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.

Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil.

Aristotle is no woolly-minded, dreamy-eyed philosopher. He is the realist and empiricist compared with Plato the mystic and idealist.

That same insistence would ultimately make him impatient with Plato’s reliance on allegory and myth to convey truths he considered too profound to be expressed in ordinary language. The Myth of the Cave in the Republic, the Myth of Atlantis in the Timaeus: Aristotle made it clear he had no time for tall tales like these, which obfuscate more than they reveal. “Plato raised up the walls of Atlantis,” Aristotle wrote, “and then plunged them under the waves,” meaning that the whole story was an obvious fabrication and nothing more. “About those who have invented clever mythologies,” he added in the Metaphysics, “it is not worthwhile to take a serious look.”5

reason must be linked to the power of observation.

Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 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.

Aristotle, by contrast, looks steadily forward, to what we can be rather than what we were.

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.

(Archimedes was the first mathematician to use the concept of infinity in his work). Without it, modern math and science as we know it would not exist.

I curl a baby lizard in my hand, so transparently orange that it seems made of plastic. But then it moves, its tiny limbs reminding me that it carries the breath of divinity within it, less than that of my own soul but more than the twigs and leaves from which I extracted it—and all in harmonious proportion with one another.

Although Paul was a Jew, he devoted himself to preaching to non-Jews—that is, to the Gentiles. The secret of his success was crafting a message that resounded with the deepest emotional needs of a sprawling empire, including its finest minds. Here are the answers, he proclaimed, for which you have been searching all your life. Here is a sense of belonging, in an empire where the bonds of community and traditional identities were dissolving. Here is a permanence, in a world where bewildering change had become the rule. Here is a sense of moral purpose, where all other institutions seemed to have lost their way.

Plato’s God had been the epitome of refined reason. This Christian deity was clearly fit only for the gutter.

However, there will be a price to pay for this belief that the ultimate meaning of reality can be found in our own spiritual nature. Our interest in the outside physical world, the realm of nature and science, by necessity drops to second place. What vital truths does the world of sensory experience offer us? The Augustinian Christian will answer as Plato does in the Theaetetus: None. “It is not necessary to probe into the nature of things,” Augustine will write, “as was done by those whom the Greeks called physicists.” There is nothing there to interest the searcher after wisdom, only more shadows and gloom.*

History, people like to say, is written by the winners. The truth is, some of the most profound works on the past were written by those who considered themselves history’s losers. They are men and women trying to figure out what went wrong; what was the turning point when optimistic hopes were dashed and the forces of doom and destruction inevitably closed in.

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be.

the old idea that the rise of modern science involved a struggle between reason and religion is not merely wrong but misleading.

Plato taught Western culture to think of reason, self-denial, and the realm of spirit as good and spontaneity, pleasure, music and art (“Plato is the greatest enemy of art Europe has ever known”), and the world of the senses as bad. Plato’s works mark the birth of good and evil that Christianity would go on to inherit—and with it the death of freedom.9

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

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, tension and renewal are our identity. And if those of us in the West can rediscover that identity, perhaps we can then save the world—not by making it richer or alternately by giving it a world government, but by leading by example and showing how to leave the cave and step once more out into the light.