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

by Arthur Herman

Aristotle deserves the title of father of medicine as least as much as Hippocrates does.

Diogenes’s goal, he said, was “to deface the coinage,” meaning strip away the false conventions on which society was built and expose the raw reality underneath.14 He is not only the first homeless philosopher, but the first deconstructionist. Before he died in 323 BCE—the same year as Alexander, an irony he would have appreciated—Diogenes had given Cynicism a respectable position in the field of literature as well as philosophy. His mordant wit inspired the major creators of Greek satire and parody and founded a Western comedic tradition that has lasted until today.

Early Academicians, for example, made enormous contributions to the field of astronomy. Plato’s friend Eudoxus devised a working model for showing the movement of the planets and the heavens. Heraclides, another Plato student, may have been the first person to propose that the earth rotated on its axis. He also used calculations of the orbits of Venus and Mars to show that they must be revolving not around the earth, but around the sun—literally an earthshaking hypothesis.‖

It is under Strato that the heirs of Aristotle took the first tentative steps toward the idea of pure science, that an investigator must be free to pursue his work regardless of where it leads or what inconvenient truths it discovers—or even what comfortable worldviews it upsets, including Aristotle’s own.

a key Aristotelian principle: that the starting point of all true knowledge is not (contrary to Plato) abstract reasoning, but the collection and comparison of individual specimens, whether they be plants and shellfish or books and manuscripts.2

The limitations of Aristotle’s teachings were becoming apparent just decades after his death. It was only after scientists began rigorously applying his methods instead of his doctrines that astronomy and physics and ultimately biology would begin to turn themselves around.

The other Platonic figure was Eratosthenes the geographer, a sometime Academy student who came to Alexandria and became director of the Great Library around 267. His nickname in the ancient world was Pentathlos, the all-around scholar-athlete. Indeed, his writings show an impressively wide range of interests, from geometry, astronomy, and mathematics (including a work on the philosophy of mathematics that he called, strikingly, the Platonicus) to history, metaphysics, and poetry. Using his observations of the different shadows cast by sundials along the same meridian and a little number crunching, Eratosthenes made a calculation of the earth’s diameter that was amazingly accurate: 7,850 miles, only about 60 off the actual mark.

In any event, Eratosthenes took Pytheas’s book and did some quick calculations based on his own estimate of the earth’s diameter. He concluded that if the Indian Ocean was not a landlocked sea, as most Greeks supposed, but opened up onto a still larger ocean extending to the shores of the Pillars of Hercules, as Pytheas’s voyage indicated, then it might be possible for a sailor to sail west from Spain to India, although Eratosthenes calculated it would take at least thirteen thousand miles.§ Furthermore, he speculated, perhaps there was even another “inhabited world” (oikoumenē) to be found between Spain and India, one that covered at least part of the western hemisphere of the globe—a hemisphere that mathematics proved had to exist since the earth was round, but which was still entirely unknown.18 His Aristotelian colleagues scoffed. How could one predicate the existence of something no one had ever seen, especially an inhabited landmass; and when everyone knew the Indian Ocean ended at the western shores of India? So Eratosthenes’s stunning thesis of a possible New World located between Europe and Asia never caught on, even after the Romans discovered there was indeed an ocean on the far side of India. His idea of a western continent faded from the science books. It would take Columbus’s accidental discovery in 1492 to finally prove that the Aristotelians at Alexandria had been wrong and Eratosthenes right all along.

He is the founder of Western technology as an intellectual discipline—one might even say as a passion. He was Archimedes of Syracuse.

It was probably in Alexandria that Archimedes came up with the invention that bore his name throughout the ancient world: the Archimedes water screw. Called “the snail” because of its shape, the screw enabled farmers to move water over long distances and even uphill by means of its continuous twisting motion. The ancient historian Diodorus asserts that Archimedes’s invention enabled the Ptolemies to irrigate most of the Nile Delta.25 It has remained in use in the poorer parts of rural Egypt until today.

What ultimately fascinates us most about the history of science is its Platonic side—the dramatic process of discovery and intuition, when what is true is at once clear and vice versa; those moments of insight that Socrates and Plato would recognize as seeing with the inner eye. What fascinates us most interested the scientist of the Alexandrian age least.

Instead, all the emphasis in Greek science is on laying out new mathematical or scientific proofs, including using visual diagrams, so logically and so beyond contradiction that there could be no possibility of dissent.

And as his research continued in Syracuse, Archimedes made sure word of what he was doing got back to friends in Alexandria. Among his correspondents was a former Croton pupil named Dositheusa to whom Archimedes would send one major treatise after another that would revolutionize mathematics. There was Quadrature of the Parabola, then two books on Sphere and Cylinder, one on Spiral Lines, and finally a treatise on Conoids and Spheroids.

Taken together, they laid the future cornerstone of what comes to be called calculus, or the mathematics of infinity (Archimedes was the first mathematician to use the concept of infinity in his work). Without it, modern math and science as we know it would not exist.

Archimedes’s work was also establishing in passing another scientific landmark for the future. If you can’t measure something, then it probably doesn’t exist.

