Ashley Lance, University of Cambridge
The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his “Defense of the Indians” in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s “On the Just Causes of War against the Indians”. Both Las Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle, among other ancient and Christian scholars, as a source of justification for their arguments. Sepúlveda, using Aristotle’s Politics, connects the ancient ethnography in Book 7, where people in Europe, Asia, and Greece are differentiated by their levels of intelligence and spirit, with the argument for natural slavery in Book 1 to deny the humanity of Indigenous peoples in the New World. Las Casas disavowing Sepúlveda takes him to task not so much on the basis of a misreading of Aristotle, but rather attempts to assimilate and assign Indigenous peoples’ into Aristotle’s conception of ‘human’. Arguing that the Nahua in Mexico exhibit intelligence in craft and ability to create systems of governance. At times, he even goes so far to compare Indigenous cities to Aristotle’s project of building an ideal city that takes up Books 7 and 8.
This paper approaches the debate in two ways, first by assessing the claims made about Aristotle. How accurate is Sepúlveda understanding of Aristotle? Does it tell us anything about Aristotle’s own views given easily Sepulveda makes his arguments for categorizing certain humans as subhuman based on the Politics? More specifically, this paper takes the stance that the ease in which racial categories are justified does not represent a misreading but rather appropriate understanding of the ramifications of Aristotle’s political philosophy. Second, this paper critically assesses Las Casas’ arguments, borrowing from Sylvia Wynter and Walter Mignolo, arguing that the move to assimilate Indigenous peoples into a European understanding of human comes with its own unique forms of violence. What does it mean for Indigenous people to be defined in Western or Christian ways? What are the lasting effects of this use of Aristotle, his ideal city, and the actual lives of Indigenous peoples? By assessing these materials from an often-elided Indigenous perspective, the paper argues that new understandings about the relationship between Aristotle, race, and colonialism can be teased out.