On the Politics of Virility

Stephen G. Salkever, "On the Politics of Virility," Essays on the Foundation of Aristotelian Political Science, ed. Carnes Lord and David O'Connor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 188-9.

The figure who represents the peak of moral virtue, the great-souled person (megalopsychos), does strangely little and is quite slow to do even that much and and is, above all, not tense or tightly strung, owing to a sense that nothing much in the realm of action is very great (oude syntonos ho meden mega oiomenos). Just as Plato attempts, against his culture, to transfer the laurel of andreia from the soldier to the philosopher intent upon his or her researches, so Aristotle seeks to replace the vision of the bold warrior with that of a beast who combines magnitude and a certain gentleness. The Spartans, he tells us toward the end of the Politics, aim only at courage, and so fail to produce even that. Real courage has nothing of saveagery about it but goes "rather with the gentler and more lion-like characters."

Those who see Aristotle's biology as providing a pseudoscientific apology for male supremacy are as mistaken as those who read his social science (politike) as a stirring call for a participatory politics of communal identity. The error in both instances comes from failing to see how Aristotle strives to undermine, rather than support, the evaluative distinction between public things and private things. For Aristotle, our human identity--as beings who can come into our own through living reasonably--requires both polis and oikia, and the latter even more (in one sense) than the former. This argument, itself thoroughly biological in character (in that its first premises are statements about the nature of human beings, about the problems and capacities that compose our distinct biological heritage), serves as the ground for the Aristotelian derogation of the Greek attachment to virility and the love of honor and to the extreme hierarchy and differentiation of gender roles that is the consequence of that attachment. It is his biology, in fact, that provides the basis for his high valuation of women, who were not highly valued by the culture in which Aristotle lived.