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

by Arthur Herman

This is kingship Neoplatonist style: the ruler as earthly im...

Eusebius used Neoplatonism to explain to Constantine and his successors what their powers were, Lactantius used Aristotle to tell them what to do with them.

Lactantius observed that religion (religio) comes from the verb religare, meaning “to tie or bind.” Religion is about bonds between God and man, but also between man and man.

The truth was that Greco-Roman culture, even in its highest ideals, was no longer going anywhere without Christianity. When Julian realized this, it shattered his spirit. He died in 363 leading a reckless campaign against the Parthians in Mesopotamia. His last words were, “Man of Galilee, thou hast won.” The brief but spectacular failure of Julian’s reign guaranteed the triumph of Christian civilization. It also hastened the doom of the Roman Empire.27

“Understanding is the reward of faith,” Saint Augustine says. “I believe, in order that I may understand” will be the catchphrase of the early Middle Ages. It is the summing-up of Augustine’s final authoritative fusion of Neoplatonism and Christianity. In his name, it will have a sweeping impact on Western culture for the next thousand years and beyond.40

Augustine’s City of God is a kind of Platonic ideal, of which Christendom can become an earthly reflection only if it strictly follows God’s word and laws and embeds them in men’s hearts.

Augustine’s formula, with its conscious echoes of Plato’s Republic, remains the basis of the Western idea of a church to this day: Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Mormon. This is the idea of the church as a community, whose members share the same values and beliefs and who are bound together in their dedication to love God as they love one another; and to serve His commands rather than those of some bureaucrat or politician.

Without faith, Bernard affirmed, intellectual inquiry is doomed to run off the track. Worldly wisdom, he liked to point out, teaches only vanity.15 By contrast, by making God the center of our lives instead of ourselves, we are spiritually transformed. Through love of God, “he who by his former life and conscience was doomed as a true son of perdition to the eternal flames,” he wrote, “draws new life and hope beyond all expectation.” He is “rescued from a most deep and dark pit of horrible ignorance, and plunged into a pleasant region bright with eternal light.”16

Later, this spiritual transformation will be called being born again. It is in fact a Christian variant on Plato’s Myth of the Cave. “Once I was blind,” as the hymn says, “but now I see.” It

Everything that Plato and Neoplatonists and Saint Augustine said were the most intelligible and true are also the most removed from our experience. Why? Maybe because the human mind tends to be dazzled and confused by too much divine wisdom.23 Maybe that’s why God decided to put us in the cave in the first place, Aquinas is hinting. He didn’t want us overwhelmed by too much light at once.

Since we are human beings, then, we have to start with what we know in order to get our bearings. That means the Bible and divine revelation, of course. But it also means the realm of the senses, and here Aristotle points the way. “As Aristotle himself shows,” Aquinas writes in the Summa Contra Gentiles, “man’s ultimate happiness consists of seeking the knowledge of truth” through reason.24 Then as we move forward, we discover that truths human and divine, the objects of reason and those of faith, actually reinforce each other. They don’t form parallel tracks, as Averroës claimed. They ultimately converge: not just in God their Supreme Creator, but in ourselves as human beings.

But for Aquinas, who was a theologian and not a scientist, the crucial point was that Aristotle had made substance and essence the point at which the material and the ideal meet. This includes man.

The human being is a soul within a body, the junction point of the two halves of divine creation, body and spirit. He is (in a true sense) the man in the middle. Aquinas’s vision of creation turned Aristotle’s ordered nature into a Neoplatonist hierarchy in which “a wondrous linkage of beings” connects each and every creature to its Divine Creator. For Aquinas, every link in the chain marks a distinct advance toward divine perfection over the one just below.

From Aquinas’s point of view, the pagan virtues outlined by Plato and Aristotle, and Christian virtues like charity and humility, are mutually reinforcing. Both reflect a knowledge of God’s laws for men. The difference is merely that one was and is learned in the natural realm; the other is learned in the divine realm of God’s Revealed Word.

