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

by Arthur Herman

“Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness, more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into Brutes, Yahoos, or Daemons,” John Adams wrote, than community of property.7

that human beings come into the world with the most valuable things they know already programmed in their minds. Mathematical truths, the rules of logic, the existence of God:

What was left was a world of “real time” and absolute spatial dimensions.

Long, harsh winters like that of 1708, when the wines of Burgundy froze in their bottles, faded as a bout of global warming swept over Europe. Meanwhile, ships bearing goods from remote parts of the globe, including China, India, and South America, filled Europe’s ports and harbors.

The Romantics, however, were the stepchildren of Plato.

unwilling labor was expensive compared to the willing kind.

“politeness.”

portraits of Watteau, Joshua Reynolds, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Evolved,

Taken together, these traits formed the virtues of a new urban type: the men and women of a polite and commercial age. The French will describe them as bourgeois; in German, they are bürgerlich; in English, the middle class.

mocked in Madame Bovary (not to mention Desperate Housewives) and excoriated in Marx’s Das Kapital.

Voltaire

Voltaire’s extravagant praise of Locke (“never, perhaps, has a wiser, more methodical mind existed than Mr Locke”) pales in comparison with his praise of Newton. Here was a genius, Voltaire wrote, “the like of which has scarcely appeared in ten centuries.”27 Isaac Newton had demonstrated to Voltaire’s satisfaction that human reason alone can discover the true inner workings of nature and the universe. Indeed, the human mind could achieve almost any goal it set for itself, as long as it remained grounded in experience and truth.

Voltaire noted that the English reserved tombs at Westminster Abbey not just for their kings, but for great poets like Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson.

The result was the first full-blown theory of human progress.

“Hunting and fishing,” Lord Kames wrote, “were the original occupations of man,” when the notion of human society hardly existed. The second stage of human

2001

It was yet another Scot, David Hume, who supplied the answer. Born in 1711, Hume lived in Edinburgh and eventually bought

The needs of the individual must yield to the imperatives of the group,

The American Revolution and then the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (ironically, the same year Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared), which Smith and Hume both applauded,d seemed to prove their point. Everywhere, it seemed, the empirical hopeful spirit of Aristotle’s Enlightenment was winning out.

first book on education

This was Plato in the raw, the unflinching moral absolutist who denounced the corruption of his native Athens and admired the austere warriors of Sparta. It was Plato the would-be Philosopher Ruler who wanted to banish the arts and private property and train children from birth in the art of nature instead; whom Rousseau saw as the man who could teach Western civilization how to start over, and thus save itself.

All the same, the main thrust of his Platonic critique of his age boils down to two simple propositions. The first is that capitalism brings out the worst, not the best, in us. The belief that commerce and the pursuit of money corrupts good morals permeated Plato’s Laws as well as his Republic. The

That led to Rousseau’s second insight. If men

nothing less. Modern mass politics, with its self-conscious public rituals,

Goya),

J.M.W. Turner called “the fallacies of hope,” the emptiness of Rousseau’s utopian vision. The crucial question became, What would take its place?

Faith in the rights of man yielded to a faith in Nature—“the nurse, the guide,” Wordsworth wrote, “the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being.” The German poet Hölderlin said the same: “Boldly forget what you have inherited and won—all laws and customs—and like new born babes lift up your eyes to godlike nature.”6

Longinus

Burke

like lions and tigers (the big cats were soon to become the Romantics’ archetypes of Nature at her freest and most untamed).13

Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto

David Friedrich’s Wreck of the Hope,

character from the Romantic inventory: the solitary hero who rides off to death with a smile and cheerfully accepts his doom.

Byron’s Don Juan.

Oedipus Rex)

Change in any society begins with class strife. —Plato, Republic, Book VIII

The lofty oaks and poplars that lined Paris’s boulevards fell under the blows of hundreds of axes,

Alphonse Lamartine, France’s most popular poet and a leading political radical.

The revolution of the poets Percy Shelley had prophesied had begun.

As historian Alan Taylor later put it, heaven and earth never seemed closer than in 1848; or man’s redemption by a great moral ideal more fully within reach.3

Then the poetry and music died.

“the right to work” at government expense for the have-nots.

Alexis de Tocqueville

He was born in 1818, the year Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. In college, he dreamed of becoming a poet. His earliest extant work is a verse tragedy, titled Oulanem, which Marx hoped might become the next Faust.7 He also had a Byronic fascination with suicide pacts and pacts with the devil and enjoyed quoting the line from Faust’s Mephistopheles,

For Plato Ideas exist prior to material reality. For Hegel they emerge as part of material reality over time, like an image painted on the spokes of a wheel that becomes visible only when the wheel is in motion. The painter in this case is God or Providence, who has decided to make human history “the unfolding of Spirit in time,”

Plotinus and Neoplatonism, where the same three-step movement—procession, retrocession, and then merger with the One—leads the initiate up the Chain of Being to the World Spirit.‡

Hegelians would make famous, alienated. We find ourselves in capitalist society like visitors at a banquet.

Under its aegis, teams of bureaucrats become a virtual cadre of Philosopher Rulers who bring order and justice to a needy world. As in Plato’s Republic, justice is the source of freedom, not the other way around.15

Hegel is the true godfather of the nanny state, or welfare state—with Plato standing beside him at the baptismal font.

Plato had made constant revolutions the dynamic of man’s life in society, and so does Hegel.

Synthesis appears only after a crisis—another word Hegel made famous—and history on Hegel’s terms is a series of crises. Indeed, “periods of happiness in history” are, in Hegel’s words, “empty pages.” They contribute nothing to mankind’s advance. During peacetime, he wrote, “civil life becomes more