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

by Arthur Herman

Indeed, without realizing it, Georges Sorel had defined the contours of totalitarian politics in the twentieth century. Violence equals élan vital in action. Myth equals the power to shape reality through mass propaganda. Apocalypse, including the massacre of millions, becomes a cleansing social vision. In the Romantic era, the translation of vision and instinct into action had produced great works of art. In the twentieth century, Sorel believed, it will produce great works of violence.

There is no Philosopher Ruler or king standing in the image of God’s plenitude of power. He is sent packing to the realm of the perfect Forms—and out of the realm of reality. What rules instead are concrete constitutional arrangements based on real-life experience, distilled into a code of laws. Politics is above all a real-time partnership, requiring people’s participation more than obedience, one in which the good life is found in living the process, not necessarily in the final result. It was this view of constitutional “mixed” government that the Founding Fathers inherited from their Florentine and British forebears.4 Achieving that classic balance between the One, the Few, and the Many, however, had always implied the goal of stability. If the mixture was allowed to change in any way, then Polybius’s and Machiavelli’s cycle of decay and doom would kick in—and change was the one thing Western man could not avoid. Even in the age of Enlightenment, men like John Adams sensed that liberty, no matter how desirable, was still fated not to last.5

Tocqueville saw that some in Europe like Hegel argued that the way to help the individual overcome a sense of powerlessness in modern society was to increase the powers of government. Tocqueville believed this was a mistake. Such a move would destroy the motivation for volunteerism and the impulse for drawing together for a common purpose. “If men are to remain civilized,” he concluded, “or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”12

from the start the United States found itself with a constitution founded on a permanent clash between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and between federal power and states’ rights (epitomized by the fierce ideological battles between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the early decades of the Republic) and a sectional split between a commercial-minded North and a slave-owning South. It was also a society delicately balanced between individualism and volunteerism and between a business- and engineer-centered culture of focused practicality and a religious evangelism bordering on mysticism. Clearly, some kind of conceptual glue was going to be needed to hold all these disparate elements together if the new republic was going to survive. For nearly seventy years, Americans found it in the ideas of Common Sense Realism.

The Common Sense philosophy (as it was also called) was a shrewd fusion of an empiricism borrowed from Locke and Aristotle and a moral intuitionism—the idea that the human mind has direct access to truths that the senses cannot reach—that can be traced back to Plato.

It was a groundbreaking insight—possibly the most important of the twentieth century.33 Scientific truth, Peirce had asserted, was no more a series of breakthroughs to intellectual certainty than predicting the weather. Instead, it is a series of constant laboratory experiments in which we test hypotheses, run the numbers or heat up the test tubes, and see what comes out.34 William James affirmed the same was true of life. We grope and feel our way along step by step, trying out and sticking to what works and dropping what doesn’t. Our knowledge grows in spots, James liked to say.35 It is from this humble process, not from enacting some series of a priori principles or a transcendental Diktats à la Hegel, that human progress is made. It

a nation of men and women committed to what experience teaches us works. Such a people can afford to be realistic about the challenges of the present, but also optimistic about the multiple possibilities for the future.

Hegel had argued that historical change ensures that there is no cumulative fund of information available to the individual. Hayek answered, Yes, there is. It’s called the marketplace. And the freer the markets, the more people have access to that fund. Thus, “we need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances [of a given transaction] will be promptly” and efficiently used—and human beings will benefit materially from that freedom.

The old idea that America became “the arsenal of democracy” in World War II because of actions by the federal government is a myth. It was in fact an explosion of productivity by the most capitalist—and Aristotelian—economy on earth.38

It was also the acknowledgment by Platonism’s most potent political offspring—Marxist communism—that economies and societies built around Aristotle’s empirical system were not only wealthier and more productive but better able to meet the stress of crisis better—even the crisis of total war.

Rand, the final product of this burst of Aristotelian enlightenment was the modern free market entrepreneur. He is the field marshal of the army of freedom, Rand insisted in 1960, and his “lieutenant commander-in-chief is the scientist.” The businessman turns science’s discoveries “into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comforts of man’s existence.” The free market becomes a mass market, where millions of people of every income level are able to get the products they want cheaper, faster, and more efficiently.

If all were of one mind, the cosmos would stand still. —Alexander the Great Just a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, three events set the compass for the twenty-first century.

In short, “what went wrong” with Muslim culture, then and later, was that it wound up getting too much Aristotle too soon, which deprived it of growth and dynamism. Aristotle’s scientific and logical treatises became the basis of a fossilized orthodoxy in Arab culture, dry and lifeless and unchanging over the centuries.

The upshot is soberingly clear. The inability of governments and large, centralizing institutions to keep up with the information needed to make the right economic decisions (an inability that Hayek identified more than eighty years ago) grows exponentially with the growth of those global markets—just as the destructive consequences of making the wrong decision expand exponentially as well.

Aristotle declared that we arrive at the truth through the analysis of the material world—much as the modern scientist does. By contrast, Plato becomes Western civilization’s spokesman for a quest for truth and knowledge outside and beyond our immediate material reality—a reality that Plato taught was really a source of limitation. Truth always lies beyond our conventional limits—those limits imposed by our own mortal nature.

History shows that too much Plato brings a rigid dogmatism and an elitist arrogance—which,

Too much Aristotle, on the other hand, ends in the narrow-minded sterility that dominated the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in which everything is reduced to rote formulae and habit and individual creativity is stamped out.

It is the balance between living in the material and adhering to the spiritual that sustains any society’s cultural health.

The problem has been that the West’s material drive and dynamism—the product of the same creative tension described in this book—has tended to reach out and pull down those older, more stable edifices, the traditional guarantees for social and psychological survival.

Their confrontation with a technological modern pluralist society like ours triggered an incomprehension and rage that radical Islamicism fanned into a nihilistic barbarism.

While this has not led to mass spiritual death, as so many critics of consumer culture charge, it has allowed mass consumerism to suffocate and choke off other important forms of human potential.

The modern environmentalist movement has recognized this and exploited it with its austere downsizing appeal. The Greens offer a manifestly Platonist reply to Aristotle’s world of technology, individual desire, and convenience, by stressing collective responsibility, self-sacrifice, and moral rather than material comfort and consumer choice.§ And whatever their empirical scientific merits or demerits, climate change gurus and advocates of the Gaia thesis do point to an important truth: that a world built on getting and spending is not enough. There are other values, spiritual needs that also require satisfaction and that demand a priority on our agendas. The tens of thousands of congregants who fill Saddleback Church in California every Sunday grasp that as well. The point is, this kind of contradiction is nothing new in Western culture. History

The tension between our material and spiritual selves has always been there, embedded in Western history by the legacies of Plato and Aristotle. It has inspired one breakthrough after another, in the clash between Christianity and classical culture; the battle of the books between Renaissance humanists and the schoolmen; and the culture wars between the Romantics and the Enlightenment. And of course it runs all through the current clash over Darwinism and creationism or “intelligent desig...

Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s most famous pupil, was right. The end result of consensus, of all thinking with one mind, is stagnation and worse. Indeed,