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

by Arthur Herman

Sitting and listening to the rhythmic flux and reflux of the waves outside his window, he found he became completely at one with nature. As he described it later, all pain from the past and fears for the future faded away, leaving nothing except an intense awareness of nature’s permanence and of Being in Itself. “I realized,” he wrote in his description of the experience in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “that our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” In the solitude of nature, “my soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity.”10 At the time it was a revolutionary, even subversive, concept—more subversive than his attack on capitalism or his version of the social contract. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had built their understanding of human identity on the premise that man was, to paraphrase Aristotle, a social animal.11 We instinctively hate being alone and crave interaction with others, they taught. Locke’s theory of knowledge had the same thrust. Verifying the truth of our own ideas requires constantly comparing them with the experience and judgment of others. And the best place to get this kind of knowledge through interaction, said Montesquieu, Hume, and others, was in commercial society. It was when you allowed people to go off on their own, to become isolated and brood over their own thoughts—the solitary hermit in his cave, the monk in his cell, or (one could add) Rousseau ...