According to Aristotle by Paya Frank

 

 

According to Aristotle

MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL BY NATURE

The perfect community of several villages is the city  1, which has, so to speak, the extreme of all sufficiency, and which arose for the cause of the necessities of life, but exists now for the sake of living well. So every city is by nature, if they are the first communities; because the city is the end of them, and nature is the end. In fact, we call the nature of each thing what each one is, once its generation is finished, whether we are talking about the man, the horse or the house. Furthermore, that for which something exists and the end is the best, and sufficiency is an end and the best.

From all this it is clear, then, that the city is one of the natural things, and that man is a social animal and that the unsocial by nature and not by chance is either a bad man or more than a man, like the one whom Homer rebukes: "without tribe, without law, without home," because he who is such by nature is also a lover of war, as an isolated piece in games.

The reason why man is, more than the bee or any gregarious animal, a social animal is evident: nature, as we often say, does nothing in vain, and man is the only animal that has a say. The voice is a sign of pain and pleasure, and that is why other animals also have it, since their nature reaches the point of having a sensation of pain and pleasure and expressing it to each other; but the word is to manifest what is convenient and what is harmful, what is just and what is unjust; and it is exclusive to man compared to other animals, to have, alone, the sense of good and evil, of what is just and what is unjust,... and the community of these things is what constitutes the houses and the city. .

1. When Aristotle speaks of the city he refers to the state, since the Greek states were city-states; and when he talks about the house he means the family .

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