Aristotle devotes the first book of Politics to households and argues that to study the broader political community of a city-state, we must first examine households in as constituent elements. (Politics, 5). The three main family relationships defined by Aristotle in Politics are master-slave, husband-wife, and father-son, and these are all essentially relationships headed by a ruler, as Aristotle lists that "freedom governs slaves, l 'man rules the woman and the man rules the child'. (23). Aristotle believes that the natural inclination to rule or be ruled is predetermined at birth, and that there is a natural inequality between the ruler and the ruled (7). Additionally, Aristotle draws an analogy between domestic relations and the political community as a whole, as households and city-states share similar power dynamics. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle associates different family relationships with different constitutions: “the association of a father with his sons bears the form of monarchy, ...., the association of man and woman seems to be aristocratic,..., the association of brothers is like timocracy” (The Nicomachean Ethics, 115). While Aristotle assumes that all three domestic relationships share the power dynamic headed by the ruler, examining Aristotle's lack of logic in proving the inherent superiority of men, flaws in his theory of the structure of souls and his use of metaphors and parables reveals that Aristotle fails to justify the behavior of men. superiority as natural rulers over women. This logical inconsistency in the Politics invalidates the analogies between the marital relationship and aristocracy/oligarchy in the Ethics, ultimately compromising Aristotle's overall analogy between households and city-states in both works. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayAristotle leaves a logical gap in his reasoning when he tries to argue that men are naturally more suited to rule than women , because it fails to provide explicit explanations. for what specific nature makes men superior. After justifying the slave-master relationship by asserting that slaves are naturally better at physical labor while masters are naturally better at deliberative reasoning, Aristotle goes on to justify the husband-wife and father-child relationships. Stating that "for a man, unless he is somehow unnaturally constituted, is naturally more fitted to rule than a woman, and one older and fully developed is naturally more fit to lead than a younger, incompletely developed person” (Politics, 21). ). Here, Aristotle arbitrarily asserts that “nature” makes men better leaders than women. However, even though the words “nature” and “naturally” appear twice in the description of the marital relationship, Aristotle does not explain what specific natural characteristic of men makes them superior to women. In relation to the ambiguous statement about the marital relationship, Aristotle explicitly emphasizes that slaves are naturally ruled because their bodies are stronger, and fathers are natural rulers because they are older and more experienced. Aristotle's justification of the superior status of men compared to women is therefore insufficient in relation to the other two relationships. Aristotle's skipping of the crucial step of reasoning suggests that he is unable todirectly justify his hypothesis of natural inequality in marital relations. Besides the logical gap in his reasoning, Aristotle's choice of words to describe the structure of souls also reflects the existence of external forces determining the unequal ability of women and men to rule, thus contradicting the hypothesis of a natural inequality. In discussing the different structures of the soul to further justify the inherent inequality between the ruler and the ruled, Aristotle asserts that “the deliberative part of the soul is totally absent in a slave; a woman has it but he lacks authority; a child has it but it is incompletely developed” (23). According to Aristotle's previous arguments about nature, slaves lack the deliberative part of the soul because their bodies are naturally more suited to work, and children's deliberative part is naturally underdeveloped due to their age. However, why women have an incomplete deliberative part of the soul remains ambiguous, as it is not clear what "authority" refers to and why women do not have this authority. “Authority” is different from “nature”, as the former is associated with the rights or privileges granted by the external environment such as social norms and conventions, while the latter is associated with the internal characteristics one is born with . If women need authority to exercise the deliberative part, then the incompleteness of the deliberative part of their souls should not be due to nature, but imposed by external forces. Therefore, Aristotle is unable to bring the different deliberative powers of man and woman solely to nature, because his choice of expression implies the existence of external influences that shape the structure of souls. This relationship also conflicts with the general assumption of natural inequality by implying equal political status between men and women. To distinguish