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

Copyright 2013 by Arthur Herman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House company, New York.

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Image credits:
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Wellcome Library, London ()
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akg-images/Fritz Eschen ()
akg-images/Anna Weise ()
From K. Clinton, Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian
Mysteries: The Martin P. Nilsson Lectures on Greek Religion,
Delivered 1921 November 1990 at the Swedish Institute at Athens

(ActaAth-8, 11), Stockholm, 1992, p. 88. ()

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Herman, Arthur
The cave and the light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the struggle for the soul of Western civilization / Arthur Herman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-553-80730-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-90783-4
1. Civilization, WesternGreek influences. 2. PlatoInfluence. 3. AristotleInfluence. 4. Philosophy, Ancient. I. Title.
CB245.H4286 2010 909.09821dc22 2010008230

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design by Susan Zucker
Jacket painting: Raphael, The School of Athens, c. 1510 (detail) (Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City)

v3.1

An editorial in The New York Review of Books recently asked: Do the Classics Have a Future? The real question is: Will the classics ever leave us alone? This books tells the story of how everything we say, do, and see has been shaped in one way or another by two classical Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle.

Far from being dead white males, theyve been powering the living heart of Western culture from ancient Greece to today. Their influence extends from science and philosophy and literature, to our social life and most cherished political institutionsand not just in the West but increasingly in the rest of the world, too, including the Muslim world. And at the center of their influence has been a two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion.

It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own. The clash of ideas that then sprang up between Plato and Aristotle is summed up in this books title.

The Myth of the Cave appears in Book VII of Platos most famous work, the Republic. Plato used it to represent his most fundamental idea: that man is destined by his creator to find a path from the dark cave of material existence to the light of a higher, purer, and more spiritual truth. Its when we rise above the merely human, Plato insisted, and enter the realm of the everlasting and immortal and changeless that we achieve wisdom.

As readers will learn, Aristotle disagreed, and his dissent from his famous teacher would have enormous consequences.

All things have a specific nature, he would argue in his Physics, based on a union of form and matter. Instead of trying to rise above mundane reality, Aristotle believed the philosophers job was to explain how the world works, and how as human beings we can find our proper place in it. There is no cave; only a world made of things and facts. The fact is our starting point, he once said, and that insight permeated his thinking on everything, from science to politics and drama.

For the next two thousand years Aristotle would become the father of modern science, logic, and technology. Plato, by contrast, is the spokesman for the theologian, the mystic, the poet, and the artist.

One gave us a view of reality as multiform and constantly evolving; the other, as eternal and One.

One told us we have to learn to deal with things as they are, including each other. The other said we need to think about how things ought to be, including ourselves and our society.

One shaped the contours of Christianity; the other, the ideas of the Enlightenment.

One gave us modern economics; the other, the Reformation.

One inspired Europe to lift itself out of the Dark Ages; the other inspired the greatest artistic works of the Renaissance, including Michelangelos Sistine Chapel ceiling.

One gave us the U.S. Constitution, the Manhattan Project, and shopping malls. The other gave us Chartres Cathedral, but also the gulag and the Holocaust.

Aristotle asks, How do you fit into the world that already exists?

Plato asks, Why does that world exist at all?

How this split happened, and how Western culture came to develop this strange dual face, forms the narrative of this book. So do the events and thinkers and personalities who perpetuated that struggle between the two ancient rivals, as well as the strange twists and ironies that arose along the way. This is neither a history of philosophy nor a history of Western civilization. It is an account of the interaction of both, and of how the legacies of Plato and Aristotle live on around us and continue to shape our world.

May 7, 2013

Raphael, The School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura, The Vatican

Prologue

THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS

There are Plato and Aristotle, and around them is a great school of philosophers.

Giorgio Vasari, Life of Raphael of Urbino

He was a provincial boy, a painter like his father. Everyone recognized that Raphael Sanzio had extraordinary artistic talent: talent, as his fellow painter Vasari later said, more like a god than a man. At sixteen and with his fathers encouragement, he moved from his sophisticated but small hometown of Urbino to work with the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino, and then to Florence, the city of the Medici.

What he found there was a visual and artistic feast. Raphael spent days and nights examining the works of his two great elders, Michelangelo and Leonardo, which, according to Vasari, inspired him to study even more intensely so he could raise his skills closer to their exalted level. However, Raphaels big break came in 1508, when a letter arrived from another Urbino native, the architect Bramante, inviting him to work for the pope in Rome.

In 1508, Rome was western Europes most revered city. It was the former capital of an ancient empire and the center of the contemporary art scene. Pope Julius II had come to the throne of St. Peter five years earlier determined to remake the city in his own grandiose image and to use the revived classical style of the ancient Greeks and Romans to do it. He had commissioned Bramante to create a design for the new St. Peters Basilica, which was to be larger and more ornate than any church in Christendom.

Bramante also supervised a host of other artistic projects at the behest of Pope Julius. In 1508, money and an appetite for grand artistic visions were plentiful in Rome. That meant big opportunities for a talent like Raphael.

Bramante and the pope had already engaged the best artists in Italy. When Raphael arrived in the Eternal City, Michelangelo Buonarroti was just starting to set up the scaffolding for painting a series of frescoes for the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. The bearded, brooding Florentine was thirty-four, in the prime of life and at the height of his creative powers. He was still furious that Pope Julius had pulled him off the project on which Michelangelos heart was set, the popes tomb and its almost forty life-size marble statues, and instead put him to work in the chapel. Michelangelo had no inkling he was about to start work on his greatest masterpiece. Nor did he realize that the slim youth from Urbino to whom Bramante introduced him was about to create something that would be as much a landmark of Western civilization as his own Sistine Chapel ceiling.