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

by Arthur Herman

his needs, Polybius’s friend Panaetius the Stoic had told his patrons. The arts of civilized life, including building, tools, machines, and farming, were proof that humans were destined to build a future for themselves based on benevolent interdependence with others, under the protection of a divine providence.14 This softer, socially optimistic side of Stoicism made a deep impression on Cicero’s On Moral Obligations, where it mixed easily with Aristotelian notions of man as “political animal,” in other words born with an instinct to cooperate with others to achieve a common good.‡ All the same, it is the “hard” side of Stoicism that dominated the life and work of its most famous Roman exponent, the philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE). Seneca’s wise man is indifferent to pain and suffering; he has no fears and no hopes. He never gets angry, even when he sees his father killed and his mother raped.15 Seneca believed in humane virtues like gratitude and clemency, including toward slaves, and writes eloquently about their lasting benefit to others. In the end, however, Seneca loved humanity more than he cared for human beings. He preached abstinence even while he owned one of the most sumptuous homes in Rome. Once, he attended the spectacles in the arena of which the Romans took great pride, with its gladiatorial combats and slaughter of wild beasts. He came back, he