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

by Arthur Herman

The Phenomenology of Mind

ideology.

false consciousness.

when in fact it is a rigged game. False consciousness comforts the

“religion is the opiate of the masses.”‖

straight out of Book VIII of the Republic.

John Stuart Mill.

Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He had learned that for most human beings, “experience”

Then Coleridge and Macaulay

Auguste Comte,

He was determined to show that free market capitalism was not the enemy but the savior of the free creative individual.

libertarianism.

the increasing empowerment of the individual. “What

“the marketplace of ideas.”

The free exchange of ideas will prevent a culture from growing stale and rigid.

In 1859, Mill saw two dangers on the horizon.

“the tyranny of the majority.”

Marx, like Hegel, believed crisis and revolution were history’s path to freedom. Mill believed history showed they were the path to slavery. The idea of the proletariat seizing the means of production was “obviously chimerical,” he wrote, and would only plunge humanity into the brutal state of nature envisaged by Thomas Hobbes.

Humboldt?”

For Alexander von Humboldt, the friend of Goethe and Schiller,

Humboldt

He would make a series of readings of the earth’s electromagnetic field,

Their classifications according to species and genus

Linnaeus

secret of the system could be cracked? Because man was part of that system of

King Charles V

He does it secondly through his actions in nature: his reshaping of his physical environment to suit his own needs and desires, including his natural desire to live with others: what the Enlightenment had dubbed “the progress of civil society.”

Matthew Boulton was one of his closest friends—as he despised organized Christianity and the institution of slavery.

And young renascent Nature conquers Time.

Saturn

Herschel, wordily titled Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.

Another scientist, William Whewell, offered an additional perspective. Induction, the patient gathering of data and the teasing out of causal factors, was clearly important to scientific research. However, the big breakthroughs, Whewell argued, required the more powerful force of the imagination. It was these inspired intuitive leaps, akin to those of a great painter or writer, that allowed “a genius of a Discoverer” like Galileo or Newton to suddenly sort our ordinary perceptions of things into an extraordinary and meaningful pattern—including our perception of living nature.

His twin starting points were that man’s ability to reproduce himself expands at a geometric rate, while his ability to feed himself from cultivatable land can grow at only an arithmetical rate. At some point those two lines must intersect, at the expense of everyone’s need to

Malthus

survival of the fittest,

adaptable

animals be created, then by the fixed laws

all.

Survival of the fittest

But if heat was actually the random motion of atoms within a given system, then entropy was simply a measure of atoms reaching a disordered state after a more ordered one.

Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics had suddenly opened the door to a new understanding of how electricity acts and flows from positive to negative—i.e., from high-energy states to low-energy ones—and how atoms directly affect the unseen properties of matter, from electrical conductivity to the viscosity of fluids.

“There is no place in this new physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.”

Einstein defined precisely as mass times the speed of light squared or E=MC2.

on Greek drama he had published the year before, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.

Heraclitus.

“beyond good and evil,”

New dawn 2001 space odessy

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a parable of the end of modern civilization.

Net zero

“only that other men believe they moved them.”

Heraclitus had made war the father of all things.27 Nietzsche added that war makes sacred every cause.

On one side, “I know of no country,” Tocqueville wrote, “where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the attention of men,” but on the other, none where reverence for religion was so widely and evenly spread. In America “liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and triumphs—as the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.” Indeed, “it considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law, and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.”2 Certainly since 1789, the relations between liberty and religion in Tocqueville’s own country had been very different.