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

by Arthur Herman

Meanwhile, the habits of wealth and luxury undermine the important virtues necessary to sustain free institutions, including honor and service in arms—even the passion for freedom itself. Men become soft and effeminate,

like the bakers and tinkers of Machiavelli’s failed militia.38

People prefer the comfortable life to the stern sacrifices of...

New legislation on Plato’s model won’t help, either: “The modification of the laws did not suffice to keep men good.” On the contrary, Machiavelli declared, “the new laws are ineffectual, because the [socie...

Once a free people have reached this point, Machiavelli concluded, there is no hope left.

Their empire may expand, as Rome’s did under the emperors. The wealth can continue to pour in. The arts may flourish; the political factionalism makes for dramatic entertainment, while people ignore the underlying rot. But such a society is doomed, unless a major crisis forces a change in its thinking.

“Hence it is necessary to resort to extraordinary methods, such as the use of force and the appeal to arms, to become a prince in the state so that one can dispose of it as one thinks fit” and thus save it from extinction.40 This is where The Prince comes in. He is the instrument of last resort, the man who pulls a corrupt society out of its self-destructive rut and puts it back on the road to political health. However, he is no Platonic soul doctor; ...

“Very rarely will there be found a good man ready to use bad methods in order to make himself prince,” Machiavelli wrote. There are also plenty of bad men who are willing to take power ...

Nonetheless, history shows that some men are willing to do evil in order to accomplish good. They are in fact history’s great heroes, like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and even Moses, who raised the Hebrews out of their slothful servitude, mercilessly crushed their enemies, and then led them into the Promised Land.

“Fortune, as it were, provided the matter but [these men] gave it its form,” Machiavellii wrote, echoing Aristotle; “without opportunity their prowess would have been extinguished and without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain.”42

The Prince explains that such a man must not let success go to his head, as it does to citizens in a free society. He has to constantly watch his back; he must not allow his followers to become too powerful on the one side or too resentful on the other. He must above all train his mind and body to stay focused on the st...

He must learn from the example of both the lion and the fox, Machiavelli wrote, since at times he will be forced to act lik...

Machiavelli understood “that such a ruler, especially a new ruler, will be forced to act treacherously, ruthlessly, or inhumanely, and disregard the precepts of religion” in order to maintain his power and thus save the State. He shouldn’t worry about a reputation for cruelty since that will discourage others from resisting his will:

“It is better to be feared than loved if one cannot be both.”

Yet such a man can still save the state, and preserve its liberty.

Machiavelli himself died in 1527,

But his point in The Prince was a more general one, which gets obscured if we treat the work as nothing more than a treatise on power politics. For Machiavelli had uncovered the final paradox of liberty on Aristotle’s model.

Aristotle’s Politics is built on the back of his Ethics: The good life presupposes the virtuous life. However, in order to survive, free societies sometimes have to violate the very values they profess to uphold. They have to wage war and kill innocents; they have to imprison enemies and sometimes torture them. In extreme situations, they have to susp...

To the just belongs i...

All the same, Machiavelli knew there was no guarantee that people will put up with the measures that are mean...

At the battle of Prato, the Florentines preferred to run away and lose their liberty r...

The masses can suddenly turn on t...

Most rulers prefer not to run that risk. Instead, they will maintain the status quo, the false façade of normal politics, just as the Medici did in order to dupe the public into believi...

Machiavelli concluded that “it is difficult, or rather impossible, either to maintain a republican form of government in states which have become corrupt or to create such a form afresh.” Instead, the old vitality simply ebbs away.

Final disaster comes not from outside, but from within.

Freedom is doomed to fail. This was the final dismal conclusion Machiavelli reached by the time he finished The Prince.

If men wanted to be free and to realize their highest nature, they were going to have to look somewhere other than politics.

No one can know what other strange but powerful secrets might be buried in the most unlikely places, not by accident but by design.

Still, modern conspiracy theories are geared to reinforce our sense of helplessness in the face of dark, powerful forces.

Of all creatures natural or celestial, the human being has no fixed place in the Great Chain of Being. He alone is capable of occupying, according to his choice, any degree of life from the highest to the lowest.

an attitude to knowledge best summed up by the modern physicist Niels Bohr,

“We achieve clarity through breadth.”

For the Platonist, the Big Picture is always what counts. Our job is to figure out how all the small bits and fragments, even seeming opposites, act...

But the freedom is there, first revealed by love. Love wakens, rouses, puts wings to feather So that the soul will soar And rise to its maker.…

It was faith, and faith alone, the confident resolute belief that Jesus Christ was his Redeemer, that made the righteous “live” through salvation and that finally lifted the veil of sin from the human soul.

“The just shall live by faith.” In other words, no relic, no person, no priest, not even the pope himself, could absolve anyone from sin, because such forgiveness was beyond the power of any mortal creature. Only God could do that, and only those who believed in Him with all their hearts would receive that absolution. In fact, there was no other kind of righteousness except through God.

that the path to salvation lay inward as a form of personal enlightenment rather than (or at least not exclusively) in outward rites and rituals.

“The language of truth is always simple, says Seneca:

Like the Church itself, by 1500 Europe’s universities had become victims of their own success. They had become degree factories, and quality control suffered as a result.

Just as there were priests who didn’t know the Mass or drank or kept mistresses, so there were philosophy professors who invoked the name of Aristotle without having read a single one of his works, and theology professors who had never turned a page of the Summa or The City of God—or the letters of Saint Paul.

Now, thanks to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, a contempt for universities and their Aristotle-centered curriculum acquired intellectual chic. It has left its trace to this day, as when we talk about something being “trivial” (derived from trivium) or call someone a “dunce” (after the original “dunce,” John Duns Scotus).

Aristotle’s Ethics where he proposes that all moral action is about making the right choices, and choice is about intention: “Intention is the decisive factor in virtue and character”—a

On the other side, Aristotle’s teacher Plato argued that doing good versus evil was a matter of knowledge versus ignorance: in other words, the man who is ignorant of the good can no more choose good than one who is ignorant of algebra can solve a quadratic equation.

Boethius. His doubts about this denial of free will had led him to reassert Aristotle’s point that the choices we make as rational beings are the causes of our right actions.§ It was an attractive, not to say morally compelling, argument.

Human beings think they want freedom; what they really want is license.

Galileo’s publisher once wrote that a picture is worth a thousand precepts.

Galileo was furious. “Of all hatreds,” he wrote, “there is none greater than that of ignorance against knowledge.”

Galileo had shown, on the contrary, that the rate of descent of an object had nothing to do with its weight or what it was made of. Motion was a state, regardless of the object, and a uniform state for all objects.

Aristotle had been wrong. And if he was wrong on small issues like falling bodies, then it was possible he was wrong on the bigger ones as well, like the movement of the heavenly bodies.

Galileo soon saw it was easier to explain phenomena like tides if you assumed the earth was not stationary, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had taught, but actually in motion.