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

by Arthur Herman

Why? Because of the invention ...

“How many crimes, wars, murders,” Rousseau complained, “how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared” if the ...

Primitive and pastoral nomadic man, even man in the state of nature (sometimes misleadingly called Rousseau’s “noble savage”), turns out to be far happier than his civilized counterpart.

Did Rousseau believe his idyllic picture of primitive man had any basis in reality? Certainly he could, and did, recite pages of research about tribal societies in America and Africa to bolster his point. But in the final analysis Rousseau wanted to use his noble savage, whose “ignorance of vice prevents him from doing evil,” to act as a kind of Platonic ideal: a model of human perfection who sets the shortcomings of modern man in sharp relief.

In Rousseau’s world, natural man is strong, virile, and altruistic, in addition to being fully in touch with his own feelings. Civilized man turns out to be weak, effeminate, greedy, and self-interested to the point of cold cunning.

If natural man is Tarzan mixed with Dances with Wolves, civilized man is Ebenezer Scrooge, Simon Legree, and Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko rolled into one (indeed, Charles Dickens’s moral outlook as w...

The Scottish Enlightenment, of course, made this passion for self-interest, whatever its faults, the driving eng...

For Rousseau, by contrast, it is the engine of...

It makes a wasteland of his primeval G...

Like the modern green activist, Rousseau saw the destruction of the environment and the pursuit o...

Thanks to man’s greed, “vast forests were transformed into pleasant fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men,” and slavery an...

“It is [the invention of] iron and wheat,” Rousseau wrote, “which first civilized men and ruined the human race” (he had already lambasted the invention of the printing press in his first Discourse) and enabled “a few ambitious men” to subject the rest of the human race “to labor, servitude, and misery.”14 Working for a living becomes man’s greatest curse,...

Because in Rousseau’s world just as in Plato’s, the less we have, including material possessions and new technology, the healthier, stronger, and more moral we are. And the less we think about our own selfish needs and wants, and the more we think about the needs of others an...

That led to Rousseau’s second insight. If men are to be happy, love of self must be replaced by the love of community. Here he came down firmly on the side of ancient versus modern liberty and on the side of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who assume the proportions of a race of superheroes in his mind.15 “What prevents us from being the kind of men they were?” he asked. “The passions of self interest,” which, “along with an indifference to the welfare of others,” have been set loose by a corrupt modern society. Replace them with th...

Still, critics like Voltaire had a point. Even if Rousseau was right and men really were stronger and happier in earlier times and under more primitive conditions, did he truly think we could turn back the clock? Yes, we can, Rousseau affirmed, thanks to the most powerful tool modern ...

The Enlightenment rested its entire worldview on Locke’s updating of Abelard’s dictum (ultimately derived from Aristotle) that we must understand in order to believe.

Rousseau told eighteenth-century Europe that it had its priorities backward. It is not our reason or our understanding that allows us to change the world, but our passions, our emotional commitment to an idea or cause.

Building for the future therefore must be about cultivating the passions and the feelings, not the mind, so that we can embrace the lif...

The orthodox Platonist, after all, is bound to believe that the source of all virtue is knowledge and reason.

Rousseau, by contrast, saw reason and virtue as locked in permanent conflict.

If we are to be free and pure in heart, our reason will have to take the backseat: “The mind is a Sophist who leads virtue to the scaffold.”21 It is that “inner voice,” which for Rousseau mean...

Strength through joy; work makes you free. It is Rousseau who first points the way toward those chilling formulations.

Today we are only too aware of where this story ends. But it is important to realize that those who read him in the three decades before the French Revolution did not. They saw only a refreshing new political vision, a way to think about man’s progress apart from the materialistic values of commercial society—in short, a vision of humanity freed from the ever-expanding “getting and spending” that the neo-Aristotelians of the Enlightenment had seemed to forecast for Europe’s future.

