The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  In other non-Western societies, however, people have found themselves overwhelmed by this scientific and materialist onslaught. We see the results in the sprawling megaslums of third-world cities like Rio, Karachi, Lagos in Nigeria, Caracas, Mexico City, and Capetown. The floods of displaced persons from traditional rural areas have grown every major city in the poorest parts of the globe by more than a factor of ten. Dhaka in Bangladesh is more than forty times the size it was in 1950.

  These are not cities on the Greek city-state model; they are neither Plato’s centers of civic identity nor Aristotle’s emporiums of commerce. They are rotting “stinking mountains of shit,” as urban anthropologist Mike Davis vividly describes them, demographic “volcanos waiting to erupt.” They are the new barbarian frontier, where poverty, fear, and violence rule—and where irrational religious fundamentalisms are taking root to feed resentment and rage, from radical Hinduism in the slums of Mumbai and apocalyptic Islamicism in Cairo and Gaza, to wild-eyed Pentecostalists in San Salvador and born-again Marxists in Caracas.12 The global village turns out to be a shantytown, instead.

  These are the breeding grounds of today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist movements. The answer to them is not more prosperity. The attackers of 9/11 like Mohamed Atta did not spring up from the slums or from rural poverty. They were the beneficiaries of middle-class wealth in their home countries. (Atta’s father was a lawyer.) They were comfortable with modern technology and were the recipients of a Western-style education. That education, however, had left a cultural and psychological void. Their confrontation with a technological modern pluralist society like ours triggered an incomprehension and rage that radical Islamicism fanned into a nihilistic barbarism.

  Terrorists see themselves as warriors of God. They are in fact murderers from the scariest depths of the cave, the cultural underworld that has grown up in societies that have lost their traditional ways and landmarks. That cave is increasingly coming to include our own cultural underclass, whose nihilistic barbarism is reflected on television and in gangsta rap.

  The answer is rediscovering that creative tension and sense of balance not in the Western image but in Western terms.

  Today’s affluent, globalized material world was largely made by Aristotle’s offspring—and is not so different from the Athens of Socrates’s day. It’s a world filled with comforts and conveniences, a world of constant change and unimaginable individual freedoms. But it is also riddled with false façades and shoddy superficialities, and it is populated by institutions that have become obsessed with process for its own sake, rather than keeping Western civilization “on message” regarding the larger meaning of freedom and liberty, community and spiritual truth.

  Contrary to the pessimists, it’s not going away anytime soon. Despite recent economic downturns and resulting gloomy prognostications, the fact is that since 1920 the rate of growth of U.S. gross domestic product has been expanding exponentially, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Even the Great Depression and the most recent turndown represent only very minor deviations from the underlying curve.13 The trend line is even clearer in other countries, including China and India. Those waiting for the modern technological global system to collapse from its own weight back to “sustainability” are bound to be disappointed.

  Still, for all its dynamism and resilience, ours is a world constructed largely around getting and spending. While this has not led to mass spiritual death, as so many critics of consumer culture charge, it has allowed mass consumerism to suffocate and choke off other important forms of human potential.

  The modern environmentalist movement has recognized this and exploited it with its austere downsizing appeal. The Greens offer a manifestly Platonist reply to Aristotle’s world of technology, individual desire, and convenience, by stressing collective responsibility, self-sacrifice, and moral rather than material comfort and consumer choice.§ And whatever their empirical scientific merits or demerits, climate change gurus and advocates of the Gaia thesis do point to an important truth: that a world built on getting and spending is not enough. There are other values, spiritual needs that also require satisfaction and that demand a priority on our agendas. The tens of thousands of congregants who fill Saddleback Church in California every Sunday grasp that as well.

  The point is, this kind of contradiction is nothing new in Western culture. History may not repeat itself, but ideas certainly do. The tension between our material and spiritual selves has always been there, embedded in Western history by the legacies of Plato and Aristotle. It has inspired one breakthrough after another, in the clash between Christianity and classical culture; the battle of the books between Renaissance humanists and the schoolmen; and the culture wars between the Romantics and the Enlightenment. And of course it runs all through the current clash over Darwinism and creationism or “intelligent design”: a battle founded, in the last analysis, on the irreconcilable contradiction between Plato’s God and Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

  So what the current debates over climate change and economic growth really reveal is that our world still needs its Plato alongside its Aristotle. Both are indispensable to our culture and our future—and perhaps all futures. Whether it is called yin and yang or right brain versus left brain,14 the tense tug-of-war is all-pervasive. But it is peculiarly fundamental to our Western identity. Thanks to Plato and Aristotle, the variation is endless, with one giving rise to the other in a never-ending ever-ascending circle of renewal.

  Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s most famous pupil, was right. The end result of consensus, of all thinking with one mind, is stagnation and worse. Indeed, tension and renewal are our identity. And if those of us in the West can rediscover that identity, perhaps we can then save the world—not by making it richer or alternately by giving it a world government, but by leading by example and showing how to leave the cave and step once more out into the light.

  * * *

  * See chapter 14.

  † They are: adenine-thymine, thymine-adenine, cytosine-guanine, and guanine-cytosine.

  ‡ And not just in the West.

  § And what could be more Platonic than its slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally”?

  For Beth, the light of my life

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My very first thanks go to my father, who introduced me to the dialogues of Plato at an embarrassingly early age, and whose marvelous library on the history of philosophy supplied something to every chapter. As the book itself took shape, he carefully read early drafts of every chapter and pointed me to materials that helped to flesh out the major argument. My mother also read chapter drafts and offered editorial comments that have helped to make it a better, and more readable, book.

  Thanks also go to Professor J. Baird Callicott, who generously allowed me to attend his graduate seminar on Plato back in 1975, and who first introduced me to the intimate connections between Plato’s world vision and Pythagoras, and Professor John Billings, who gave me my first primer on Aristotle’s logic. At the University of Minnesota, Professor Vicki Harper led me and a small band of students on an intense excursion into Aristotle’s metaphysics, and Steven Oberhelman, now at Texas A&M, was my indispensable guide to unraveling the tangled web of the Roman Republic. He will be surprised to see some of his insights reappear in this book thirty-six years later.

  I have to extend my gratitude to the Johns Hopkins University’s John G. A. Pocock for his help in understanding Aristotle’s impact on Western political thinking; to Orest Ranum for encouraging my fascination with Neoplatonist kingship; and to Nancy Struever, who turned me loose on Boethius’s translations of Aristotle and showed me their importance to the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Maurice Mandelbaum’s seminar on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer also made an indelible impression on me that carried through in my first book, The Idea of Decline in Western History, and now this one.

  Tom Veblen read and commented on the entire manuscript in its first stages, as did Charles Matheson, who also patie
ntly guided me through the mysteries of Pythagorean geometry as well as the Golden Section, while opening up his library on architecture to me. Responsibility for any remaining mistakes lies not with him—or anyone else mentioned here—but with me.

  Thanks also go to my two editors at Random House. John Flicker enthusiastically embraced the idea of a book on Plato and Aristotle, and Jonathan Jao saw it through to completion. A similar note of gratitude goes to Molly Turpin for her patient help in getting the book finished, especially with finding images, and Dennis Ambrose and the entire production staff. My agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, became the book’s constant and consistent champions, and their support and advice have been, over fifteen years, of inestimable value.

  Peter Schramm of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University cheered the book’s idea from the first time he heard about it, as did Hillsdale College’s Larry Arnn. Successive visits with Greg Lindsay at Australia’s Center for Independent Studies contributed to several ideas that are central to the book’s thesis, including one particular lively conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Neal Kozodoy, and Roger Hertog all listened patiently while I laid out different aspects of the book, while conversations at the American Enterprise Institute with Alex Pollock, Chris DeMuth, Michael Novak, and Arthur Brooks helped with key turning points.

  Last but always first, my gratitude goes to my wife, Beth. Her patience during the four years it took for this book to see the light of day was exemplary, and her love and support were indispensable—as they always are.

  NOTES

  Prologue: The School of Athens

  1. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 1:284.

  2. Christiane Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9.

  3. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 292.

  4. This is the thesis of Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza, passim. The librarian, Tommaso Inghirami, called the Cicero of his age, was no less an authority than Erasmus of Rotterdam. Inghirami died only five years after Raphael’s frescoes were finished, in 1516, when he fell from his mule under the wheels of a bullock cart. A painting of the bizarre accident still exists, in Rome’s Church of St. John Lateran.

  5. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza, 93.

  6. Usually identified since Vasari’s time as Zoroaster. However, Joost-Gaugier argues convincingly (107–10) that the portrait shows the geographer Strabo, who was born around 64 BCE and who was a convinced Aristotelian, as well as heir to the great Alexandrian school of geography.

