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

by Arthur Herman

James Madison—“If men were angels, no government would be necessary”—is a sentiment torn from the pages of Aristotle and Machiavelli if ever there was one.

Tocqueville himself noted that “Americans are more addicted to practical than to theoretical science,” and that “they mistrust systems” of the usual Platonic-Hegelian pattern. “They adhere closely to facts, and study facts with their own senses.” In fact, Tocqueville concluded that they had invented their own philosophical method without realizing it, one that “accepts tradition only as a means of information and existing facts only as a lesson to be used in doing otherwise, and doing better.” In short, a bias toward progress was built into the American character, along with a love of liberty both political and personal, in which the American “is a subject in all that concerns the duties of citizens” in a self-governing republic, but “is free, and responsible to God alone, for all that concerns himself.”1

Politics is above all a real-time partnership, requiring people’s participation more than obedience, one in which the good life is found in living the process, not necessarily in the final result.

The genius of the Constitution’s chief author, James Madison, was to conceive of this constitutional balance as dynamic, not static. In Madison’s vision, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of American government would have their powers separated out, so that instead of cooperating they would be locked in permanent but dynamic competition. No group of cunning and unscrupulous men could seize control of one branch to dominate the others, as the Medici had in Florence (and as, many Americans felt, King George’s ministers had taken control of the Parliament in Britain), because other groups of cunning and unscrupulous men would naturally use the other branches to fight back.

It was in its way, a breathtaking proposition. But “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote. In this way, “through supplying opposite and rival interests,” the separation of powers in the federal Constitution would “supply the defect of better motives”—a phrase that landed him in trouble with those, like John Adams, who preferred a more high-minded approach to republican government.

Indeed, it still provokes some resentment from those who believe that government, even in a free society, still has some Platonic duty to cultivate the virtues of its citizens.7 Madison, however, was an admirer of David Hume as well as Aristotle. He understood better than some other Founding Fathers the tenacity of self-interest—and the lack in real life of enough better motives to go around.

In what David Hume had called the “perpetual intestine struggle between Liberty and Authority,” Madison had concluded that the best way to preserve liberty in a modern society like America was to hobble authority through what he called countervailing interests. We have another term for it: gridlock. Through gridlock, Madison predicted, “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.…” In this way, he wrote, it will be “very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry … any measures against the public interest.” Except the “he” in this case wasn’t Madison, but Hume himself.

“The society will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens,” Madison explained in The Federalist Papers, “that the rights of individuals, of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”9

Tocqueville saw that some in Europe like Hegel argued that the way to help the individual overcome a sense of powerlessness in modern society was to increase the powers of government. Tocqueville believed this was a mistake. Such a move would destroy the motivation for volunteerism and the impulse for drawing together for a common purpose. “If men are to remain civilized,” he concluded, “or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”12

The answer was complete religious freedom, including the freedom not to believe. “It does me no injury,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yet it was also Jefferson who wrote, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?” Later he added, “No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be.”

Yet doubt, Peirce pointed out, is the starting point for acquiring all certain knowledge. What Peter Abelard had believed about logic and theology—“Through doubting we come to understand”—Peirce insisted was the basic rule for modern science as well.

It is the desire to clear away doubt that leads to genuine empirical investigation and to arriving at the truth. But with it comes a realization that some of “our indubitable beliefs may be proved false.”

We need to be open to possibilities, since circumstances might one day prove our assumptions wrong—including circumstances of our own making. The power of the individual to change, not only his own life, but the world, was not diminished but affirmed, by the precepts of Pragmatism.

So instead of Plato’s universe of moral absolutes, Pragmatism leaves us with a universe of probable outcomes.

“So far as man stands for anything,” James wrote, “and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be...

Still, in order for this approach to work, we need a destination—just like the commuter in traffic. The goal of James’s Pragmatism was to arrive at a tr...

His The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) drew a sharp differentiation between trying to treat religion as a set of truths and seeing it as a set of beliefs that give force and meaning to our lives.

Truths are ideas we can verify; false ideas are those we can’t.40 We may not be able to prove God exists; but believing He does can change our lives and actions in profound ways that, from the Pragmatic standpoint, can actually make that belief true.

“There are cases,” James said, “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary fa...

James liked to use the example of a train robbery. A pair of bandits rob an entire train of passengers because the robbers believe they can count on each other if they encounter trouble, while each passenger believes resisting means instant death, even though they outnumber the thugs a hundred to one. The result is a robbery. However, “if we believed that the whole carful would ri...

Or take the mountain climber who has to leap an immense and deep chasm in order to return home. If he believes he can make it, he can make it. If he hesitates and jumps halfheartedly, he will plunge to his death. Beliefs, James believed, are rules for action, including (or especially) Christianity. Religious belief helps us to overcome the maybes and the self-doubts that lurk in the normal interactions of life. It can inspire a mountain climber to superhuman acts or a drug addict to stop taking heroin. It can inspire people to resist a fearsome tyranny or save others from the same threat.

To despise compassion as weakness is not an expression of the love of life, but its opposite.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

For Aristotle, the locus of rational planning had always been the individual and his oikos, or household. In the same way, justice, or who deserves what, pertains to the individual person apart from his or her social or economic function. No notion of individual or natural right can take root without it.

From the very start, Plato had argued the opposite. Justice belongs to the social and economic whole, the community. Indeed, it presupposes it. That community may be perfect (as in the Republic) or imperfect, depending on whether it upholds an absolute standard of virtue or goodness. However, the same basic rule applies. To belong is to submit to a definition of virtue and justice that is common to all, whether Philosopher Ruler or Guardian or Worker, because all are part of the whole. It is those who stand outside the system—the ones Plato dubbed foreigners, or metics—who receive no justice at all. “In a sense, their very existence as the Other undermines it: a point Rousseau picked up when he said that Spartans’ hatred of foreigners sprang from their love and respect for one another.

James Madison had said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” By 1900, however, certain Americans were beginning to think men could become angels, with government helping them to do it.

In fact, the pursuit of equality only generates more conflict, much as Aristotle had predicted in the Politics—which requires more direct government action to maintain order.

“The passion for ‘the collective satisfaction of our needs,’ ” Hayek wrote, was how “the socialists [meaning believers in a strong centralized state] have so well prepared the way for totalitarianism.” They have done this, Hayek asserted, by “depriving us of [economic] choice, in order to give us what fits best into the plan and at a time determined by the plan.”

If in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again. The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.

History shows that too much Plato brings a rigid dogmatism and an elitist arrogance—which, as Karl Popper pointed out and as the world saw in the age of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, easily slides into totalitarianism.‡ The twentieth-century successors to Aristotle, the voices of enlightened liberal Europe, forgot how to defend themselves and allowed the totalitarians, with their passionate intensity and contempt for debate, to goose-step into power. The catastrophes of the twentieth century arose not because men argued too much but because they gave up arguing at all. Such are the perils of too much Plato. Too much Aristotle, on the other hand, ends in the narrow-minded sterility that dominated the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in which everything is reduced to rote formulae and habit and individual creativity is stamped out. A complacent behaviorist calculus begins to govern social and political relationships; fellow human beings become abstract unknowable ciphers to be manipulated at will.