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

by Arthur Herman

“It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly.”

“The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven,” he once quipped, “not how the heavens go.”

he believed “it is not possible that sensible experience is contrary to truth.”

Through his dark reading of Aristotle, Machiavelli had left behind a dilemma and a paradox.

Self-governing societies seemed doomed to be free but unstable. Because they existed in time, and were therefore subject to the vicissitudes of change and to men’s passions, they would inevitably hit a wall.† Like ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, they were doomed to fall into the hands of a despot in order to save society from mob rule. Freedom, in short, must eventually lead to unfreedom.

In Book V, Aristotle noted that some laws are common to all people, whether Persians and Greeks, Egyptians or Babylonians. All agree that murder and theft are wrong; all agree that our word is our bond and that contracts must be kept. The origin of these universal rules for conduct and justice can’t be written law, since all written law is based on them. So where did they come from? They come from our observation of nature, Aristotle said, and the experience of seeing what’s fair and what’s unfair in actual situations. From that experience, human beings extract a standard of justice that “has the same validity everywhere and does not depend on acceptance” by a particular people or government—but which is upheld by all of them and everywhere men institute fair and just laws.25

In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, life ends up being “nasty, brutish, and short.”

To correct this, right reason dictates a solution. To avoid killing one another off, men make an agreement. They trade in their natural rights in exchange for civil rights, which are now recognized and protected by the community and those who wield authority in its name.

The problem was that many natural law theorists made breaking the contract too easy. It wasn’t necessary for the ruler to threaten people’s lives or seize their property; just being of the wrong religion, or not sufficiently committed to the right one, was enough.

All these liberties or rights are protected, not hindered, by the original social contract. Proper government is not a restraint on our natural liberty, as Hobbes and others thought. It is a net increase, since it provides a framework of security in which we can enjoy our civil liberties in ways not possible in the state of nature. It “is the one great reason of men putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature.”

With it, however, come certain duties. One is the duty to use our reason as God’s gift; another is to protect our liberty and the liberty of others. The most important, however, is the duty of the sovereign to respect that liberty: and when he doesn’t, when “he that in a State of Society would take away the Freedom that belongs to those of that Society,” and pretends to be our master rather than our servant, then it is he, not us, who is the real rebel against society.37

Locke’s conclusion was startling, not to say world shattering. A monarch like Louis XIV, or any of his would-be imitators, in effect is at war with his subjects.§ When that happens, Locke asserted, then lawful government is at an end. We are all thrown back into the original state of nature. “Where the government is dissolved,” Locke explained, “the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative” body to act in their name.38 The social contract starts over from scratch. Government by popular consent is not just a good idea, as it was for Aristotle and Ockham. For Locke, it is an inescapable law of nature. It is what separates a society of free men from a society of slaves.

To others like his late friend Algernon Sidney, that “legislative body” representing the people was England’s Parliament, and always had been.39 To Locke, it really didn’t matter. The issue was not historical precedent, but natural right. The real power was power invested in the people, now and forever. It could...

Locke’s belief that a government of the people, by the people, and even as for the people is a matter of natural law and right would take root across the Atlantic in the fertile soil of the New World.

The Locke who inspired the eighteenth century was the philosopher who wired Aristotle’s most important insight, that all knowledge comes through experience, into the modern Western mind.

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written in 1690 after the Glorious Revolution, decisively moved the Enlightenment in Aristotle’s direction.* This was Aristotle the father of empirical science, the advocate of rational argument reinforced by the evidence of the senses. It was Aristotle shorn of substances, essences, categories, and final causes and selectively edited.2 Apart from three or four texts—and only certain key passages of those—the rest of his work was left to gather dust.

“Reasonable” is the operative word for Locke. We can never be completely certain that our idea of reality, and how things really are, exactly fit. All we know is that our perceptions lead us to think so because of their “conformity with our own experience, or the testimony of others’ experience.”

He was content to assume that our mind’s picture of the world represents that world, because he knew that the assumption works. When I try to lift a 250-pound boulder with a fork instead of a forklift, I soon discover whether my ideas conform to reality or not. I’m free to doubt whether the cow I see is really there. When she gives me a quart of milk, however, my doubts are over—or should be.

In other words, we know we can trust our ideas when they bear practical fruit. Locke puts us firmly in the real world, just as Aristotle did.

“What is that which moves desire?” Locke wrote. “I answer, happiness, and that alone.”17 “The pursuit of happiness” became not just an American but the main Enlightenment enterprise for nearly one hundred years after Locke’s death.

As Adam Smith pointed out in his Wealth of Nations, “the experience of all agents and nations … [is] that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.”

The reason is “the slave consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible,” while the free worker has a self-interested stake in making it more productive, or any other trade he is engaged in, even at the most menial level—and production was at the heart and soul of the new capitalist order.21

Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson was the first Western philosopher to be an outspoken opponent of slavery, declaring, “Nothing can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all rights.”

