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

by Arthur Herman

Thomas Jefferson was even more excoriating. He once confessed in a letter to Adams that he had been rereading the Republic. “I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” Jefferson had to conclude that Plato had always been a fraud, “a dealer in mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind,” which had been allowed to inject “an impenetrable darkness” into Western culture. “O Plato!” Voltaire exclaimed. “You have done more harm than you know.”5 Why did the Enlightenment dislike Plato so much? Because his worldview directly contradicted the view of reality and human nature the Enlightenment derived from John Locke, and ultimately from Aristotle.‡ That view was, first, that man is an individual, an individual born with a natural sociability (an updated version of Aristotle’s zoon politikon) but also a desire to protect his own natural rights and his own self-interest. “It is love of self,” Voltaire would write, “that encourages love of others.” That self-interest was derived from nature, “which warns us to respect [the self-interest] of others.”6 This was one reason the Enlightenment, like Aristotle, so strongly opposed the Republic’s formula for communism. The abolition of private property was not only contrary to natural right, it would also ensure that the bonds that connected men to each other would be founded not on mutual respect and friendship, but on envy or even ha...