Indeed, the admiration for Rousseau started at the top of the intellectual pyramid. Immanuel Kant was the most respected philosopher in Germany. Yet in forty years, Kant interrupted his daily postluncheon walk only once, when his copy of Rousseau’s Émile arrived. His auste...

“What Kant prized in Rousseau,” writes historian Ernst Cassirer, “was the fact that he had distinguished more clearly than others between the mask that man wears [in commercial society] and his actual visage.”26 Kant, of course, realized that Rousseau’s picture of the noble savage was an ideal construct: “This wish for a return to an age of simplic...

But Kant did agree with Rousseau that the growth of civilization adds nothing to man’s moral makeup; instead, it usually ends up becoming a distraction from our moral duty. So the task ahead lies in creating institutions that will reflect our true moral nature, the voice of conscience that recognizes certain moral actions as an urgent duty without room for reflection or compromise.

Kant termed that voice the categorical imperative.

It is really a more sophisticated version of Rousseau’s “inner voice,” which ultimately answers the call of the General Will.28 Kant’s goal, however, was far grander and more utopian. He did not want to throw out enlightenment or commercial society or progress; instead, they should be fused together with our higher moral nature to create a brand-new stage of civil society, that of a single cosmopolitan culture and a single world government. Kant summed up the goal of this world government in the title of his tract Perpetual Peace, published in 1795; in which no nation may breach the peace of another and whose guaran...

Unfortunately, until then, Kant wrote, “human nature must suffer the cruelest hardships under the guise of external well-being.” No wonder Rousseau preferred man’s savage state, Kant observed, so long as this last stage to which the human race must climb is not attained.30 Over Kant’s reading of Rousseau flutters the flag of the United Nations, but also the first pages of Georg Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy, not to mention Marx’s Das Kapital. With the fusion of Kant and Rousseau, the European mind was on the brink of a new way of visualizing the direction and purpose of civil society: toward the abolition of the self-interested individual, instead of his ultimate triumph.

Yet they read Rousseau in droves, especially his blockbuster novel published in 1761, The New Heloise (La Nouvelle Héloïse). As its title implies, it is a modern retelling of the story of Abelard and Héloïse, involving the passionate love of a tutor for his underage female student in defiance of all social convention. Page follows page of sighing, longing prose and weepy outbursts of frustration interspersed with complaints about being misunderstood by adults and society. The New Heloise is like an extended episode of Gossip Girl. It is in fact the direct ancestor of the Harlequin romance, and spawned a host of imitators. More than any single work, The New Heloise made “I feel, therefore I am” the unspoken motto of adolescence, right down to today.

That seems a strange achievement for a man who claimed to worship the stoic warriors of ancient Sparta and Rome. However, as he disclosed in his autobiography, The Confessions, Rousseau’s secret was to reveal at length how unhappy everyone is under the stressful conditions of modern society because they aren’t allowed to get in touch with their true “inner voice.” Then as now, this discovery guaranteed a huge teen readership.

Don’t accept the world for the corrupt, wicked, exploitative society that it is.

David Hume had once said that either a nation must destroy its debt, or the debt would destroy the nation.

The Rolands’ friend Maximilien Robespierre believed he was such a man. For a time he convinced others as well (Jacques-Louis David served as his de facto minister of propaganda). Robespierre’s goal was to banish tyranny and injustice not just from France, but from the planet. There was no room for compromise or second thoughts. In his grandiose vision, any resistance to the revolutionary regime sprang not from reasonable doubts about whether men could be made good by legislation alone, but from resistance to the idea of virtue itself.

It’s worth remembering that Platonism lends itself to conspiracy theories.‖ The belief that appearances deceive easily grows into the conviction that they deceive for a reason: that hidden manipulators want to keep us in the cave and want, literally, to keep us in the dark. Rousseau himself suffered from a lifelong fear that enemies were constantly working to undercut his success—the same people who were working to keep the world corrupt and unjust. Robespierre believed the same thing.

