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

by Arthur Herman

“I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), could be stated less succinctly but more accurately as “Because we are the only beings who do math, we rule.”

The truth was that Newton’s biblical research was central to his entire scientific career. They form the essential backdrop for his most famous work, the Principia Mathematica. For like a true son of Plato, Newton never lost sight of the Big Picture, including the problem that had so perplexed Henry More and the other Cambridge Platonists. Where do we find God in a material and mechanical universe?

From start to finish, however, Newton’s own goal was to demonstrate the dependence of matter on God.10

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...

the theory of knowledge stretching back to Plato, that

Gibbon would later extend in his Decline and Fall of the Roman

So when a Polish nobleman asked him to draw up a model constitution for a future independent Poland, Rousseau was pleased to oblige. It was his chance to play Philosopher Ruler, and he made the most of it. The constitution he drew up could not be more different than the one James Madison would draw up for the fledgling United States (which was influenced, as we know, by his reading of David Hume). Instead of limiting the power of government, Rousseau’s extends it in every possible direction. In fact, it reads a lot like the first three books of Plato’s Republic—which is hardly a coincidence. Children must be trained to love their fatherland and its liberty “with their mother’s milk.”‡ Education must be compulsory and include military training from an early age, since in a true republic every citizen must be a soldier, trained to fight and die for the nation. There must also be constant rounds of civic festivals and public rituals to make people proud of their country and its customs, and in which participation is compulsory.

It’s worth remembering that Platonism lends itself to conspiracy theories.‖ The belief that appearances deceive easily grows into the conviction that they deceive for a reason: that hidden manipulators want to keep us in the cave and want, literally, to keep us in the dark. Rousseau himself suffered from a lifelong fear that enemies were constantly working to undercut his success—the same people who were working to keep the world corrupt and unjust. Robespierre believed the same thing. When the National Assembly abolished the monarchy in 1792 and the rest of Europe turned to put Louis XVI back on his throne, Robespierre’s utopian hopes became fused with Rousseau’s paranoid style. The result would be the Reign of Terror. “Citizens, the

Robespierre is the first true modern dictator: the man who rules not as the living image of God, as the kings of old had, but as the living image of the will of the people. His virtue becomes unassailable, since it is identical with that General Will; just as he can have no flaws—Robespierre’s nickname was “the Incorruptible”—so can he have no opponents or rivals. And among Robespierre’s earliest victims were his fellow Rousseauians Monsieur and Madame Roland. They had begun to have doubts about where their former protégé was leading the Revolution. In the France of the Reign of Terror, the price of doubt was death. The husband chose suicide. The wife, who had shed tears when she first read The New Heloise, did not. She mounted the scaffold on November 8, 1793. Her fellow Rousseau enthusiast Marie Antoinette had gone to the guillotine a few weeks before. Madame Roland’s final plea, “O liberty! O liberty! what crimes have been committed in your name,” marked her belated realization that the utopian path to man’s freedom had opened the door to its opposite.48

In the end, what replaced the spirit of revolution was the spirit of Romanticism. The Romantic, a term that the Enlightenment had associated with the picturesque and/or merely foolish (which still lives on when we talk about someone as an incurable romantic), assumed after 1800 a powerful cultural force—so powerful that it persists, almost unrecognized, as the foundation of popular Western culture today.

This belief in an eternal and beneficent Nature bore a striking resemblance to the belief in Christianity it replaced, and not by accident. After 1725, orthodox Christian belief faded from the intellectual scene, as the Enlightenment drove out the last remnants of medieval Neoplatonism.

Do you wish to know in brief the tale of almost all our woe? There once existed a natural man; there has been introduced within this man an artificial man and there has arisen in the cave a civil war which lasts throughout life.8

If Plato is the original pioneer of pessimism—a belief that man’s greatest achievements must inevitably be overwhelmed by the forces of corruption and decay and, like Atlantis, subside back into the timeless sea—then nineteenth-century Romanticism is its messenger into the modern era.

Men of intellect and science, and not only Jews, fled. Einstein, Freud, Carnap, and the surviving members of the Vienna Circle; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin; conductors Otto Klemperer, Arturo Toscanini, and Bruno Walter; physicists Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd: These are only the best known. A curtain of intellectual darkness had descended across the heart of Europe.

“I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” Stephen Crane