Since Locke had been Shaftesbury’s personal tutor, we can even put the politeness issue in Locke’s terms. When we do a business deal in Rio de Janeiro or Calcutta, read a newspaper detailing market trends in Frankfurt or St. Petersburg, window-shop on Oxford Street or on the rue St.-Honoré, share a table with a stranger at a coffeehouse, or split a cab with a traveler on the way to the airport, we are steadily adding to our stock of experience of the world, which in turn gives us a better idea of how the world works and what our own priorities need to be. This forces us to be more practical and pragmatic. We grow more concerned with producing a beneficial result than standing on outdated or dogmatic principles.

Aristotle’s exact words) “since he takes few things seriously, he is not excitable.” He accepts good and bad fortune as it comes, “because he estimates himself at his true worth.”

the Quakers had once been wild religious fanatics (hence the name, from their convulsions when in the grip of the Holy Spirit),

Voltaire was well aware of Shaftesbury’s dictum that “all politeness is owing to liberty.”

The Golden Rule of morality as Aristotle originally formulated it in his Ethics, that “we should behave toward our friends as we would wish them to behave toward us,”

This was the power of self-interest. Hume was careful to distinguish it from mere selfishness. Self-interest was instead the passionate desire to improve our material circumstances that beats in every human heart and fills every human mind, even in the most barbarous and primitive societies. As Kames put it, “Men thirst after opulence.” That thirst, Hume realized, was the driving engine of social and economic change.

In the early stages of society’s evolution, people can’t afford the untrammeled operations of that passion. The needs of the individual must yield to the imperatives of the group, such as the need to share the spoils of the hunt or the meager bounty of the harvest. In commercial society, however, self-interest can find a range of constructive outlets. Instead of enriching ourselves by robbing our neighbors at swordpoint, we open a store or bank. Instead of seeing the stranger from a foreign land as a potential enemy, we see him as a potential customer. Instead of representing a threat to the safety of the group, self-interest becomes a force for constructive cooperation with others, in order to get the things we want and achieve the results we dream of.

Today we tend to think of Wealth of Nations as a work on economics. It is in fact a treatise on the history of civil society and on the driving principles that give commercial society its dynamism and affluence.

People usually identify that driving engine as the division of labor. In truth, the division itself springs from Hume’s power of self-interest, the desire of some (but not everyone) to so dramatically improve their lives materially that they focus entirely on that skill or trade that brings the greatest return. This in turn generates a surplus so abundant, so far in excess of that possible in other previous stages of society, that these entrepreneurs enrich not only themselves, but the rest of society—even the politicians and intellectuals who scorn the business class on whom their own prosperity ultimately rests.

Free markets free men’s minds, their bodies (Smith delighted in pointing out that slavery was not only unjust but less profitable than free labor), and their individual spirits, even as they fill their pocketbooks with the fruits of natural liberty unleashed.

“I enter with secret horror this vast desert of the social world.”

Had the growth of polite society, the fruit of commerce and progress, made men and women more moral, as leading Enlightenment voices were claiming, or not? Just as suddenly, Rousseau had the answer. No, it hasn’t made human beings better, it has actually made them worse.

Far from making people love virtue, commercial society had filled their heads with a love of luxury and vice.

Far from making them respect and help their neighbors, it had unleashed an ugly selfishness—includ...

And instead of drawing people together, it had driven them apart, producing “only a frightful solitude” in which each person was a stranger to every...

Rousseau rushed home. He feverishly composed an essay on the subject, which he later published as A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences.

Thanks to progress, it read, “a vile and deceiving uniformity reigns in our morals, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold: constantly politeness demands, propriety commands; constantly one follows custom, never one’s own genius.”

Economic and social improvement may have brought with them luxury and ease, but also “a train of vices: no more sincere friendships; no more re...

Socrates, “the wisest man in Athens,” had also realized that the sophisticates of his home city were ignorant of the real human virtues.

This was no coincidence. Even as “the conveniences of life increase,” his Discourse read, “the arts improve, and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, the military virtues vanish.” Indeed, “the study of the sciences is much more apt to soften and effeminate men’s courage than to strengthen and animate it.”

Rousseau had finally won the fame he craved: ironically, by savaging the character of the very society that now wholeheartedly embraced him. Some scoffed at him as the “new Diogenes”; and indeed like Diogenes, Rousseau discovered that the more he abused people, the more they sought his company.

Unlike Shaftesbury or Adam Smith or even Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau comes to the intellectual table as the student of no one. He was almost entirely self-taught.

the main thrust of his Platonic critique of his age boils down to two simple propositions.

The first is that capitalism brings out the worst, not the best, in us.

The belief that commerce and the pursuit of money corrupts good morals permeated Plato’s La...

Contrary to Locke, Rousseau believed that property was not a natural right, but a cruel afterthought.

Man is everywhere born free, as Rousseau puts it in his most famous phrase, and is everywhere in chains.