseled instead that most should aim to become gentlemen. Confucius’ sage, not only transcends the social order but also the time and place of his society, to become a model for all a model for all humanity, for all time.
Confucian ethics also places a high premium on authority and obedience, particularly obedience to one’s parents and leaders. These two ideals, that of the cultured scholar serving the public and respect for and obedience to the social hierarchy remain, more than 2,500 years after the passing of the great sage himself, the most salient features of Confucian ideology which was the official ideology of China rulers for almost 2,000 years.
Plato (428-347 BC)
Plato was one of the three great Greek philosophers of antiquity. The other two are Socrates and Aristotle. Plato was a student of Socrates, while Aristotle was a student of Plato. As one of many Socrates’ young admirers, he was heartbroken when the city of Athens put Socrates on trial and sentenced death for heresy. Socrates very much like Jesus Christ had a gift for making the powerful look foolish, and in the end, he paid for it with his life.
In response to the execution of Socrates, Plato decided to write The Republic, which was a book of dialogues –by dialogues I mean plays focusing on serious philosophical discussion in which Socrates was the lead character. In The Republic, Plato presented some rather astonishing views, some remarkably modern and some remarkably absurd, even today. For example, he suggested that men and women be given equal opportunities as regards careers. In this Plato was astonishingly ahead of his time. It would take another 2,400 years for this to begin to happen. On the absurd side, in a bid to curb political corruption, he proposed that political rulers be forbidden from owning property or be responsible for raising their families. They are to make use of only public property and their children raised by professional nurses in public day care centres. All this in a bid to get them focused on promoting the good of the city as opposed to amassing personal wealth for themselves and their children. His last major proposal was that only philosophers be allowed to become rulers as they are the only ones naturally fit to rule. Unsurprisingly this was met by ridicule but I personally see little problems with this as long as philosophers are aware of the limitations of philosophy in dealing with practical politics.
Plato would write another collection of dialogues called The Statesman. In it, he compares different kinds of regimes ranking them from best to worst. For him, the best/ideal regime is the rule of virtuous philosophers unconstrained by law. Next to this is rule of men who might or might not be above corruption, who are constrained by laws. The absolute worst is the rule of tyrants. Tyrant rule by definition is unconstrained by law. He suggested that societies deliberately aim for the second regime subject to the rule of law. He feared that a society aiming for the best might end up with the worst since they are both unconstrained by law. In advocating for government subject to the rule of law, again Plato shows himself to be remarkable modern and ahead of his time.
While Plato could say stuff that could one scratch his head, he was without a doubt an imaginative thinker and because of that imagination, he set the agenda for the entire history of Western philosophy.
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Aristotle is widely regarded as the greatest polymath ever. He seems to have carried out penetrating research into just about every subject under the sun worth knowing. His surviving works range in subject from meteorology to psychology to politics, and they dominated higher learning in the west until the 17th century. Even more than that, he also invented new fields of knowledge like formal logic, which even today is still taught very much in the manner in which he conceived it. Other fields he invented include biology and literary criticism. Much of the astronomy and physics as devised by Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo and Newton which ushered in the modern scientific era were done in a bid to refute the physical theories of Aristotle.
Though Aristotle was Plato’s student, having spent 20 years in Plato’s school, he differed from his teacher on some major points. Plato was very elitist in his thinking (having come from a very wealthy background, perhaps this couldn’t be helped) while Aristotle took his point of departure from the views of ordinary people then refined them to elegance. As we have seen, Plato thought that philosophers should rule, while Aristotle differentiated a statesman from a philosopher, and didn’t think that one should necessarily be the other.
Like a lot of philosophers, Aristotle pondered on the nature of happiness and decided that happiness was the actualization of our potential in activities of moral and intellectual virtue. In his research into politics, he divided the types of rule into 3 classes, these being the rule by one, few or many. He said each of these had their good and bad forms. He listed the good forms as monarchy, aristocracy and polity. The bad forms he named, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. It seems the word “democracy” took on a very different meaning for Aristotle than it does for us in modern day. For him democracy can be likened to mob rule, or rule by the poor. The good form of democracy which he called polity, seemed to be a rule by the middle class.
