Did Aristotle Create Racist Ideas?
*Welcome to the first edition of the #Nerdflow Newsletter!*
Something I’m interested in is the long history of race. In other words, I want to understand how the classification of certain human beings as naturally inferior became a thing. Our modern racist assumptions are shaped be the past. In this legacy, a name that comes up over and over again is that of Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE). Some consider him the father of scientific racism who paved the way for contemporary claims about racialized innate intelligence like those made by Charles Murray in The Bell Curve.
In Book I of Politics, Aristotle develops his infamous theory of natural slavery. He says,
It is evident, then, that there are some people, some of whom are naturally free, others naturally slaves, for whom slavery is both just and beneficial.
Aristotle’s arguments are weak and rather circular. He says that whoever can be treated as someone’s else’s property is a natural slave. First, he suggests that nature gives slaves and free people different kinds of bodies, then he undermines this idea and locates the difference in the soul, and finally he concludes that “the soul’s beauty is not so easy to see as the body’s.”
Did Aristotle create racist ideas? The answer is no and yes. I like the way that Ibram X. Kendi puts it in Stamped From the Beginning,
All in all, ethnic and religious and color prejudice existed in the ancient world. Constructions of races—White Europe, Black Africa, for instance—did not, and therefore racist ideas did not. But crucially, the foundations of race and racist ideas were laid.
Honestly, my favorite parts of Politics Book I is when Aristotle references his opponents. At one point, he says:
But others believe it is contrary to nature to be a master (for it is by law that one person is a slave and another free, whereas by nature there is no difference between them), which is why it is not just either; for it involves force.
I was like, “That totally makes more sense than what you’re actually giving us, Aristotle!”
My impression is that Aristotle wasn’t trying to invent ideas of hierarchy, but he was providing “empirical” observations of the hierarchies he saw in his society. These observations also served as rational justifications of societal hierarchies by grounding them in what is considered natural. Aristotle explicitly talked about the “natural order” of master over slave, husband over wife, father over child. His groundwork for later racist ideas can’t be separated from sexism. For example, Aristotle says: “…we must take what [Sophocles] says about a woman as our guide in every case: ‘To a woman silence is a crowning glory’—whereas this does not apply to a man.”
Hundreds of years after Aristotle, parts of the New Testament traditionally attributed to the Apostle Paul echo the same views. (Though, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Aristotle directly influenced biblical writers.) While Aristotle didn’t invoke God, these parts of the Bible use theological language about God and Christ to justify hierarchy and double-standards when it comes to virtuous behavior.
It’s no surprise that modern racists have continually found inspiration in Aristotle, from recent race science peddlers to New England Puritans to the Spaniards who first debated the colonization of the Americas. At the same time, Aristotle’s theories have also always been refuted, even in his own day.
I’m in the early stage of writing a book on a rebellious 16th-century priest named Bartolomé de las Casas who confronted the way that Europeans used Aristotle to justify conquest and argue that Native Americans were inferior. Tired of how Christians cited Aristotle, Las Casas once told a royal audience that Aristotle was “burning in hell” and that “we are too used to invoking his doctrines when it is convenient.”
I don’t think we should “cancel” Aristotle. We can keep reading him, and even appreciate other insights he provides. But there’s nothing wrong with unabashedly opposing his ideology of human hierarchy and its modern mutations. This opposition has a long history.
What I’m Writing
Nothing to share at the moment. I just went through final revisions for my April column at The Revealer, which will be on the internet’s unofficial patron saint. I’m researching for an overdue essay on Augustine. Plus, the book stuff.
Writing Life Tip
Book Proposal and Book Deal
I’ve encouraged people to check out Courtney Maum’s Before And After The Book Deal if they are interested in navigating publishing a book. I’m a newb, and still in the early part of the process, but I found her book to be really helpful and she has a great sense of humor.
What I’m Reading
Racism and purity culture: Atlanta shootings show how they’re linked
The Scholar Who Chronicled the Afro-Latino Experience
Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance
The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence
Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?
Book: Kink: Stories
Song(s) I Love
Jay Electronica - Better in Tune With the Infinite
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Bibo no Aozora