L’uomo buono e il buon cittadino nel III libro della Politica di Aristotele. Un punto di difficile convergenza tra etica e politica

The good man and the worthy citizen in book III of Aristotle’s Politics. A point of difficult convergence between ethics and politics This essay is devoted to the weighty problem that is introduced at the beginning of chapter 4 of Aristotle’s book III of the Politics. This is the question of whether it is possible or not to identify the virtue of the «good man (aner agathos)» with that of the «worthy citizen (polites spoudaios)» (1276b16-18). Aristotle had just scientifically established what defines the bounds between each citizen and his city. On the one hand, the citizen is he who plays an active role in the government of the city. On the other hand, the city has the power to “fashion” the citizen in its own image and, therefore, to ask him to conform to its constitution. The possibility that what is required of the «worthy citizen» may go against the virtue of the «good man» creates a fracture between the political dimension and the ethical one. The latter was the area in which Aristotle depicted his ideal of man, which corresponds to the full realization of the zoon politikon. Now, if we opt for the possibility of a contrast between the virtue of the good man and that of the citizen, this will raise some doubts as to the very notion of “virtue” and the homogeneity of its semantic area. If we instead identify the two, we are likely to overlook the difficulty raised by the diversity of political constitutions and the difference of value between men who are recognized as citizens within a specific politeia. By keeping in mind this difficulty recognized by the interpreters of this text, and which takes the form of a dialectical «problem» that illustrates somewhat ambiguous lexical usages, this essays aims to reconstruct Aristotle's textual strategies from a wider perspective. I will include in my area of investigation, on the one hand, the evaluation of political regimes, based on their relative correctness, and, on the other, the search for the ideal conditions for a perfect constitution (ariste politeia). My main thesis is that Aristotle has to face two problems of varying complexity. Firstly, he needs to reconcile the diversity of regimes with his unitary criterion of correctness, namely the respecting of the ethical-political substance of virtue. Here, Aristotle easily finds a solution. Secondly, he has to face numerous objections that focus on the different qualities of citizens, in order to restrict the political body and to affirm the exclusive validity of the criterion of “likeliness” (homoiotes) for defining a citizen body and of the criterion of excellence for gaining access to positions of power. The essay claims, then, that Aristotle struggles to avoid conclusions that reduce the plurality within the polis and concentrate power into a few hands. In order to show this, the essay presents a detailed and careful reading of the metaphor of the ship as a political model that implies virtuous cooperation to ensure everyone's safety, as well as the hypothesis that the group of citizens could be excellent, even though the majority of its members are not.