Sound thinking
Political community and the good
by Ken Myers
“Metaphysics is the master science in the theoretical order because it studies the most fundamental and comprehensive object there is, namely, being qua being. Politics, by analogy, is the master science in the practical order because it concerns what we might describe as the most comprehensive sphere of human existence. As Aristotle explains in the opening sentences of the Politics:
“Every city (πόλιν) is a community (κοινωνίαν) of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest (πάσας περιέχουσα τὰς ἄλλας), aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.
“Just as human action aims inevitably at some good, so too the ordered inter-action of human beings, to the extent that it is indeed the inter-related actions of individual human beings (and not just an accidental coincidence of discrete acts), aims at a common good. The different kinds of communities, then, are specified by the different aspects of the human good they are meant to realize in common. Now, just as the characterization of the variety of sciences as the study of being in a certain respect leads to the need for a science of being as such and not only in a certain limited respect, so too does the characterization of human community as ordered to the good in a certain respect lead to the need for a human community ordered to the good as such, without specifying qualification, the whole human good. Aquinas brings out even more strongly the completeness of the good that defines politics: ‘If every society is ordered to a good, that society which is the highest necessarily seeks in the highest degree the good that is the highest among all human goods . . . and so political society is itself the highest society.’ This complete human community is what Aristotle calls the city, the ‘polis’ — which is sometimes translated in this context into English as ‘the state’ or the ‘city-state,’ because we naturally think of a city, not so much as a supreme political entity unto itself (in spite of the fact that the very word ‘politics’ means, literally, ‘city matters’), but as a part of a larger unity, typically the nation.
“This ambiguity, the difficulty that presents itself in translating the term ‘polis,’ deserves attention. We tend to distinguish between ‘city’ and ‘state’ principally in quantitative terms. But the crucial consideration regarding completeness or perfection for Aristotle is not the size of the political unity or community, but its status in the order of goodness. Specifically, the crucial point is its comprehensiveness, its capacity to include within itself the ends pursued by other societies, such as the household or the village — indeed, in a manner that we will have to specify below, also the society of the Church. Before addressing that, let us speculatively deepen the point about what precisely defines what Aquinas calls the ‘most perfect’ (perfectissima) society of the city. Human beings cannot but pursue what they take to be good, both in each discrete action and in their lives as a whole, so that an individual life can be taken to be an interpretation, whether conscious and deliberate or not, of what the human good is. The organization of human life in a community, beyond the regulation of discrete actions, or, in other words, a city, is thus inevitably itself a particular interpretation of the highest human good. Just as one cannot study any particular science, understood as a study of being in a particular respect, without (however unconsciously) taking for granted or implying a metaphysics, that is, an interpretation of the meaning of being as such, so too one cannot have a human community that is not an interpretation of the human good, as such. Whatever human community thus sets the ultimate horizon for the unfolding of human life, that community is the one properly designated as the polis.”
— from D. C. Schindler, God and the City: An Essay in Political Metaphysics (St. Augustine’s Press, 2023). Dr. Schindler discussed this book on Volume 160 of the Journal.
