1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:16,000 Are you interested in politics? Some people say they are not interested. But if you think about it, you will realize that politics affects us all. Politics is about how we organize our social coexistence. 2 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:29,000 For example, about how we make the rules that determine what can be done and what cannot be done. So if you don't take part in those decisions, someone will make them for you. 3 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:46,000 The importance of politics was quite clear for Aristotle 2,500 years ago. He thought that human beings are social animals, or as he said, political animals, because we cannot live alone. 4 00:00:46,000 --> 00:01:02,000 No human being could survive alone. We need other people to survive, to learn a language, to learn a culture, and to become part of a community. In order to fulfill our needs, our mental and material needs, we need other people. 5 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:11,000 So human beings are really social. Then this means that politics is an essential aspect of our way of life. 6 00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:25,000 Aristotle thought that human beings are different to animals because we can think and we can speak something that is possible because we have a language, which is something that other animals don't have. 7 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:42,000 Language, for Aristotle, had a purpose. He thought that our ability to think and to speak had the purpose of helping us discover together, using dialogue, what is just and what is fair. 8 00:01:42,000 --> 00:02:01,000 So for Aristotle, language and thought had a mission, which is to help us to achieve happiness. For Aristotle, the objective of human life is to be happy. So this is an ethical dimension of his thought. 9 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:18,000 He thought that ethics was based on the individual pursuit of happiness. But this is also true for politics. For Aristotle, the objective of a society is to make it possible for their citizens to achieve global happiness, collective happiness. 10 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:41,000 This means that, according to Aristotle, ethics and politics are just the same thing. They both try to achieve the same objective, happiness. Ethics tries to achieve individual happiness. Politics tries to achieve collective happiness. But, after all, they both try to obtain the same goal. 11 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:46,000 So for Aristotle, ethics and politics were basically the same.