Individual and Community in Greek Thought I

At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics (10.9), Aristotle suggests that individuals can achieve true happiness only if they live in communities which foster the practices of life that promote virtue: “Surely he who wants to make men, whether many or few, better by his care must try to become capable of legislating, if it is through laws that we can become good.”

Please read along with these notes, Plato Republic 1-2, 5; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10,

Texts will be circulated as e-mail attachments: all should sign up for a Google Group (or something) and let me know.

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Individual and Community in Greek Thought

Section 1

As a preliminary observation one should point out that the individual and the community develop as distinct ways of conceptualising the realm of the human in Greek thought. The notion of the human itself might depend on other distinctions: that with the gods, for example (who are described as αθανατοι or αμβροτοι), or with the animal or vegetable world. Internally, the human realm can be understood either in terms of the individual or of aggregations of individuals. It is important to note, I think that these realms have a certain degree of independence, in that characteristically in Greek thought, the speculation regarding any one of these realms does not necessarily inhibit the other, as it might, I think, be seen to do in Christian thought. Aristotle concludes the Nicomachean Ethics by looking forward to a discussion of politics: the Plato of the Republic or the Laws is not antithetical to that of the Philebus or the Phaedrus.

At first sight, then, Greek thought in the archaic and classical periods seems particularly rich in its vocabulary of terms relating the two spheres. There is the heroic community, the tribe, the family, and above all, the state: there is also a sense of national identity, expressed in such terms as the Achaians or the Hellenes. Then again there are ways of distinguishing exceptional individuality through terms such as the king, the hero or the prophet. As such the constitution of the human domain itself is marked by certain restrictions: the most important being of gender and class. J.M.Rist observed that the notion of `human value' is not available in general way in the Greek period, because Greek political and ethical thought is concerned with the values of adult male participants in the political process. Thus what can be predicated as a value of this class can not be predicated of women, children or slaves. The distinction of individual and community operates within these limits. But before we can look at the ways in which the realms of the common (το κοινον) and the individual (το ιδιον) distinguished in Greek thought, it is useful to examine at some general features. In a seminal study, J-P Vernant , makes a number of important points in this respect. What follows is a recapitulation of some of Vernant's major arguments. The notion of the individual that emerges in Greek thought between the eight and the fourth centuries B.C. is distinguished by its consistency in viewing the individual as being part of a social group or organization:

Greek society was egalitarian, not hierarchical. The city defines those who compose it by placing them in a group or on a single horizontal plane. Whoever lacks access to this plane is excluded from the city-state and from society (and at its limit, from humanity, like the slave.) But each individual, if he is a citizen is, at least in principle, able to fulfil all the social functions, with their religious implications.(MI: 319-320)

As long as he is not touched by curse or pollution, the individual can perform religious and sacrificial rites for himself and his family (and also in the name of the larger group, should he be authorized to do so by civic authority) as much as he is entitled to fight in the wars for the state. For Vernant, therefore, the Greek individual is always - in his role as a member of the polis - closer to Dumont's formulation of the homo aequalis than to that of homo hierarchicus. The notion of individuality thus is constituted, at least partly, by the possibility of participation: in the affairs of the state, in military activity, in religious rites. This idea of participation is intimately linked on the other hand with the emergence of the generalist discourse of the city-state. In a classic study of early Greek thought, Vernant sees the emergence of the state as being impelled by a growing need to share knowledge previously regarded as secret or sacred. This leads to what may be termed `disclosure', the transfer and accumulation of knowledge in the public domain; as the Greeks would locate it, εις το μεσον. Obviously this process is seen as a constititutive process of the city-state in general and has nothing to do with the specific kinds of political organization (πολιτεια) that we are familiar with from the Greek period.

The forms of individuality that are enabled in such circumstances need to be understood. Vernant suggests a tripartite distinction (similar in some ways to the one proposed by Foucalt in The Care of the Self, NY, 1986, 42-3) among the notions of the `individual', the `subject' and the `ego'. The individual is characterized in terms of the place that he occupies in the group to which he belongs, and the kind of autonomy that he may thought to possess iin respect of the `institutional framework'; the speaking individual, able to express himself in his own name and in terms of the uniqueness of his being may be described as the subject. The third kind, the ego, is the ensemble of psychological practices that constitute the inner being of the individual , bounded and guarded by the limits of self-consciousness. Vernant tends to see the last variety as being relatively rare in Greek thought up to the end of the classical period, but that is a question that we may take up later. The first two correspond to the forms of biography and autobiography respectively, being the literary forms in which the singularity of the individual is seen by the others and by the self.

The distinctions between the realms of the individual and the communal may be seen more clearly now. Though the areas of το ιδιον and το κοινον are postulated as separate ones, they are also dependent on each other. Common activities are necessarily shared and not the exclusive privilege of any particular individual or group: the private realm being administered solely by the individual. But here too distinctions of the `private' and the `public' must be seen as being historically rather than essentially determined: education and food largely fall within the private domain in Athenian culture, whereas in Sparta both the αγωγη [agoge], the education of Spartan youth, and the συσσιτια [sussitia], compulsory communal meals, are controlled by state policy.

Vernant's discussion of the realms of the individual and the communal provide a firm basis for our own study. The demarcation of the realms of the private and the public, and consequently the valuation of action as being for-the-self or for-the other (whether another individual or the group), are determined fundamentally by the ways in which these domains may be constructed. Attempts to allocate forms of activity, or aggregations of practices, to one or the other often turn out to be problematic. Whether we consider the activities which apparently involve the community as a whole, or those which appear to be the most private, the respective demands of self and structure may lead to a degree of uncertainty. An area in which both the demands of the individual and community are experienced most obviously is that of war. As the most obvious site of heroic striving, the battlefield appears as the ultimate arbiter of success and failure. As such it operates as both the field of communal desire and that of personal ambition. The values of war permeate the discourses of statecraft deeply and in some cases determine the notion of community. Equally it is seen as the decisive arena of heroic self-creation, a theme that is especially important in the literary productions of the age. It is useful to remember that the images refracted in literature bear a real, though occasionally oblique, relation to actual changes and problems in the organization of military culture. For example, the momentous changes in the style of warfare over the late sixth and early fifth centuries, from the aristocratic military culture of the ἱππεῖς [hippeis] to the heavily armed infantry, the ὁπλίται [hoplitai], are critically viewed in Aristophanes' play the Knights.

Amlan Das Gupta