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

by Arthur Herman

One path—Plato’s path—sees the world through the eyes of the religious mystic as well as the artist. It finds its strength in the realm of contemplation and speculation and seeks to unleash the power of human beings’ dreams and desires.

The path of Aristotle, by contrast, observes reality through the sober eyes of science and reveals the power of logic and analysis as tools of human freedom. “The fact is our starting point,” he said, and meant it.

In the end, however, it is the enduring tension between these two different worldviews that distinguishes Western civilization from its predecessors and counterparts. It explains both the West’s perennial dynamism as a culture, and why at times it presents such a confusing dual face to the rest of the world. The West has been compassionate, visionary, and creative during certain periods of history, yet dynamic, hardheaded, and imperialistic in others—even at the same time.

In about 585 BCE, a man named Thales amazed his fellow Milesians by correctly predicting an eclipse of the sun. A few years earlier or later (the record is scanty and unclear), Thales also made a trip to Egypt, where he calculated the height of a pyramid by measuring the length of its shadow at the same time of day that his own shadow equaled his actual height.1 With these two feats, Thales signaled a major change in Greek thinking and world thinking. A new, rational way of understanding reality was born, as opposed to one tied to myth or religious ritual—as still prevailed in two much older civilizations, Egypt and Babylon. It was a major shift, and a radical one.

“The world is a living fire,” Heraclitus is supposed to have said, while his most famous sayings of all, “All things change” (Panta rhei) and “You cannot step into the same river twice,” make him the father of relativism: a relativism that teeters on the brink of embracing chaos.

His name was Parmenides, and in answer to Heraclitus’s claim that everything changes, Parmenides countered by arguing that nothing changes. Far from permanency being an illusion, as Heraclitus claimed, it is change that is the illusion. To

From every angle—historical, philosophical, religious, and cultural—the soul of Socrates is the starting point for everything to come. To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.

Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed out. Here the metaphor Plato preferred was not that of a bridge but that of a cave. It appears for the first time in Book VII of his most famous dialogue, the Republic,

This point is fundamental for Plato and his legacy to the West. Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil. For Plato and all Platonists who come after him, grasping a standard of perfection is what we need in order to be virtuous and ultimately happy.

Dialectic teaches us that contradiction is the essence of the false, just as consistency with first principles is the essence of the true.

“When one tries to get at what each thing is in itself,” Plato has Socrates say in the Republic, by asking the inconvenient questions, sifting through the answers, and “relying on reason without any aid from the senses,” then he has mastered the dialectic. He will stand “at the summit of the intellectual realm,” just like the man who stood on the mountaintop after escaping from the cave and saw the sun, and see “the Good in Itself” by an act of pure thought.23 Not only will he know the truth, he will be prepared to act on it. He will be ready to change the world in the light of truth and a higher reality.

The soul of reason. The light of truth. The path of dialectic leading to understanding, even of goodness itself. These are Plato’s great ideals.

The influence of Plato’s image of God as a rational Creator knowable through our reason would be immense, and not only in ancient Greek thought. It would shape the whole notion of God in early Christianity. In fact, the word Plato uses for his ordered creation, genesis, will become the title of the first book of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. In time, early Christian and medieval commentators will carefully stitch together Plato’s version of creation and Moses’s into a harmonious whole, so that spiritual-theological and rational-scientific elements of both the Old Testament and the Timaeus could emerge as one coherent system we still call Intelligent Design.

Meanwhile Plato’s Academy would become the model for every monastery and university on the Western model.

What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

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. Aristotle’s term for this knowledge of the world was episteme, which later Latin commentators translated as scientia, or science. Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.9 In this, Aristotle was his own best student.

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. Everything that is, has been caused to be or made to happen; and when we discover the cause or causes of a thing, we learn what it is supposed to do and be. We “possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing,” Aristotle declares in his Posterior Analytics, “when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other.”16 Causes for Aristotle come in clusters of four.

In the Aristotelian mind-set, it is the future that counts, not the past. Here we arrive at one of the most crucial differences between Plato and Aristotle, and one of the most important for the future shape of Western culture. Plato’s philosophy looks constantly backward, to what we were, or what we’ve lost, or to an original of which we are the pale imitation or copy.

Aristotle, by contrast, looks steadily forward, to what we can be rather than what we were. His outlook is by its nature optimistic:

We live in a world of separate individuals, each following his or her agenda and narrative. Moral questions necessarily arise when we interact with others, and we have to make decisions about what to do. The problem is not knowing an ideal right from an ideal wrong, Aristotle insisted, but knowing how to behave toward others in the real world and still uphold certain timeless moral standards.

“The whole concern of both morality and political science must be pleasures and pains,” is how he states it in the Ethics.

