The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization
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The fact that Athens had sentenced Socrates to death was more than an unjust act. It was final proof that human institutions were flawed by their nature, even those ostensibly concerned with democracy and justice, because they are all based on opinion and illusion.
Brandan Crabill
Smaller government has less power to do the terrible.
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But above all, Pythagoras was convinced that number was the secret language of nature.
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Reason steps in after, not before, experience; it sorts our observations into meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and exact as anything in Plato’s Forms.
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Aristotle’s bias toward observation and classification also led him to break completely with the concept of Plato’s Forms. He did so not only because they seemed too abstract and logically unwieldy,13 but because they missed certain essential features of reality.
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This reversal left Aristotle’s philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.
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The world is a system. Our contemporary notion of an “ecosystem” neatly captures this element of interconnectedness of Aristotle’s view of nature, just as our belief in the power of science to unlock that system is its most important offshoot.
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So instead of Plato’s philosophy of transcendence, in which everything is a reflection or a sign of something higher and more real, Aristotle gives us a philosophy of causation.
Brandan Crabill
Causation vs. Transcendence
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Aristotle, by contrast, looks steadily forward, to what we can be rather than what we were.
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In that sense, Aristotle is the first great advocate of progress—and Plato, creator of the vanished utopia Atlantis, the first great theorist of the idea of decline.21
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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.
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Beginning with their founder, Zeno, the Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.
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Its Jewish quarter (according to the historian Josephus, Jews started arriving shortly after Alexander’s death) covered two of the city’s five principal districts. Jewish Alexandria became the home of shopkeepers, craftsmen, and artisans and a dozen synagogues.21 Jewish relations with Greeks and Egyptians alike were respectful and amiable. People were too busy making money to fight over religious or ethnic differences.
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“Now we are suffering the evils of too long a peace. Luxury, deadlier than any armed invader, lies like an incubus upon us still, avenging the world we brought to heel,” Juvenal wrote in Satire VI.
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In Plato’s view, the democratic politician’s verbal dexterity is a direct index to his level of moral corruption.
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The downward flow of divine perfection is matched by an equal upward striving of all things back toward their original source.
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Christian society achieves its self-actualization, as Aristotle might say, through the union of faith and reason.
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If we are going to deal with a complex and dangerous world, he believed, we had better be prepared. That means above all reading Aristotle.
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Cyril Connolly once said that in every fat person was a thin person struggling to get out.
Brandan Crabill
Were they swallowed whole?
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Newton’s God is a God who constantly watches over His creation. He provides it with universally true general laws, then thoughtfully provides man with the means to decipher them, namely reason.
Brandan Crabill
God is stabilizing reality to provide his children with predictable outcomes they can obtain through reason.