When the National Assembly abolished the monarchy in 1792 and the rest of Europe turned to put Louis XVI back on his throne, Robespierre’s utopian hopes became fused with Rousseau’s paran...

Not being for the revolution was as evil as being against it. “You must punish not merely the traitors,” Robespierre’s ally Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (another Rousseau devotee) proclaimed, “but even those who are merely indifferent,” since that indifference sprang from a love of self that was the source of all evil—and doom for any radical transformation of modern society.

As the guillotine claimed its victims, increasingly whatever was not forbidden was made compulsory. Wage and price controls were imposed; universal conscription sent tens of thousands of unwilling Frenchmen into the army to fight the monarchies of Europe. Churches were closed and Christianity banned, along with the traditional calendar, saints’ days, and seven-day week. Saint-Just spoke of taking children away from their parents at age five and training them, like ancient Spartans, to become workers or soldiers. For the first time in European history, the word communisme floated in the air.47

Robespierre is the first true modern dictator: the man who rules not as the living image of God, as the kings of old had, but as the living image of the will of the people. His virtue becomes unassailable, since it is identical with that General Will; just as he can have no flaws—Robespierre’s nickname was “the Incorruptible”—so can he have no opponents or rivals. And among Robespierre’s earliest victims were his fellow Rousseauians Monsieur and Madame Roland.

Madame Roland’s final plea, “O liberty! O liberty! what crimes have been committed in your name,” marked her belated realization that the utopian path to man’s freedom had opened the door to its opposite.

This was why, three years before, on the other side of the English Channel, the statesman Edmund Burke had dubbed Rousseau “the insane Socrates” of the French Revolution. Even before the Reign of Terror, Burke saw in revolutionary France a tragic playing out of the Platonist temptation to perfect society through reason alone while ignoring human nature as Aristotle and the Enlightenment had defined it, in order to make us into something better.

“In the groves of their Academy,” Burke wrote, “at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”

the French Revolution proved best at devouring its own children.

what painter J.M.W. Turner called “the fallacies of hope,”

The Romantic, a term that the Enlightenment had associated with the picturesque and/or merely foolish

Man’s senses, which Plato treated as the source of error and Locke the source of useful knowledge, were transformed by Romantic artists and poets into the source of divine truth.

Sitting and listening to the rhythmic flux and reflux of the waves outside his window, he found he became completely at one with nature. As he described it later, all pain from the past and fears for the future faded away, leaving nothing except an intense awareness of nature’s permanence and of Being in Itself. “I realized,” he wrote in his description of the experience in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “that our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” In the solitude of nature, “my soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity.”10 At the time it was a revolutionary, even subversive, concept—more subversive than his attack on capitalism or his version of the social contract. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had built their understanding of human identity on the premise that man was, to paraphrase Aristotle, a social animal.11 We instinctively hate being alone and crave interaction with others, they taught. Locke’s theory of knowledge had the same thrust. Verifying the truth of our own ideas requires constantly comparing them with the experience and judgment of others. And the best place to get this kind of knowledge through interaction, said Montesquieu, Hume, and others, was in commercial society. It was when you allowed people to go off on their own, to become isolated and brood over their own thoughts—the solitary hermit in his cave, the monk in his cell, or (one could add) Rousseau ...

Rousseau reversed the Enlightenment formula. Solitary man is best. Mingling with others brings out our competitive urges and our false self-regard, which (as the Discourse on Inequality explained) inspires all the corruptions of commercial society. For Rousseau, the final cure had to come through the social contract and submitting to the General Will. Until then, however, nature in all its silent vastness would do.

The Renaissance Neoplatonists deeply admired Longinus and swept him up in their belief that art had the power to convey divine truth. With a single decisive stroke, Burke detached Longinus’s sublime from the standard classical ideal of beauty. The real source of our experience of the sublime, the youthful Burke argued, was our most intense feelings; and of these the most important were fear of pain and danger, especially from a nature beyond human scale and beyond man’s control.

“Hope, fallacious hope,” Turner wrote, “where is thy market now?”