Bacon grasped the empirical aspect of Aristotle’s thought: that knowledge ultimately comes to the knower via the senses, which supply the raw data that reason sorts and disentangles in order to arrive at the truth. “There are two modes of acquiring knowledge,” he wrote, “namely by reasoning and experience. Reason draws a conclusion … but does not make it certain [but] the mind may rest on the intuition of truth when it discovers it by the path of experience.” It’s a sentence that might have been written by John Locke or even David Hume.

All the same, what was missing from Roman law, and even from Cicero, was the idea that living in freedom was a universal human value transcending all local traditions and historical contexts. It was precisely this sense of freedom as an essential part of human nature and potentiality that the Florentines had discovered in Aristotle and passed on to subsequent generations. The conclusion was clear: to be human was to desire to be free. Being free in turn meant living under a constitution in which men “rule and are ruled in turn” and by choosing their own leaders, chose their own collective destiny. The Florentine rediscovery of Aristotle’s politics of freedom signaled the birth of a new ideal for Europe.14

For in writing the Discourses, Machiavelli discovered a basic paradox: When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success. The freer a society becomes, the more prosperous and more arrogant it becomes as well. Like ancient Rome or Renaissance Florence, it sows the seeds of its own servitude. Although self-government and liberty are the highest forms of political life, Machiavelli revealed that human nature also makes them the most unstable.34

Aristotle’s Politics is built on the back of his Ethics: The good life presupposes the virtuous life. However, in order to survive, free societies sometimes have to violate the very values they profess to uphold. They have to wage war and kill innocents; they have to imprison enemies and sometimes torture them. In extreme situations, they have to suspend civil liberties, even shut down traditional institutions—all to prevent something worse. To the just belongs injustice. All the same, Machiavelli knew there was no guarantee that people will put up with the measures that are meant to save them from themselves. At

It was a stunning revelation. Renaissance Platonism realized that it was this quest for spiritual perfection that bound together all the great religions and civilizations:

On the surface, Plato and Aristotle, Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian theologies, seemed hard to reconcile. But underneath them all, Pico argued, was a shared set of universal truths handed down over the centuries to certain great wise men, who then passed them along to their successors.

Pico’s is a heady vision: Doctor Faustus, indeed, without the Devil. And certainly the Renaissance Platonist vision of the unity of all knowledge stood in sharp contrast with the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen, with his insistence on making divisions and distinctions and creating niggling little categories and compartments.

Michelangelo’s ceiling was finished in 1512. The next year a church council officially endorsed Ficino’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

Galileo’s science managed to fuse the Platonist’s faith in mathematics with the Aristotelian faith in experience as the basis of discovery. All his work on mechanics, optics, and astronomy was deeply rooted in experiment and empirical research. When experience proved ambiguous or unreliable, however, Galileo realized then that mathematics must take over.

His “mathematization of Nature” allowed scientists for the first time to anticipate discoveries and work out scientific theories, including Einstein’s relativity three centuries later, long before the means of testing them existed.

Descartes’s answer was confident and pat. God was the omnipotent Legislator who has made everything and installed all the necessary rules that govern the universe, including the laws of mathematics, rather the way the manufacturer installs software on a new Android. Then God steps aside and lets His creation “do its thing.” As part of the original installation, God has also put the idea of His existence into our minds.6

That constancy reveals the will of an “all wise Agent,” as Locke later wrote, “who has made them to be, and to operate as they do.”24 Locke’s Two Treatises of Government revealed that the political universe is run the same way, through natural laws that guide men’s behavior in the same sure way that they guide the movement of the planets. In discussing this, Locke had found a kindred spirit in Aristotle. This was not the Aristotle of the schoolmen or the civic humanist of the Florentines, but the shrewd analyst of human nature in the Ethics.