Choice and intention are the dynamic elements in our moral life, and “intention is the decisive factor in virtue and character.”

Virtue aims to hit the mean.… It is possible, for example, to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and pleasure and pain generally, too much or too little; and both of these are wrong. But to have these feelings at the right times on the right grounds toward the right persons for the right motive and in the right way is to feel them in an intermediate, that is the best degree; and that is the mark of virtue.

Socrates had asserted it was better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Aristotle wants to ask: Are you sure? Aren’t there circumstances when it is better to do wrong to someone—say, knock an elderly blind lady to the curb—in order to prevent a greater wrong—say, letting her get run over by a truck? The decisive issue in moral action for Aristotle is always our intention—in this example, our desire to save someone from certain death. It does not lie in the nature of the action itself.

Aristotle believed that the goal of political institutions was man’s improvement rather than his perfection. He believed the way to do this was by encouraging each individual to realize his potential, rather than force him to submit to a collective order. By contrast, the most famous Platonic dialogue, the Republic, is all about raising that collective order to the highest-pitched perfection. Plato explicitly made the individual’s health and happiness dependent on the larger political community.1 Whereas Aristotle looked to Athens as his basic political model, Plato preferred Sparta, Athens’s great rival. Plato’s outspoken admiration for Sparta reveals a lot about his ultimate political agenda.

His short answer is that no one is an island unto himself. Our ethical choices, such as whether to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, all have social consequences. If we live in a society in which people consistently do evil to themselves (like the crack addict) and to one another, eventually we end up with no society at all. A society that has fallen into this position, as he believed Athens had, is sick, in Plato’s sense almost literally so. It desperately needs a doctor to restore it to spiritual health.

order to do this, men require some freedom from government interference, and in a democracy like Athens, they require equality before the law. In his Politics Aristotle set out the essential prerequisites of democratic liberty pretty much as they remain today.25

So the basis of Aristotle’s secure and stable order is not the Philosopher Ruler, but the good citizen who participates actively in the political, social, and economic life of his community. He takes his turn in office and in voting; he leads his own life with his family; and he pursues his own interests at work every day. In his values and orientation, Aristotle’s citizen is a true “political animal.”

The good citizen’s life is not about achieving one single goal, however laudable, or doing one thing perfectly. It is about doing all things well enough to be a happy man—and be an integral part of a happy free society.

But there are dangers inherent in Aristotle’s approach as well. They involve an acceptance of the status quo that can shade into timidity, and rationalizing injustices with a casual shrug of “that’s the way things are.” Aristotle’s philosophy emphasizes the necessity of change, even progress. Yet paradoxically, his insistence on being the detached observer, on analyzing rather than influencing events, winds up providing the excuse for institutional inertia and apathy.

We can also translate thymos as righteous anger, the burning indignation we feel at the sight of a parent abusing a helpless child, or any wrongdoing and injustice. Thymos is the fire that burns in the heart of the activist, the reformer, the revolutionary, and the intellectual rebel. All

The study of history is … the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of Fortune. —Polybius (200–118 BCE)

Above all, Cicero wanted Rome’s citizens to keep an Aristotelian sense of proportion between their responsibility toward family and friends and their responsibility toward the state.

At the same time, Cicero also echoed Aristotle by noting that the individual household is “the seed-bed of the State.” By Cicero’s reckoning, government must respect our personal sphere of responsibilities and connections, including our property, in order to win our respect and loyalty. Indeed, Cicero straightforwardly states that the reason men create states and cities is to protect private property—a momentous step beyond Aristotle’s own views and toward those of John Locke fifteen centuries later.

In short, there must be another balance to match the one that maintains a free and fair constitution. This is the balance between the state and the citizen, between the needs of the community and what Romans called libertas, or individual liberty.

Cicero’s De Oratore (On the Orator) is the essential companion piece to his De Re Publica. One is useless without the other. Cicero’s orator is a man built to heroic proportions. He must be a man of eloquentia, with the speaking skills necessary to move great crowds. He must be a patriot whose profound love of country allows him to identify with his audience, to feel what they feel and understand their needs and desires. And he must be a man who understands the true nature of good and evil.

