The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization
by Arthur Herman
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization:
John Locke said that the place to start the study of how men behave was Aristotle.3 With a handful of exceptions, the Enlightenment followed his advice.
One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle’s philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.
Thanks to Erasmus, the new trend of the 1500s was away from universities and toward an entirely revolutionary idea: homeschooling.
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.
To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality. Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless,” just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed out.
Still, the 1745 revolt left behind a sobering question for the Enlightenment to ponder. Why do some societies like England and France and cities like Edinburgh become polite and commercial, while so many others do not—even when they are right next door?
Aristotle, we must remember, was a doctor’s son. Although he was very young when his father died, his family were longtime members of the medical guild of the Asclepiades. Using one’s eyes and ears and sense of touch to diagnose ailments and complaints, and judge the course of a disease or its cure, was in a sense a family tradition. According to the great Greek doctor Galen,‡ Asclepid families also taught their sons dissection.8 So those walks along the beach were not idle time. They must have confirmed for Aristotle what he already suspected, that reason must be linked to the power of observation. Reason steps in after, not before, experience; it sorts our observations into meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and exact as anything in Plato’s Forms. Aristotle’s term for this knowledge of the world was episteme, which later Latin commentators translated as scientia, or science. Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.
Plato’s fascination with number as the architecture of reality seemed to explain what had, like the Forms, been puzzles before. In the Philebus, for example, Plato applies his mathematical theories to ethics. He shows, or tries to show, that virtue itself is a matter of harmonious proportion, not unlike the intervals of the musical scale: that all human activities involve finding the right measure between the Unlimited and Indeterminate and the stabilizing Limit, and that the good life depends on the permanent establishment of right and definite measure or proportion.29 In effect, the Forms, even the Good in Itself, turn out to be nothing more than mathematical formulae for virtuous living—even if the actual calculations remain vague and elusive.
But I suggest, gentlemen, that the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to avoid doing wrong, which is far more fleet of foot”—as their own verdict evidently proved. As for death, Socrates told the jurors (in words that were probably as close as Plato came to giving an exact transcript of his master’s words), “nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death; and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods.” If Socrates was right, death would even be a blessing. “I [go] to die, and you live,” he said as a farewell, “but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.”28 A month later he was dead. *
The West has been compassionate, visionary, and creative during certain periods of history, yet dynamic, hardheaded, and imperialistic in others—even at the same time. Its technologies have saved millions and killed hundreds of thousands of others at a single press of a button. Its theologies have inspired some of the greatest works in human history, and also burned helpless victims at the stake. Its ideologies have created the freest and most dynamic societies in the world, and also the most brutal tyrannies in the history of man. Why? Much, if not all, the answer lies in the perpetual struggle between Plato and Aristotle.
Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast.
Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world
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.
Polybius concluded that was exactly what the Romans had done. The republic had its monarchical element with its two consuls, who enjoyed absolute authority, or imperium, on the battlefield and in times of national crisis. It had its aristocratic element with the Roman Senate, which was not elected but chosen instead from Rome’s best families and most distinguished heroes and which made the major decisions for the city’s foreign policy, including signing treaties and deciding to go to war. Finally, Rome had its democratic element in its various popular assemblies, where the Roman people, or plebs, voted “or bestow offices on those who deserve them,” including the two consuls, and “who have the right to award both honors and punishments, the only bonds whereby kingdoms, states, and human society in general are held together.
The study of history is … the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of Fortune. —Polybius (200–118 BCE)
Even the name is not his real one. His given name was Aristocles. Plato, from the Greek for “wide” or “broad,” was probably a family nickname.
In every society,” Kames concluded, “the advances of government toward perfection are strictly proportioned to the advance of society” toward mutual cooperation and improvement. The better we all get along, in other words, the more benign our rulers can afford to be.
Still, the 1745 revolt left behind a sobering question for the Enlightenment to ponder. Why do some societies like England and France and cities like Edinburgh become polite and commercial, while so many others do not—even when they are right next door? Unlocking that mystery became the next great goal for the Enlightenment, and the Scottish Enlightenment in particular.
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.
And all the while, hanging over them was the shadow of the Scottish Highlands. For the purple-gray mountains that rose up to the north of Edinburgh were inhabited by fearsome men in kilts: beings who seemed more like beasts than men.
As much as London or Paris, and certainly more than Berlin or Madrid, Edinburgh was the epicenter of Aristotle’s Enlightenment. Small wonder, then, that it dubbed itself the Athens of the North.
Isaac Newton had demonstrated to Voltaire’s satisfaction that human reason alone can discover the true inner workings of nature and the universe. Indeed, the human mind could achieve almost any goal it set for itself, as long as it remained grounded in experience and truth.
Middle-class man scores low on Plato’s thymos meter. Some would say low on the testosterone meter as well. He is no Martin Luther. Still, he is probably a more congenial neighbor, and he was to be the essential building block for what the eighteenth century treasured most after two centuries of religious war and upheaval: a little peace and quiet.
The Enlightenment, however, saw in middle-class man an up-to-date reflection of Aristotle’s political animal: a being designed by nature to work peaceably and constructively with others on the basis of free will—and to make a little money while he did it.
with the new economic order, a new moral perspective was taking shape. The Enlightenment term for it was “politeness.
It was Aristotle who first made private property the basis of the good life and the independent householder the basis of the free polis.18 The world of the Enlightenment took him firmly at his word.
the key to happiness is understanding how the real world works. This idea stood in contrast to Plato-inspired utopian dreams, including John Calvin’s Geneva (a favorite target in the Enlightenment). Our highest ideals are not reflections of some transcendent reality, Enlightenment thinkers argued, or some higher truth. They are just that, ideals: insubstantial playthings of the mind that can deceive as often as they can inspire.
That view was, first, that man is an individual, an individual born with a natural sociability (an updated version of Aristotle’s zoon politikon) but also a desire to protect his own natural rights and his own self-interest. “It is love of self,” Voltaire would write, “that encourages love of others.” That self-interest was derived from nature, “which warns us to respect [the self-interest] of others.”6 This was one reason the Enlightenment, like Aristotle, so strongly opposed the Republic’s formula for communism. The abolition of private property was not only contrary to natural right, it would also ensure that the bonds that connected men to each other would be founded not on mutual respect and friendship, but on envy or even hate. “Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness, more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into Brutes, Yahoos, or Daemons,” John Adams wrote, than community of property.
the Enlightenment understood the enormous historical and cultural distance that separated it from the “ancients”—thanks in part to the rise of Christianity. The big loser in all this, however, was not Aristotle but Plato. His Republic—later so much admired by the Romantics—was the one work of political philosophy the Enlightenment most despised. Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson pronounced its theory of politics unworkable; Smith’s friend David Hume referred to the book’s “illusory and visionary rantings.” On the other side of the Atlantic, John Adams said there were only two things he ever learned from reading Plato, and one of them was that sneezing will cure hiccups.4 Thomas Jefferson was even more excoriating. He once confessed in a letter to Adams that he had been rereading the Republic. “I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” Jefferson had to conclude that Plato had always been a fraud, “a dealer in mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind,” which had been allowed to inject “an impenetrable darkness” into Western culture. “O Plato!” Voltaire exclaimed. “You have done more harm than you know.”5
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.