  7. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza, 87–88, 90.

  8. Coleridge quoted in John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge” (1840), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 10:118.

  Chapter 1: The First Philosopher

  1. Plato, Phaedo, in Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 111.

  2. Added good and evil, as implied if not stated in Socrates’s statement.

  3. Plato, Crito, in Last Days of Socrates, 88.

  4. Ibid., 90.

  5. Plato, Phaedo, 179.

  6. Ibid., 181.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 60–61.

  9. According to the Apology (60), he fought at the battles of Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium during the war against Sparta, where “I remained at my post like anyone else and faced death.”

  10. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), 8.

  Chapter 2: The Soul of Reason

  1. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 74, 83.

  2. Ibid., 90.

  3. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 65.

  4. Heraclitus’s pupil Cratylus took the next step by declaring, “No one steps into the same river even once.”

  5. Arthur L. Herman, The Ways of Philosophy (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1990), 54.

  6. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; repr., New York: Meridian, 1958), 174.

  7. A. E. Taylor, Socrates (1951; repr., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975), 132.

  8. W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle (1950; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 87.

  9. Plotinus quoted in Paul Friedlander, Plato (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 1:29.

  10. Plato, Phaedo, in Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 131.

  11. Ibid., 135.

  12. Plato, Apology, in Last Days of Socrates, 51.

  13. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 317–18.

  14. Ibid., 317–19.

  15. Plato, Phaedo, 124.

  16. Plato, Republic, 264–66 (translator’s introduction to bk. V).

  17. Plato, Phaedo, 492.

  18. A point raised by R. M. Hare in his Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 37.

  19. Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1956), lii.

  20. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 122.

  21. Meno, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen, 1961), 364 (81d–e).

  22. Alexander Kohanski, The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 38–39.

  23. Plato, Republic, 342 (VII:532).

  24. Taylor, Socrates, 100.

  25. Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 32 (I:ii).

  26. Plato, Apology, in Last Days of Socrates, 64.

  27. Ibid., 62.

  28. Ibid., 76.

  Chapter 3: The Mind of God

  1. A rare exception is I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), and perhaps the first volume of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), although Popper paints Plato in far more sinister colors than his deceased teacher.

  2. Plato, Apology, in Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 60.

  3. This has stopped scholars from arguing that his notion of the divine and Plato’s actually descend from the ancient mystery cults, in particular the Orphic mysteries. In the Renaissance, it was accepted as historical truth. For a modern version, see G.R.S. Meade, Orpheus (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965).

  4. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 449 (X:614–15).

  5. Ibid., 450 (X:616b).

  6. Francis Cornford, Before and After Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 1.

  7. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; repr., New York: Meridian, 1958), 106–7.

  8. John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook, Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras (Albany, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999), 67–88.

  9. Peter Gorman, Pythagoras: A Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).

  10. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 287–88.

  11. Strohmeier and Westbrook, Divine Harmony, 73.

  12. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 229.

  13. In 1917, the biologist D’Arcy Thompson showed how the growth of microscopic spores and of liquid crystals followed very much the same progression as in Pythagoras and the Timaeus. See D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, ed. John Tyler Bonner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  14. Paul Friedlander, Plato (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 1:27.

  15. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), 4. Later legends have Plato becoming so fascinated with this sacred geometry, and the notion of n
umber as the language of creation, that he made his own journey to Egypt to explore its mathematical mysteries. There is no evidence, let alone proof, that he took such a trip. However, some of his accounts in the Laws of Egyptian customs suggest he may have known them firsthand.

  16. This is Timon of Athens. See Francis Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 3.

  17. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 42.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid., 43, 73.

  20. Ibid., 77.

  21. Ibid., 49.

  22. As explained in Taylor’s analysis of Timaeus in Plato, 445.

  23. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, introduction, 11.

  24. See for example Raymond Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages (repr., Milwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1982).

  25. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, 40.

  26. Ibid., 10 (introduction).

  27. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 78–79.

  28. Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), (977e–978b).

  29. Taylor, Plato, introduction to Philebus, 39.

  30. See Bertrand Russell, The Wisdom of the West (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 75.

  31. Taylor, Plato, 7.

  32. According to John Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 B.C.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2–5.

  33. Friedlander, Plato, 1:102.

  Chapter 4: The Doctor’s Son

  1. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker (1946; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xxvii.