The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

Instead of stability, Heraclitus said, there is only change: ceaseless, relentless, and without end.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.

Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed out.

This point is fundamental for Plato and his legacy to the West. Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil.

But Socrates also supplies a surefire method for “recovering” that knowledge lost at birth—to grasp truth as if we knew it all along. That is, through questioning and applying reason to the answers. This is the Socratic method, which Socrates used first to test our ignorance (“What is friendship?”) and then to present a solution to our ignorance. The Greek name for Socrates’s method is elenchus, which means a test or trial. Later, Plato elaborated the method into a formal procedure, a kind of sustained mental workout for the soul to prepare it to receive the truth, called the dialectic.

Dialectic teaches us that contradiction is the essence of the false, just as consistency with first principles is the essence of the true.†

the process of distinguishing the false from the true is made easier when we assume, as Plato does, that our reasoning self—the soul—shares the same perfection for which we want to strive.

Not only will he know the truth, he will be prepared to act on it. He will be ready to change the world in the light of truth and a higher reality.

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, “is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous,” especially in our daily dealings with others.

Aristotle believed that the goal of political institutions was man’s improvement rather than his perfection. He believed the way to do this was by encouraging each individual to realize his potential, rather than force him to submit to a collective order.

Augustine’s formula, with its conscious echoes of Plato’s Republic, remains the basis of the Western idea of a church to this day: Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Mormon. This is the idea of the church as a community, whose members share the same values and beliefs and who are bound together in their dedication to love God as they love one another; and to serve His commands rather than those of some bureaucrat or politician.