6
further develops this distinction in Book I of the Rhetoric, where he argues that “equity”
is a form of unwritten universal law that remedies the deficiencies of the written laws of
communities, and he twice invokes Antigone’s example, suggesting that the unwritten
law can be used to assess and question conventional laws (Rhet., 1373b1-14, 1374a18-
1374b2, 1375a25-b5).
12
•
Second, Aristotle speaks of nature as impulse or inclination, as distinct from conscious
human thought. This is the sense in which familial communities, based on bonds of
kinship, are said to be natural (Politics, 1252b31-32). Aristotle does not say that natural
impulses are determinative; nature in this sense is more like a disposition than an
overwhelming force. Thus, for example, Aristotle says that the direct endowments of
nature are only one of several possible sources of happiness (EE, 1214a15-25; Pol.
1332a39-42).
•
Third, Aristotle refers to nature as form, a set of distinctive qualities that is both unique
and universal to a class of things under consideration. Similar to Plato’s concept of
Ideas, in this sense the nature of a species or genus consists of the qualities that set it
apart and define it as a unique group. Nature in this sense “makes nothing in vain,” and
one task of the scientist or philosopher is inquiry into the qualities unique to each natural
grouping. For example, Aristotle’s famous claim that humans are by nature political
beings, zoon politikon, derives from his observation that speech concerning justice is a
distinctly human attribute that is not shared by other animals (Pol., 1253a7-18). Similarly,
Aristotle’s inquiry into the “nature” of political communities rests on claims about what
12
Of course, how Aristotle’s account of Antigone informs his political theory is separate from the
question of whether they are based on an accurate interpretation of Sophoclean tragedy. In this
paper, I limit myself to how the Poetics fits with the Politics, but whether the two work as literary
criticism I will leave as an open question.
Convention