The study of history is … the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of Fortune. —Polybius (200–118 BCE)

Aristotle’s Politics classified all governments as rule by either the One (monarchy), the Few (aristocracy), or the Many (democracy). Each had its characteristic problems, Aristotle said, and none was destined to prosper forever. However, a “mixed constitution” that included elements of all three would hold up best over time.9

Polybius went back to the Republic, where in Books VIII and IX Plato gives us his most trenchant analysis of politics as it actually works, as opposed to the utopian ideal he outlined earlier in the work. Socrates warns his listeners that every political system that fails to live up to those ideal principles must eventually be overtaken by an inevitable cycle of decay and collapse. It is a chilling story, made more chilling by the sober, matter-of-fact way Socrates tells it. For example, Socrates explains that the dissolute freedom of democracies like that of Athens, “which treats all men as equals whether they are equal or not,” must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule. He implicitly dismisses Aristotle’s notion that a system based on the idea that those who rule are ruled in turn, if only by the rule of law, will ever work in practice. Instead, democratic man “lives from day to day, indulging in the pleasures of the moment” and refusing to accept any order or restraint, including the restraint of law. The chaos that results will lead inevitably to one-man rule, he says, in order to restore calm.12

At first, one-man rule will be accepted and even invested with the legal trappings of kingship. However, “the man who tastes a single piece of human flesh,” Socrates says, “is fated to become a wolf.” As the ruler’s appetite for power grows, kingship, too, “degenerates into its corrupt but associated form, by which I mean tyranny” (this is Polybius, not Plato, writing). Tyranny triggers resentment, revolution, and violent overthrow again. Out of the rubble of the rule of One emerges the rule of those who have led the revolt against it, namely a jealous and self-interested aristocracy.

Yet this, too, eventually decays into something corrupt and ugly, namely the naked rule of the rich, which breeds a bitter wave of resentment among the underprivileged masses. According to Plato, society now splits “into two factions, the rich and the poor, who live in the same place [but] are always plotting against each other.”13 When this class struggle reaches its climax, the po...

And so it goes, at least according to Plato. As he explains it, the same dreary process repeats itself over and over, an endless cycle (in Greek, the term is anakuklosis) of political birth, decay, revolution, and renewal without end or purpose. This is the dismal cycle, the Republic explains, that all those condemned to live in the cave are fat...

A mixed constitution required every group in society pulling its appropriate weight. Allowing any one element—the monarchical, the democratic, or the aristocratic—to gain undue influence over the other parts became a death knell of doom, and the end of any self-governing republic.

Grit your teeth and bear it. Keep your temper. Remain indifferent to pain and accept your fate, whatever it may be. These are hallmarks of the Stoic outlook,

And his chief moral tenet certainly echoes Aristotle’s: “Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.”

By Cicero’s reckoning, government must respect our personal sphere of responsibilities and connections, including our property, in order to win our respect and loyalty. Indeed, Cicero straightforwardly states that the reason men create states and cities is to protect private property—a momentous step beyond Aristotle’s own views and toward those of John Locke fifteen centuries later.

As he made clear in his Gorgias, Plato had learned to hate all orators, just as he hated all theater and all representational art. Oratory, Plato says, has the same relation to justice as cosmetology does to bodybuilding: “a mischievous, swindling, base, servile trade which creates an illusion by the use of … makeup and depilation and costume, and makes people assume a borrowed beauty to the neglect of the beauty that is the result of training and discipline.”27 And for the same reason: both politics and makeup appeal to the emotions instead of reason.

“Advice is judged by results, not intentions.”

As Cicero pointed out, Rome’s rot was moral and self-inflicted, and it started at the top.

Brutus and the other Liberators, as they dramatically called themselves, had no plans or strategy once Caesar was dead.

This is the significant error in many efforts. Once the deed is done and the objective is completed, if there is no plan for what to do afterward, doom is almost certain.

The historian Tacitus made his reputation, then and later, by tracing how the “trickle down” of corruption at the top by Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula triggered a decay of private morals and a blank passivity among Rome’s leading families in the face of tyranny.

Tacitus sneered, “they call it civilization when in fact it is only slavery.”

Tacitus is the first romantic anthropologist. His sentiments will reappear in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the “noble savage,” among other places. But its roots are to be found once again in Plato and his Myth of Atlantis: the idea that at some primeval stage of humanity, long before the cycle of man’s degeneration began, men knew the truth clear and pure and obeyed the laws of God.

“To the perceptive eye,” Plato wrote in the Timaeus, “the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgement of true happiness is defective they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune.”

The Stoics should have done better. They had understood that men and women had to live in the world, and came equipped, as Aristotle would have pointed out, with the moral and mental tools to deal with that fact. Man’s reason gives him the power to shape nature according to

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

said, a worse person, because he had been among his fellow men. Roman society itself, he concluded, was nothing more than a collection of wild beasts.16 The characters in Seneca’s plays, which resemble The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in their taste for blood and horror, suffer unspeakable torments. However, the characters learn to bear their suffering with what Seneca called fortitudo and constantia, or constancy. They prefer to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageo...

