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

by Arthur Herman

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. Still, the Myth of the Cave reveals a bitter truth: Most people prefer life in the cave. The world and institutions around us reflect it—and as Glaucon realized, people get upset and even furious when someone challenges their fondest illusions—what Francis Bacon would call the Idols of the Tribe—especially if everything else is collapsing around them.

He commented sardonically that he had never heard of a herdsman who took pride in thinning his own herd.

teaching them that goodness is the true wealth both for the individual and for the state.

He warned the jury that his ultimate responsibility was not to them, but to his conscience, or what he called his “inner voice”: his own soul.

“But I suggest, gentlemen, that the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to avoid doing wrong, which is far more fleet of foot”—as

Socrates insisted that it was better to suffer wrong than inflict it, and his last days proved it. It’s why Cicero dubbed Socrates “the wisest and most upright of men” and why centuries later, Mahatma Gandhi took him as a personal role model and called him “a soldier for Truth.” Socrates’s quest to lead his fellow citizens to a higher vision of themselves and their society, while living that example himself, even when it cost him his life, raised him to the level of the heroic, where he has stayed more or less ever since.

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.

Politics on Plato’s terms always involves the search for a foundation more elevated and certain than custom or public opinion or majority rule, because all of them reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the realm of ignorance and error.

Aristotle invented and wrote the pioneering treatises of all the following fields: biology, zoology, gerontology, physics, astronomy, meteorology (meaning the study of meteors and comets), politics, and psychology, not to mention logic and metaphysics.§

the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.

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.”

If we want to know what a man really is, we need to focus not on where he came from or what he left behind, but on what he can do now and in the future, as part of his own dynamic nature.

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. In that past original, Plato will say, we find the key that unlocks our future. Later that most Platonist of epochs, the Renaissance, would look back to classical antiquity for its model of perfection, just as the Romantics—Platonists almost to a man and woman—would look back to the Middle Ages. Aristotle, by contrast, looks steadily forward, to what we can be rather than what we were. His outlook is by its nature optimistic: “The universe and everything in it is developing towards something continually better than what came before,” including ourselves. It is truly a “philosophy of aspiration,” as scholar F. M. Cornford once dubbed it, and for Aristotle the world we make for ourselves continually reflects that constant striving toward improvement. 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

This is why Aristotle was prepared to take a second look at the mechanical, practical arts of his day, or what we call technology. All forms of knowledge, he declares in his usual categorical way, are either theoretical, technical, or practical. Pure theory (epistēmē) is concerned only with knowing and understanding, like biology, metaphysics (or “first philosophy”), and theology. Practical knowledge, praxis, has to do with doing. Interestingly, he puts politics and ethics in that category. But technē, the third kind of knowledge, has to do with making. Its goal is not understanding but production. The potter at his wheel, the blacksmith at his forge, the shipwright in a Piraeus boatyard, are not interested in discovering some new scientific principle or adding to the sum of human knowledge. The art of making, Aristotle declares, only imitates nature rather than inventing somethi...

The best life is the one in which we follow our reason, not our passions or emotions. But man’s function is not just to think—which Aristotle admits to be the highest of all human activities—but also to do.

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.

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.

This is why for Aristotle ethics is not a science. We aren’t looking for moral perfection. “In fact, such a life is not possible for man,” Aristotle states. “If it were, he would be a God.”23 Instead, we look for advantage and improvement. From that point of view, Aristotle assures us, learning to be virtuous is not that hard. It’s all a matter of practice and learning the habits that go with it.

“The whole concern of both morality and political science must be pleasures and pains,” is how he states it in the Ethics. The key is teaching people how to take pleasure in doing the right thing and experience pain in doing the bad thing.

“Moral goodness is the result of habit,” he writes, pointing out that the words for character and custom are the same in Greek: ethos.24 A large share of the laws and customs in a city like Athens was set to inculcate the kinds of personal virtues Plato and Aristotle wanted their fellow citizens to have. Aristotle’s point was that learning those virtues took more than laws. It took building habits based on a relative calculus of pleasure and pain.

The transformative power of good habits, and Aristotle’s principle that practice makes perfect, rests on our essential spiritual purpose. The goal of man from the start is to be happy, and “it is virtuous activities that determine our happiness.”25 As human beings, we have an inborn disposition to virtue; if we want to cultivate that disposition, which most of us do (who really revels in being evil?), we need to cultivate the habits that go with it.