This was, in the end, the real secret to Christianity’s success in the late Roman and Greek world. It supplied, or claimed to supply, the answers to all the questions Plato, Aristotle, and their disciples had been asking for nearly five hundred years. By accepting the person of Jesus as the son of God and savior, by absorbing His words and life lessons, man’s soul would finally grasp the timeless wisdom that every previous philosopher had said was the key to happiness. Through Christianity, what Socrates had called “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless” was suddenly, amazingly accessible—not only to the trained and disciplined minds of the Academy and Lyceum (or, later, Plotinus’s seminars), but to every human being. It was an idea, and a movement, whose time had truly come.

the key factor was its skill in seizing the high ground of Greek thought, especially Plato. Other schools had their role to play. The Stoics had spoken of a brotherhood of man not very different from Paul’s vision of the brotherhood of Christians, as he very well knew.7 Aristotle’s theory of substance would come in handy when Christians had to explain how a spiritually all-powerful God could become flesh and blood and how a holy offering of bread and wine could turn into the real presence of a resurrected Jesus Christ. But Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato’s philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato’s shadowy cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ.8

The consequences were huge. Anyone with an ounce of training who had read the Timaeus could see what Philo and John were up to. By using Greek philosophy to explain essential features of an alien creed like Judaism, not only were they laying out a blueprint for a Christian theology that would make sense to Greco-Roman culture. They were also offering a God who transcended the limitations and boundaries that previous thinkers, including Plato and Aristotle, had imposed on the conception of the divine.

The result was a God who was “beyond Being,” eternal and uncreated.13 He was a God more powerful and pervasive than Plato’s Demiurge but also more actively involved in His creation than Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

This led him to ask a question: If I were to die tomorrow, and had to stand before my God for judgment, what would I say to Him? Socrates had said that the unexamined life was not worth living. The same was true for Origen and, he believed, for every Christian.27 The task of Christianity had to be to prepare believers for that awful moment and to show them how to live a life that reflected the light of divine truth in every aspect. Origen was the first Christian thinker to make the conscience, Socrates’s daimon, or inner voice, the focus of moral life. For Origen, the conscience is all that separates the human being from the savage beasts who lynched his father.

If Christianity was to have any larger meaning in the lives of the faithful, Origen believed, it had to cultivate that inner conscience, to make it the guide all our dealings with the world and others. By combining Plato’s thymos, that sense of moral outrage, with the teachings of Jesus, Christianity could scour away the cruelty and savagery of the age.

Origen saw this as both necessary and natural. The one great lesson Origen learned from his Neoplatonist teachers was that every human being was made in the image of God, in the same way Plato described all material objects as made in the image of the Forms.31 Of course, the most perfect of God’s images was Jesus Christ himself, His only begotten son. However, everyone of every race, sex, age, or creed, from the lowest slave to the emperor himself, carried that same reflection of perfection.

More than any other Church Father, Origen established the sermon as a principal focus of Christian service and the Bible as the central subject for discussion.

He was also one of the first Christian thinkers to treat the New and the Old Testaments as forming a single work. He taught his students to read the Bible allegorically, in order to see how every event in the Old Testament foreshadows later events in the New, like the Jews’ exodus from Egypt foreshadowing the flight of the Holy Family, and Joseph’s run-in with Potiphar foreshadowing Christ before Pilate. This would then lead them to read the events and images symbolically, as reflecting the highest spiritual truths or “mysteries” of Christianity, and morally, meaning its connection with the inner life of the believer.35

In the end, Origen’s Platonized Christianity added up to more than a cleverly argued theology. It signaled a cultural revolution. Its overt moral absolutism smashed all the cherished myths and institutions of mainstream ancient culture, from its temples and gods, including the emperor worship that underpinned the Roman Empire, to its games and spectacles and sacrifices—all in the name of Greek wisdom and reason. It triggered a systematic process of deconstruction, both literal and symbolic, that would reach its climax in Saint Augustine’s The City of God. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would survive Origen’s withering blast—not even Celsus’s brilliant anti-Christian polemic of a century before.

In the end, however, Origen’s principal argument for the validity of his faith was its own success. Christianity’s spread, he implied, was a kind of democratic referendum on the elitist institutions of the ancients. The philosophy of the ancients and the Stoics had reserved final wisdom for a chosen few. Christianity delivered those same truths, and the moral virtues that went with them, to the many, right down to slaves and the homeless. Plato was like a chef at a five-star restaurant, Origen said, who only knew recipes that appealed to his handful of wealthy diners. Jesus, by contrast, Origen says, “cooks for the multitudes”—and the multitudes have responded.41

Very interesting. Through Christianity people gained access to mental models previously only for philosophers

One empire under one absolute God, with one absolute ruler as His image on earth. The ancient Greco-Roman ideal that human government exists to serve human ends suddenly disappears from the scene. Instead, a luminous new image of political authority had arrived, which over time would radiate out from Constantinople and Rome across all of Christian Europe, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Urals.

This was an ideal of government serving divine ends, with God appointing and anointing

a ruler to exercise supreme authority in His name. A coin from Constantine’s reign shows a great hand emerging from a cloud to place a crown on the emperor’s head—the very model of royal coronations from Charlemagne an...