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

by Arthur Herman

The same men who led the Reign of Terror abolished slavery in France. In England, opposition to the slave trade became one of the hallmarks of English Romanticism. Both Turner and Blake were sickened by it and used their artistic skill to portray its horrors. Writers like Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordswort...

the basic point Thomas Aquinas had extracted from Aristotle some six centuries earlier. Man is above nature but also part of it: he is subject to the same laws, both morally and physically. But do things work the other way? If it is part of man’s nature to change things for the better, then perhaps it is true, at least to some degree, of Nature herself.

the entire book was about the power of observation and practical experiment to generate a provisional explanation, or hypothesis, which, once we add more observations to either confirm or deny our hypothesis, gradually solidifies into a general law. That law, Herschel admitted, might not be mathematically precise—or at least not at first. But once it’s tested by time and dint of example, it can be enough to explain what’s going on.

The key was finding a provisional link between cause and effect.

“I gave both the dog and the cat some vitamin D,” the experimental scientist says to himself, “and both their skin rashes went away.” This discovery leads him to make a hypothesis: Whenever an animal with a skin rash is given this amount of vitamin D, it will be cured. He will be able to reexamine old cases—“I saw a dog the other day eat some broccoli and its skin rash disappeared, so broccoli must contain vitamin D”—and open the way to considering new ones. When he gives vitamin D to his spouse and her skin rash actually gets worse, he doesn’t throw ...

Reasoning in science, like reasoning in real life, is a process. It is, as Herschel sho...

Another scientist, William Whewell, offered an additional perspective. Induction, the patient gathering of data and the teasing out of causal factors, was clearly important to scientific research.

However, the big breakthroughs, Whewell argued, required the more powerful force of the imagination.

Then very suddenly, in the spring or early summer of 1837, Darwin had the answer. His comments on the data in his notebooks show a new confidence and a sense of direction. He realized it meant chucking the idea that life on earth began at an act of deliberate creation such as the one described in the Bible—or in Plato’s Timaeus. If that had been so, then men would not have been born with nipples (a puzzle that particularly fascinated Darwin). Unlike those of women, male nipples serve no possible purpose foreseen in the mind of a Creator. Instead, they must be a trace of a prior state when they were of use, Darwin decided, which had since disappeared from the human species. “So with useless wings under elytra of beetles. Born from beetles with wings, and modified”: modified not by a Creator, but by the passing of generations, which bring with them a constant, inexorable process of change.

“Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work,” Darwin wrote in his Autobiography.40 He finally had his how, which he called natural selection.‡ His disciple Herbert Spencer coined a more portentous phrase for it, survival of the fittest, although survival of the adaptable would have been more accurate. Those who can adapt to the current environment, whether we’re talking turtles or wheatgrass or people, live to propagate and continue the species. Those who can’t, won’t.

Natural selection became one of the most contentious parts of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in part because of its source.41 However, Darwin’s unexpected move was not in relying on Malthus’s law of population; it was in turning it from a barrier to progress into progress’s driving engine. Natural selection at long last solved the problem of what was the underlying structure of all natural history—indeed of life. For Darwin, the process is the structure. He had turned nature’s most obvious characteristic, its propensity for change, into its greatest virtue.

What made Darwin so reluctant to reveal his theory in public, and why did it win almost as many opponents, both in and outside the life sciences, as it did adherents? Certainly Darwin, who was a religious agnostic, knew it spelled the doom of the age-old creation story of the Book of Genesis. In fact, to this day the conflict over evolution is defined as a clash between Darwinists and so-called Creationists. Yet the history of geology has exposed the intellectual inadequacies of the seven-day creation story far more decisively than evolution has, and before Darwin arrived on the scene. His own theory depended on it. Yet it is Darwin, not Charles Lyell, who is the recurrent object of wrath and loathing.

Is it because Darwin proposed that human beings were descended from higher primates? That claim, which Darwin developed in The Descent of Man in 1871, certainly raised plenty of ire at the time and since—and not just among dyed-in-the-cloth evangelicals. The entire foundation of Romantic liberalism, not to mention the Thomist position of Las Casas and others, was that man is part of nature but also above nature, because of the spiritual essence of his soul.

No such immanent divine spark survives Darwin’s evolutionary logic. In fact, Darwin made a joke of it back in 1838 in his notebook: “If all men were dead, then monkeys make men, men make angels.” Man thinks himself a great work, he wrote, worthy of being created by a deity...

It also gets us closer to the truth about the opposition to Darwin: not because of what evolution says about men, but because of what it says about God.

The traditional Western notion of God as Supreme Creator rested not only on Genesis but on Plato’s Timaeus, implying that the cosmos is a deliberate copy of divine perfection. This is especially true of man, who, as Christianity had argued from its start, had been made in God’s image—with all the force that Plato’s theory of Forms could give that statement.

Now Darwin was implying that we are not the copy of anything perfect or divine. We are just one more set of beasts roaming the planet equipped with our natural reason as our only distinguishing mark. This didn’t just topple the foundation of Christian moral teaching and metaphysics; it meant that one entire half of the traditional...

Aristotle had been as obsessed with perfection as his great teacher—witness his views on astronomy. But he was also willing to shrug and say: Look, if it exists, there must be a reason. In Aristotle’s mind, viewing the world as a copy of anything—even the mind of God—gets us nowhere. It is arguable whether Aristotle even had a conception of a God, but he did have a Prime Mover without whom nothing else moves.