This marked an irrevocable shift in Western thinking. The old celestial spheres and hierarchies left over from the Middle Ages had already been done in by Newton’s infinite universe with its mathematical laws. As the eighteenth century wore on and Locke’s influence grew, the rest of the traditional Neoplatonist frame fell away as well. The World Soul and its divine emanations dissipated into thin air. So did the Great Chain of Being. What was left was a world of “real time” and absolute spatial dimensions. It was a world without angels or demons or ideal Forms; a world with no unseen forces except those we can measure and calculate, predict and control.

Later, some regretted this loss of belief in the supernatural.14 Enlightenment men and women judged it a net gain. They gave up looking to angels for guidance—but they also gave up looking for witches to punish. Instead of waiting for divine radiance to transform their inner selves, they confidently relied on their reason and their five senses in order to explore their world—and to discover the laws of nature.

Even more important, the exchange of goods also made both seller and customer more aware of the needs of others and more eager to work together in order to achieve a win-win result.

When we do a business deal in Rio de Janeiro or Calcutta, read a newspaper detailing market trends in Frankfurt or St. Petersburg, window-shop on Oxford Street or on the rue St.-Honoré, share a table with a stranger at a coffeehouse, or split a cab with a traveler on the way to the airport, we are steadily adding to our stock of experience of the world, which in turn gives us a better idea of how the world works and what our own priorities need to be. This forces us to be more practical and pragmatic. We grow more concerned with producing a beneficial result than standing on outdated or dogmatic principles. Far from creating a poltroon, the eighteenth century saw the world of commerce creating a person who might have stepped out from the pages of Aristotle’s Ethics. This was someone intellectually alert and morally centered, regardful of others by habit and therefore not inclined to extremes of behavior.

Above all, he is inclined to be tolerant of others, whether they are Christians or Muslims or Jews—if only to avoid missing a good business deal.

Voltaire came back singing the praises of making money instead of war. He

In short, what had made the Florence of 1402 free wasn’t Divine Providence or even its laws, but how it made its money through trade and industry—which in turn made men change the laws to accommodate their new sense of freedom. It was a pathbreaking way of seeing man’s freedom, not as a divine gift but as a product of society itself. Not only did commerce and liberty go together, but they gave history an entirely new, hopeful direction.

In sum, the growth of commerce triggered a sense of personal independence in people—it gave men and women the confidence to make up their own minds and resolve conflicts on their own, without the need of awe-inspiring kings or emperors—or witch doctors and priests. In commercial society, men no longer have to be terrified into obedience or being moral.

The Golden Rule of morality as Aristotle originally formulated it in his Ethics, that “we should behave toward our friends as we would wish them to behave toward us,” becomes internalized and a mainspring of action. We cooperate—out of self-interest, of course, but we cooperate nonetheless. Our pocketbooks, but also society, benefit from our newfound liberty. Taken

Smith recognized that not everything would be sunny in a society geared around the unleashing of self-interest and economic growth, what we call capitalism. Some people would inevitably be left out of society’s benefits—not its material ones (what welfare recipient doesn’t own both a TV and a cell phone?), but its cultural ones, as the grind of making a living deprives them of leisure and opportunity for enrichment of the spirit. Preventing this kind of “mental mutilation,” Smith wrote, deserved “the most serious attention of the government.”40

In Rousseau’s world, natural man is strong, virile, and altruistic, in addition to being fully in touch with his own feelings. Civilized man turns out to be weak, effeminate, greedy, and self-interested to the point of cold cunning. Like the stereotypical New Yorker, he is incessantly asking: “So what’s in it for me?” If natural man is Tarzan mixed with Dances with Wolves, civilized man is Ebenezer Scrooge, Simon Legree, and Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko rolled into one (indeed, Charles Dickens’s moral outlook as well as Oliver Stone’s owes a great deal to Rousseau).

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

Not being for the revolution was as evil as being against it. “You must punish not merely the traitors,” Robespierre’s ally Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (another Rousseau devotee) proclaimed, “but even those who are merely indifferent,” since that indifference sprang from a love of self that was the source of all evil—and doom for any radical transformation of modern society.