As a rationalist, Aristotle was willing to concede that doing good is not as optimal as knowing the good. In fact, practice makes perfect applies to bad habits as well as good. As human beings, we have the potential for both. It all boils down to a question of the choices we make: not just at the start of the journey, but at every point along the way.

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.27

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.

Socrates and Plato, to their credit, did recognize that circumstance and intention can complicate moral judgments.c

Aristotle’s point was that all forms of morality are situational, because morality takes place in a real, live-fire environment, and in virtual time, jus...

We all have the potential to be good and the potential to be bad.

But which we become depends on the choices we make as rational beings and the dispositions that arise over time from those choices.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato brilliantly compares human beings to charioteers driving the two horses of our human nature: our soul of reason and our irrational animal passions. The charioteer’s task “is difficult and troublesome,” he says, as we try to give the lead to the one and rein in the other. But if we do it well, we will live a virtuous life and reach the goal of every wise man and “in the course of [our] journey” behold “absolut...

Aristotle’s soul, by contrast, is like the bareback rider. She has only one horse, herself. She needs to stay balanced on that horse with subtle adjustments of her body to keep her seat and stay in control as she takes in the scene, adjusting her pace to the road and terrain, going neither too fast nor too slow, but never falling off or throwing the horse into confusion—and never losing sight of the final goal.

Those who wish to be virtuous, Aristotle concludes, “are compelled at every step to think out for themselves what the circumstances demand, like a navigator on a ship at sea or a physician.”

Aristotle’s politics is like his ethics. It is rooted in real life, the Greek polis as he knew it, especially Athens, for which he wrote a description of its constitution that we still have. 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.

For all its limitations, in his Republic and the Laws, Sparta was proof to Plato that freedom was a function of solidarity and unity of purpose.2 Aristotle, by contrast, saw Athens as proof that men can be free only if they are individuals and are allowed to live their lives as they, not others, see fit. “Freedom from any interference of government,” rather than submitting to its dictates, no matter how just, is one of Aristotle’s hallmarks of a democratic society.

So not surprisingly, Socrates is the Republic’s main character, and on this all-important topic for the first time he speaks to the reader in the first person. He describes to his listeners the outline of an ideal government that, although unrealizable in reality, can serve as a model for implementing future change. “It makes no difference whether it exists now,” Socrates says at one point, “or will ever come into being.” By studying the laws of an ideal state, Plato argues, men will learn how to order their lives better in the real ones.

What ultimately makes for the good life is not power or money or the pursuit of pleasure, but knowledge—knowledge of what harms and what benefits us (for example, knowing that courage is useless if it leads us to risk our lives needlessly); knowledge of what harms or benefits others; knowledge, finally, of good and evil.

“Let us then allow ourselves to be led by the truth … which teaches that the best way to live is to practice righteousness and virtue. And what is true for the individual, his listeners are forced to concede, must be equally true for society.

At this moment, two-thirds into Book V of the Republic, an important impulse for Western culture is born—and a clever Greek pun. It is the utopian impulse, after the Greek word utopia, which can mean either the best place to live (eutopia) or nowhere (u-topia), since experience (and Aristotle) will teach us that they are one and the same.

Self-interest must learn to yield to the common interest; and men must be united if they are to be free. Taken together, that remains Plato’s most important political legacy.

community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

Plato’s goal is unity, a laudable one. But Aristotle says that this kind of unity equals the death of the polis and freedom. Plato’s authoritarian, even arbitrary, rules reduce the community to the outlook of a single household or family, whereas a truly free society requires an aggregate of families and, as he says, “different kinds of men.”

Diversity of interests means inequality of results, even a division between rich and poor.

Enforcing economic equality is not just a violation of common sense. It also flies in the face of why the polis exists at all.

For Aristotle, class conflict is inevitable.

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.” To borrow a word that will be freighted with other meanings later on, he is bourgeois.

In his daily interactions, he practices that peculiar mixture of prudence and virtue that enables him to hit the mean and keeps his family and his polis on an even keel even as it complements the same virtues of his neighbors. He is no visionary or crusader. Aristotle would have little patience with those we call political activists. 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.

Those who argue that only experts know best are wrong. In politics, as in house building, the best judge of what works is the user, not the maker.

Politics on Plato’s terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle’s terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.