the husband-wife relationship from the father-child relationship, Aristotle compares the husband-wife relationship to the “rule of a statesman” and the father-child relationship to the “rule of a king” (21-22 ). Aristotle describes the rule of the statesman thus: “men govern and are governed in turn, because they tend by nature to be on an equal footing and to differ in nothing” (21) . Here, Aristotle is referring to the Athenian democratic system in which aristocratic male citizens with similar political interests decide by lot who governs and temporarily represents the common interests. This analogy between the power of men over their wives and that of the statesman over other citizens is problematic, because the power of the statesman presupposes equality of social status between the ruler and the rest of the citizens. citizens, while Aristotle attempts to prove the natural inequality between men and women. Comparing women to citizens also contradicts existing social conventions in ancient Greece, whereby women were mostly not considered citizens. Furthermore, Aristotle concludes that “man is thus permanently bound to woman” (22), suggesting that man's ruling status is eternally fixed. However, as just defined in the rule of the statesman, citizens take turns governing and being governed. This contradiction between the arbitrary and fixed designation of male power in government and the fluid and temporary attribution of leadership in government to the statesman makes one wonder whether it is really legitimate to designate men as permanent leaders. Having recognized this divergence in the statesman metaphor, it suggests that men and womenWomen are naturally equal as statesmen and their citizens, and that the superior political status of men over women should not be permanently fixed. Whereas the statesman metaphor implies the potentially equal political status between men and women. and feminine, the parable of Amasis and the foot bath suggests that women and men share the same inherent characters and are therefore intrinsically equal. Comparing the rule of a husband over his wife to the rule of a statesman, Aristotle states that although the ruler is equal to other citizens, he must be "distinguished by behavior, title, or rank from the ruled." just like Amasis and her footbath (22). The parable tells that Amasis, of modest origins, becomes king of Egypt. In order to gain the respect of the Egyptians, he transformed his gold footbath into a statue of God to show that lower status did not mean lower nature, as the same material could be arbitrarily transformed into objects with different uses and receive different levels of respect.Similarly, even if the ruler is superior in rank, behavior and title, he is naturally equal to other citizens, just as the Nobel statue and the humble footbath are both made of gold. Applying this parable to the male-female relationship, although the man rules over the woman, their natural characters are the same even though they are shaped differently by social conventions and assigned unequal social statuses. Moreover, the parable sheds further light on why women do not have the authority to exercise the deliberative part of the soul: women's incomplete deliberative power is imposed by an external authority, just as gold is fashioned into a humble foot bath by external forces. In both cases, appearances and results are independent of inherent nature. Accordingly, while Aristotle asserts that a natural inequality between ruler and ruled exists among the three family relationships, such inequality is untenable in the marital relationship. Aristotle's difficulty in proving the superior nature of men implies that men and women should have equal political status and intellectual abilities. Applying Aristotle's logical fallacies in politics to his analogy between households and city-states leads to further contradictions, reflected primarily in his problematic mappings of male rule to aristocracy and female rule to oligarchy in ethics. Aristotle defines aristocracy as the rule of the best, and aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy when rulers neglect the common good and rule by their power and wealth, no longer being the most virtuous. (The Nicomachean Ethics, 155) Therefore, the major difference between aristocracy and oligarchy lies in the virtue and legitimacy of the rulers. Aristotle argues that male domination within households resembles aristocracy because “man rules according to his worth” (155). The underlying assumption here is that men naturally have more virtue and deliberative power to be good leaders, and therefore have the "value" to rule, just like rule by the best in aristocracy. However, according to a previous analysis, Aristotle fails to prove this hypothesis in politics, and without this hypothesis he is unable to conclude that the domination of men is the domination of the best, and therefore his analogy between the domination of men and the The aristocracy is invalid. Likewise, the comparison between women's rule and oligarchy is also problematic given the logical fallacies in marital relations. To illustrate the superiority of aristocracy over oligarchy, Aristotle introduces.