Redeem the Time

Man is a social animal.

Man is rational animal.

I can’t emphasize enough how much of political philosophy flows out of the understanding of these two premises: you must understand both of these propositions in order to understand what the proposition that “man is a political animal” means. To understand the propoposition “man is a political animal” is to understand that government is partly natural and partly artifice.

If you emphasize man’s social nature and ignore or downplay his rational nature, you could end up saying government and everything else that helps man achieve his good is organic, or arises out of nature in the sense that nature means everything that moves and is changeable simply speaking. You could end up thinking that governments grow like everything else in nature, ignoring the extent to which they are produced, or “constituted,” by human reason. Absent reason in man, one can easily ascribe the cause of man’s actions and artifices to history. Yet providence, or the “practical reason” or “prudence” of God as it exists in directing history, is unknown to man in this life at least. Although one will likely hold that the end of government is the common good if man is naturally social, it will be very difficult to say what that good is or ought to be in an unchanging or immovable way while denying the reason of man, as reason provides an unchanging standard.

If you emphasize man’s rational nature and ignore or downplay his social nature, you can end up saying that government and everything else that helps man achieve his good is made up or determined by him, a product of his nature in the sense that the most immoveable or unchangeable part of his nature allows him to manipulate physical things, including his fellow men. You could end up thinking that governments are pure creations of the human mind, able to be produced in accordance with whatever our reason sets forth as good, ignoring the extent to which man is naturally social and drawn together in particular ways through family, village, and polis. Absent the social nature of man, one could see man’s reason as supreme over the limits or givens of nature, which you will claim man’s reason can judge and seemingly reject. If men are atom-like individuals that can determine their relation to everyone else on their own terms, there is no principle of unity between them, and hence if man is not social there is no common good. It will be very difficult to say that there is a fixed good for men in common, as men will only associate with each other as they choose or think best, and one might even end up saying that each man is free to determine his own good in an unqualified way.