Seneca’s solution to life’s inevitable cruelties was to withdraw. It was an increasingly attractive reaction in the later imperial age. The wise man must shun unnecessary human contact and connections, Seneca said. He must live within, and for, himself. He must cultivate the virtue of apatheia, literally an indifference to the fate of others—apathy even, in the last moment, to...

Remain indifferent to pain and accept your fate. Consider yourself already dead, and live out the rest of your life according to nature.

What are Alexander and Pompey and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius asks, compared with Socrates and Diogenes and Heraclitus—the man who said that nothing in the world is permanent? “This is the chief thing: be not perturbed, for all things are according to the nature of the Universal; and in a little time you will be nobody and nowhere.…” So leave this life satisfied, because He who releases you is also satisfied.

Strange words to come from a man who was ruler of the known world. Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, and even Pythagoras appear several times in the Meditations. Aristotle, never. Aristotle’s outlook was precisely the one Marcus Aurelius wanted to warn against: the idea that man is born to take charge of his existence and solve problems in a practical way, by building a better house or a more efficient machine; to make a better empire and a better life. Man’s impulse toward energeia, considered action toward a desired end, was precisely the way of life the Meditations rejected.

His name was Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

That sounds a great deal like Plato, and Plato was always the central figure in Plotinus’s cosmic vision. But Plotinus had also read his Aristotle, and by putting the two together in a thoroughly original way, he transcended the traditional limits of ancient thought. It was a major breakthrough. From the last days of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Plotinus’s “Neoplatonism” offered a new dimension for the European intellect to explore, and a new challenge: how to make the rational soul one with the Absolute.

Since Socrates, thinkers had been obsessed with the question “What is the good life?” Plotinus decided it was time to revert to the earlier question, “What is reality?” What he discovered is that once we get the right answer to that question, it also provides the key to the other one. In other words, no truly virtuous or happy life is possible until we realize that everything, including ourselves, has its rightful place in a single spiritual realm: the Absolute One, Goodness or Being in Itself.

This may sound like Plato, but then Plotinus veers in a very different direction. Plato had seen reality as dual, with the spiritual and the material as totally separate and distinct realms. Plotinus wanted to treat them as a single totality, embracing Being in Itself and the smallest and most insignificant part of creation and everything else in between.

Plotinus taught that the material world is not distinct from the spiritual. The cave still reflects the distant light of truth, no matter how dimly.

Instead, all things exist in a carefully ordered sequence, a sequence not only of time but of value, running from the purest and most spiritual—the One and its animating principle, Nous, or Being in Itself—down to the basest and most material, just as the steps of the ziggurat lead from one to the next.

So far so good, if you are an orthodox follower of Aristotle. But Plotinus now put this together with Plato’s picture of God the Demiurge from the Timaeus, the Supreme Creator who crafts the universe out of the image of His own perfection, so that each element reflects the perfection of the whole. All of a sudden, Plotinus gave his generation a whole new luminous way of seeing the world and humanity’s place in it. To understand its impact, we need to go back on our first Aristotelian walk through the woods but this time see it through Plotinus’s eyes. We see the same trees and shrubs and stones in the path and the clouds overhead, we hear the same creatures scurrying in the leaves and insects buzzing around our head, and we feel the same sun on our face and the same breeze blowing through our hair. But now we see that everything expresses, to an exact lesser or greater degree, the animating life-giving spirit of mind and Being, which connects everything to everything else. From God Himself in the heavens and the sun in the sky, to me and Rover the chocolate Lab with his humanlike alertness and curiosity, the watchful deer in the shadows, the chipmunks and squirrels, the bees and other insects, and then the trees and other flora, down to the dirt and dead leaves: All form an ordered hierarchy of Being.

When the eighteenth-century poet William Blake spoke of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, he was speaking the language of Plotinus and Neoplatonism.

“All things follow in continuous succession,” Plotinus told his disciples, “from the Supreme God to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break.” At the top is the One and the Good, beyond knowledge and description. “As the One it is the first cause, and as the Good the last end, of all that is.”25 As part of its own perfection, the One produces Nous, or Being in Itself, which contains all the perfect intelligible forms necessary for creation. Nous in turn gives birth to the World Soul, just as in Plato’s Timaeus: it is both the generator and the container of the rest of creation, the means by which life flows out into the rest of existence, including the human soul, our direct point of contact with the source of all goodness and perfection. The One’s spiritual giving does not stop there. It flows down uninterrupted through the animals and plants, down to the smallest speck of dust and least significant bits of matter, all of which still reflect to some infinitesimal degree the perfection of the whole. From one end to the other of the hierarchy, everything participates in a constant diminishing series of divine emanations. These emanations, and the connections they forge, form what comes to be called the Great Chain of Being. Any time a thinker of the Middle Ages or Renaissance talks about “a scale of being” or “the ladder of perfection,” he is borrowing from Plotinus.26 And just as all things spiritual and material form rungs along the ladder, s...