Aristotle also said that if something exists, then it must change, including the cosmos itself. Only the Prime Mover does not. Only He is unmoved, eternal, and perfect. The rest of reality is bound to the laws of nature: doomed, in other words, to various states of imperfection. That’s what makes it reality. And if evolutionary change is the rule for the rest of the cosmos, then why not for man himself?

Aristotle’s God is not a caring god. His nature is pure actuality (energeia) and excludes all possibility of Him worrying about the creatures of the cosmos, let alone desiring any outcome. However, without Him the potential dynamism of matter would remain untapped. Wrapped in eternal self-contemplation, He summons up by His mere presence the latent powers...

“The aim of science,” Mach wrote, “is to obtain connections among phenomena” within that field of experience—and then describe them in the shortest and most economical way possible as scientific laws.

Whatever their differences, Plato and Aristotle did agree on one thing: the importance of reason in human affairs.

In Plato’s case, the path of reason was more speculative and inward-turning, based on a search for timeless a priori principles. Aristotle celebrated a more practical version of reason, embedded in the rules of logic and science—and in empirical experience. But both assumed that distinguishing truth from falsehood was man’s most important mission, and that his mind was the surest guide for doing it.

For more than two thousand years, their successors embraced the same idea. Christianity tended to see human reason in more Platonic terms, as a reflection of the mind of God. Following Aristotle, the Enlightenment treated it as a powerful ordering mechanism, not only generating scientific knowledge but also enabling us to grasp the basic forces go...

But none ever doubted that reason was the essential core of human identity. Even the Romantics, with their celebration of feelings and emotions, were chasing after a richer synthesis of our spiritual and rati...

Then very suddenly in the 1880s, new ideologies sprang up in Germany and France arguing for just that. Their proponents asserted that it wasn’t what we know that makes us powerful, but what we believe—even if it’s a lie. Instead of knowing and analyzing reality, they proclaimed, man’s missio...

The question the pre-Socratics had rallied around was: What is reality? As we saw, Socrates had changed the key philosophical question to: How should I live?

All the same, the pre-Socratics’ answers to the first, Nietzsche suggested, already implied the second. It’s just that their approach took them in a sharply different direction from Socrates’s: one that put a premium on man’s place in the world, instead of above or apart from it, which to Plato and Aristotle was the consequence of his possessing reason.

For Nietzsche, the most important of the pre-Socratics was Heraclitus.

Heraclitus was the first to realize that “good and bad are identical” in the constant flux that is existence.

Of course, the consequences of Heraclitus’s most famous saying, “All things change,” or Panta rhei, can appear paralyzing to the human mind. It means nothing is permanent, even from moment to moment.

“It takes great strength” to realize that we are destined to ride the hurricane of change alone and to accept the ceaseless fluctuation of everything we see or touch or hold dear. However, when we do, we will be prepared to see life as a whole, including ourselves.3

Sorel’s term for this kind of vision is myth, with all that word’s Platonic associations.

Plato had made it clear in the Republic that no society, no matter how just its laws, can keep the majority of its citizens honest without resorting to some salutary beliefs or myths, which, even if they are literally false, encourage social solidarity and obedience to the rulers.

Plato called these myths the...

Josef Goebbels coined a more cynical term, the big lie. It will be the essence of mass politics in the ideological age. “It is not necessary that men move mountains,” Sorel’s disciple Benito Mussolini liked t...

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, includ...

World War I killed off nations, empires including Russia’s, and fifteen million people. It left in its wake an intellectual climate that celebrated the forces of unreason, violence, and primitive myth—in books, novels, art, music, and politics. In fact, a postwar generation would teach Europe to think about politics as an art in which great leaders of genius, like great artists, could weld men together and magically create new, higher forms of community, akin to the imagined utopias of earlier ages.

Plato’s Republic would at last be realized—not through the power of reason or virtue but by propaganda and violence.

The price of revolution was now ideological, as well as political, conformity.

The French Revolution had seen its enemies as aristocrat and the Church. The Russian Revolution extended that standard to include intellectuals, teachers, writers, artists—anyone who refused to comply with what would come to be called “the party line”—the official Communist Party credo on any subject from politics and education to art and architecture.

It was Lenin’s declaration of a new front in the class war: a war on free intellectual inquiry. It was a chilling foretaste of what was to come, not just in Soviet R...

What is striking about the politics of both left and right in the interwar years is how unabashed they w...

The traditional idea, so dear to the Romantics and dating back to Plato’s portrayal of Socrates, that intellectuals are the natural foes of tyranny proved fatally flawed.

But most intelligent men and women watched what was happening on the Continent with deep foreboding.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

By 1932, as depression swept the industrial world, those words by William Butler Yeats seemed watchwords of an even more terrible catastrophe to come.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, which asserted that “a proposition can be true or false only in virtue of being a picture of reality.”38 Logic, Wittgenstein had concluded, forms the essential frame for our picture, within which we group observations into true statements, including scientific observation.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosopicus (to give the book its full ponderous Latin title) had at last brought together the two halves of Aristotle’s living legacy—his logic and his empirical science—and shown that they are inseparable, indeed that they define our world. Because “what we cannot speak about,” Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus’s last sentence, meaning what can’t be verified by empirical observation, “we must pass over in silence.” Three thousand years of fuzzy thinking and foggy logic, from Parmenides’s problem of Being to Hegel’s dialectic and Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, had been neatly broomed away.

The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you or me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. —William James, Pragmatism (1907)