This sesntimmt still exists today

The Romantics yearned for a way to end this war in the cave. They wanted some way in which our Aristotelian instinct to engage our reason in the material world and our Platonic desire to realize our spiritual inner nature could be, if not finally reconciled, at least overcome. Of course, this wasn’t going to be easy. As we’ve seen, the creative drive of Western civilization had arisen not from a reconciliation of the two halves but from a constant alert tension between them.

For Hegel, history moves according to a three-step process. There is first the thesis, embodied in concrete events and persons. Then, comes the antithesis, the negation of the thesis arising from its own contradictions. Then finally, comes the synthesis, which reconciles the truths common to both, arriving at a new level of understanding—and a new stage in the advance of Absolute Spirit.

But we can see where it really came from: Plotinus and Neoplatonism, where the same three-step movement—procession, retrocession, and then merger with the One—leads the initiate up the Chain of Being to the World Spirit.

For example, men have automobiles which allow them to travel where they want and enjoy a greater independence and mobility: the very embodiment of Freedom. Then, the influx of more and more automobiles causes traffic jams and gridlock in city streets: the antithesis of mobility and Freedom. So then come stop signs and traffic laws, the perfect synthesis allowing people to get where they are going but also preventing our desire to get where we want from degenerating into anarchy. In this sense, the stop sign, which at first glance places a limit on our freedom, actually (or objectively, in Hegel’s terms) protects our freedom, even extends it.

False consciousness is the Marxist version of the cave. It is that shadowy realm of falsehood and deceit by which the bourgeoisie maintain their power by pretending that it is founded in nature (as Aristotle would say) when in fact it is a rigged game. False consciousness comforts the ignorant and assuages the guilt of the guilty. It helps to keep reality at arm’s length.

Lol that marx lived in engla nd fdreely while hatkng it and saying tjey english bourgeois was in the cavs

that the social world around us is not just the result of wrongheaded thinking or systematic injustice, as his father and Jeremy Bentham believed. It reflects a complex organic historical development and consists of institutions that give meaning and purpose to the lives of ordinary people, however pointless they may seem to the ivory tower philosopher. Social reality has a hidden purpose, Coleridge taught—a purpose that, like Nature herself, we tamper with at our peril.31 Then Coleridge and Macaulay both showed him that the first task of an intellectual is not to trash and overturn existing institutions of his society, as both Bentham and Marx tried to do. It is to understand first of all how and why they came about. By doing so, we can discover certain basic principles of human nature to serve as the basis of thoughtful reform instead of headlong revolution.32

The amount of individuality in a society, he would write, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.”34

Mill responded that we are here to fulfill not one final single end, but many ends—as many as there are individual human beings. For Mill, it is the healthy diversity of purposes and destinies that makes for a happy society and a truly free society.

Allowing men and women to say what they believe, Mill argues, and publish what they think is true promotes the spread of new discoveries and truths while pushing out the false and misleading.

“All the peoples of the world are one,” was Las Casas’s final pronouncement, meaning they all share one nature. That nature rested on man’s reason, the one characteristic that all human beings share regardless of where they live. Underneath the wide diversity of societies, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was a single common human nature addressing the same problems in the same way but with different results, because of differences in the physical and cultural environment. “Thus

What made Hegel so irresistibly appealing? First of all, his totality as a thinker. His theories didn’t just draw together science, art, history, and philosophy into a consistent (if not always coherent) whole. His vision of totality also embraced, and subsumed, the individual. As with Plato, Hegel taught that the key to human happiness was belonging to an entity larger than ourselves. For Hegel and the Hegelian, the desire of each person to lead his or her life as he or she pleases—the Lockean individual of the Enlightenment—was as morally absurd as it was physically impossible. We are all inevitably parts of larger and larger wholes, Hegel explained, both organically (the individual and his family belong to a village or town; that local community is part of the nation; and so on) and over time, as all things become integrated into the ultimate reality of the Absolute—including the State.30