VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 9
The Far Side of the Mediterranean, the One Same Position
Start at the height of Athens, in the fifth century before the common era, a city of three to four hundred thousand of whom a hundred to a hundred fifty thousand are slaves. One in three. The citizen has his free hours for the assembly and the gymnasium and the long talk of what justice is because his field is tilled, his mine is dug, his supper is cooked, by someone else. That ratio is where this chapter begins, because the last chapter walked the three steps through in China, the Shang holding the person, the Zhou by law, the Han by the market, and this chapter crosses the sea to a people who never met the ancestors of China and never read one character of one another, to ask a single question. When two unrelated civilizations each reach the step where it is only right is made into an institution, is what they build, in its frame, the same.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section sets the question straight, that it weighs neither who came first nor who was crueler, only whether the frames match, because a match would show this is not one culture’s ailment but a common product of wei on the layer of the economy, wherever it is only right that I take more is made into an institution, there a thing of similar form will grow. Athens, the cradle of democracy, is turned over to show the mine beneath it, the Laurion silver works where twenty to thirty thousand slaves labored in lightless shafts until they died, the silver becoming the fleet and the temples and the very attendance fee that let a poor citizen put down his work and cast his sacred vote, so that the freedom of that vote was bought with their whole lives, and philosophy did not fall from the sky but grew out of a granary someone else filled. And the volume does not tear Athens down, the questioning of Socrates and the days of discussing justice are real, it only sets the layer beneath out at the same time, the assembly above and the shaft below being the two ends of one thing, which is the way of working every chapter uses, not to tear one end down but to see both ends at once, walked in close to the citizen who feels he holds no one down because from childhood the world he saw was made this way, and to the slave of twenty three who does not think of freedom because he has never seen the word and thinks only of the next mouthful of water.
The second section takes the line that reasoned it round, Aristotle’s natural slave, some people slaves by nature with the ruling part of the soul missing, needing to be ruled as the body is ruled by the soul, a passage built with cunning in three steps, the human cut into a reasoning length and a length without, the likeness of soul over body, the likeness set back onto the human. This is the first time in Western thought that enslavement was given a systematic argument for its own rightness, that line it is only right grown to its most decent shape, philosophized and written into the textbook, a great success of wei that made enslavement not merely an institution but a body of learning. The volume respects Aristotle, who stood up logic itself and opened the head of biology, owns his merit and does not judge his right and wrong, and marks only that he was a man of that world finding a way to put the world he was used to seeing, and that exactly because he was the finest mind of the age this stroke matters most, since a coarse man’s line hurts few but a line reasoned by the most rigorous mind grows a leg of logic that needs no one to guard it, wei at its most refined coming out of the finest minds, for a position to stand steady wanting not a wicked man but a clever one. And the trick is in the first step, a difference of position moved inside the human where it can never be peeled off, the same move run today when the worker is called just suited to the line and the child not the material.
The third section has Rome write it down, the slave defined as a thing in the Twelve Tables and the codified law, property under the one same class as the ox and the horse and the house, bought and pledged and rented on the one same principle, and the Aquilian law of 286 before the common era making a man who killed another’s slave make good its market value exactly as for killing livestock, so that when a person dies the one who took the loss is the master and the dead person himself the law does not mention, because in its sense he is not a person but the thing destroyed. This is the coldest stroke in the volume, not the honest ugliness of the Shang altar but a fair, reasoned, even-handed article that dealt justly with the one who did the harm and the one who lost the property and only did not count the third person in, not barbarism but civilization, the most precise law in human history and the ancestor of countless codes still taught today, and the thing it did was to strike a person out of the column marked human. It was handed down, the template for the slave trade run across the seas where cargo lost overboard was claimed from the insurer, and in a sense the ancestor of modern property law, and the move will return two thousand years on with the object changed to labor power and to debt, for today no law writes the person into the column of things, a true advance, yet the labor power sold by the hour and the thirty years pledged and the attention packaged and the health data priced are the pieces sliced off the person that went into that column, counted as Sima Qian counted fingers, now as work-hours and clicks and monthly payments.
That is the method this chapter hands you. When the surface is a cradle of philosophy or the most precise code ever written, look for the shaft beneath it and the third person the article does not count in. What you carry away is the proof that the position is no one culture’s ailment, that wherever wei is made into an institution the same frame grows, and the buried thread that the Roman move which turned a person into priceable property was not abolished but refined, until what is priced is not the person whole but the pieces cut from him.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. The Philosophy of Athens Was Dug Up Out of a Mine
SECTION 2. Aristotle’s Line, the Natural Slave
SECTION 3. Roman Law Defines the Person as a Thing
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. The Philosophy of Athens Was Dug Up Out of a Mine