Aristotle was a realist about politics and believed that everybody lived in a corrupt regime. For him, the point of politics is to moderate bad government so that it doesn’t become worse, and if possible try to make it better.
Aristotle gets some criticism because he seemed to lack Plato’s progressive views on women and because he seemed to endorse a natural form of slavery. His defenders point out though, that he was against slavery based on conquest and force (personally I can’t help thinking what other form of slavery is there?) and that being a citizen in Aristotle day would mean compulsory military service, which it seems in his view would discount woman. With women in modern times serving in militaries, I don’t think that argument would hold water with his detractors. But one can’t deny that the times were different, so perhaps one shouldn’t be too harsh in judging Aristotle by the standard of our own times.
Augustine (354-430 AD)
Augustine was a catholic bishop and Roman citizen born and based in Roman North Africa. In his most famous work titled City of God, Augustine tried to deal with what must have been a personally painful experience; the sacking of the city of Rome by barbarian invaders. Some members of the Roman elite had blamed Rome’s defeat on the rise of Christianity, claiming that it preached meekness and humility, thereby undermining Rome’s military character.
Augustine felt that Christians were being made a convenient scape goat and he sought to address this in City of God. He started by pointing out that Rome’s foremost philosopher had already mentioned the corruption setting in the Roman Empire even before the birth of Jesus Christ, thus implying that Rome’s eventual defeat at the hands of the barbarians was centuries in the making.
In City of God, Plato also took time to address some of the claims made by Plato in The Republic, specifically the source of evil. Plato claimed that this was the human body and its various appetites and lusts. An experience in Augustine’s youth led him to believe that this can’t be correct. He instead believed that the source of evil was perverse pride. This realization led him to find problems with other claims made by Plato. He felt that Plato’s belief that his philosopher-kings could avoid corruption because of their philosophical discipline was wrong because they suffered from perverse pride as much as anybody else. This led to Augustine’s greatest political contribution; that we cannot hope to have virtuous rulers and that politics is a necessary evil to control human sinfulness. Augustine’s political realism, is one that continues to influence how politics is viewed in many quarters up to present day times.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Few in history have exerted a greater influence on matters of the intellect and religion in equal measure, as Thomas Aquinas. Born to a noble family, he would leave nobility behind to take up orders as in impoverished friar in the Dominican order of the catholic church.
Aquinas’ best known work is the Summa Theoligiae. In it, Aquinas tried to synthesize the science and philosophy of Aristotle with the claims of Biblical religion. Many would claim that such a synthesis is the essence of Western Civilization. Aquinas argued that God is the author of both human reason and of revelation. As a result of that, he would claim that what we learn by the means of science cannot in principle contradict what we learn from scripture. From this he would infer that if there seemed to be a contradiction, then we must be mistaken about either the claims of science or those of the Bible (I would add perhaps both).
Aquinas developed his view that Biblical faith and Aristotelian philosophy are compatible in the form of thousands of arguments, ranging from physics and biology to ethics, psychology and theology. His guiding principle throughout is that ‘faith does not destroy or replace reason but perfects it’.
Aquinas’ guiding principle can be plainly seen in his work on morality and law. From Greek philosophy he would identify the virtues of justice, wisdom, courage and moderation, what he termed the ‘natural virtues’. From the Bible, he would faith, hope and love as the Bible’s supreme virtues. He believed the Biblical virtues perfected the natural virtues, hence we could not do without one set or the other.
In the field of law, Aquinas treated Roman law as a model of rational human law, and he sought to show it might be reconciled with the divine law revealed in the Bible. According to Aquinas, both rational human law and divine law stem from God’s eternal law. Since we have no direct access to God’s eternal law, we can understand it only indirectly, by means of the natural law of human conscience and the divine law of the Bible.
In matters of civil legislation, Aquinas believed that the human legislator must use his practical wisdom to specify general principles of natural law into the particular rules of human civil law.
Aquinas synthesis of science and religion remains highly relevant in a world that increasingly pushes them apart. In the face of the onslaught, he surely would have remained confident that God does not teach one thing in nature only to contradict in the Bible.
Bibliography
- Garrard, Graeme and Murphy, James. 2019 How to Think Politically: Sages, Scholars and Statesmen Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World. London: Bloomsbury Continuum
