Donald Mangum
Plato and Aristotle
In the center of Raphael’s painting titled The School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle famously walk side by side, Plato pointing upwards while Aristotle gestures, palm downwards, in metaphorical references to the realms of the real. Of metaphysics, Plato and Aristotle are the cat and dog respectively. Plato is abstracted and spiritual, maintaining a sort of feline transcendence, often playful but only on his own terms (operating with the indirection of the playwright, the artist, crouching behind characters, advancing in fits and starts), batting an idea about often long after it has died, subtle, wry, and always the stylist. He is at home with mystery and at peace with silence. Aristotle, on the other hand, seeks truth and reality in immanence, bounding like a lab retriever into the swamp water of experience. For him there is no irony, no winks at the reader, no boredom with moderation or in the endless plodding progress of dry logic and common sense. He is a codifier of thought and an auditor of life, an accountant at heart. Never doubting the isomorphism of language, thought, and reality, he slogs his way through nearly two hundred treatises.
PLATO
hierarchy of being
Platonic forms
analogies of the divided line, the cave, and the sun
In Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, we find resolutions to the four-fold pre-Socratic oppositions (one / many, permanence / flux, reality / appearance, and understanding / experience) in a hierarchy of reality and knowledge; that is, reality and knowledge themselves have planes, or tiers, of superiority, ranging from the lowest (multiplicitous, changing, and experienced by the senses) to the highest (unified, permanent or eternal, and apprehended by the understanding). Moreover, each of these planes owes its very manifestation to the plane above it as something like an emanation (or reflection?) from higher to lower. The most general division in these tiers of reality is between the formal and the material or physical. The formal realm is abstract, conceptual, and ideal. It is associated with reason or the understanding. It is also the means by which things in the material or physical world are recognized. The material (physical) realm is made up of individual, concrete objects of sensory experience or specific events. Thus, a Platonic form is the form, idea, concept, abstraction, or pattern that makes a specific material object intelligible. There are higher forms and lower forms according to the degree of abstraction or generality (e.g. triangularity and right triangularity), and there are higher and lower entities within the physical realm, for example, a man and a picture of a man.
Two of Plato’s famous analogies illustrate this hierarchy. The divided line represents a spectrum of being and knowledge, divided first into halves. The first division is between physical reality (known by sense experience), and formal reality (known by the intellect). The two further divisions are between images and physical objects in the lower half (known by sense experience) and between lower and higher forms in the higher half (known by respectively lower and higher levels of intellect).
The second analogy depicts a bizarre scenario with prisoners chained inside a cave, their heads held in a position so that they can see only a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners, people parade back and forth while holding objects on their heads. Further behind the prisoners, a fire casts images of those objects onto the wall which fills the prisoners’ entire field of vision. The analogy depicts people bound by chains of ignorance, facing a wall bearing images (the physical world) which they mistake for reality, but which are only imitations of the real things (the forms) located before the fire behind them. Only by breaking these chains and turning to gaze upon the objects themselves could these people recognize the wall for what it is, a fake, a poor copy of true Being. Likewise, only through exercise of the intellect and dialectic can we loose the fetters of our own ignorance to know true Being, the source of the shadowy experience of everyday life. Just as the initial glimpse of the actual cave objects, backlit by fire, is a painful shock, difficult to withstand (not to mention the eventual sight of the sun itself), so is the process of philosophical enlightenment an ordeal. It takes an adjustment of the eyes/mind to look comfortably upon the forms. But once they have been seen and known for what they are, the prospect of a descent to one’s former place in the depths of common experience is intolerable.
In the third analogy, the Good, the source of all being and knowledge, is likened to the sun, the source of light and therefore vision itself. Just as the sun cannot itself be seen (since it is what makes vision itself possible), neither can the Good be known.
A simple example of the superiority of formal to physical reality can be seen in the form (idea) of a right triangle versus a wooden or plastic drafting triangle. The form of a right triangle (or of right triangularity as it were) has certain properties that are eternal. For example, the square of the hypotenuse is, has always been, and will always be equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. The sum of the interior angles is, has always been, and will always be one hundred and eighty degrees. And even if there never had been and never would be any physical triangle, what we have just said about triangularity would still be true. On the other hand, if we didn’t know right triangularity, we would not recognize a drafting triangle for what it is, and in fact, it would not exist as a drafting triangle, but only as a piece of plastic (which in turn could exist or be known only in terms of what plastic is). Triangularity is eternal, drafting triangles only ephemeral and incomplete.
We understand or recognize circles, squares, lines and points without ever experiencing anything but approximations, and we recognize those approximations only in terms of the forms (concepts). Likewise, we do not experience perfect justice, piety, honor, or love, but we recognize and evaluate instances according to certain standards, certain forms.
ARISTOTLE
predication
the four causes
the unmoved mover
infinite regress
Whereas the Platonic worldview can be at least roughly apprehended in a single vision of metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological hierarchy, Aristotelian philosophy tends invariably towards labyrinthine analysis, breaking everything down and sorting out the parts. For example, there are ten ways of predicating anything of (saying anything about) an object of knowledge; that is, by reference to its quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, affecting something else, and being affected by something. Thus, Cecil is large and green, one of only six sea monsters, at the bottom of the ocean, in a painfully contorted posture, sporting an underwater top hat, scaring all the water babies, and being pestered by a swarm of jellyfish. Aristotle also sets out all the rules for how to reason correctly (logic), and his four “causes” are to account for how anything is what it is. They are (1) the material cause (not surprisingly, whatever material the thing consists of), (2) the efficient cause (whatever agent brought the thing about), (3) the formal cause (whatever we recognize the thing to be – notably inseparable from the thing itself, unlike Plato’s forms), and (4) the final cause (the purpose of the thing). Hence, the nail is “caused” by the iron that makes it up (material), the blacksmith’s forging of the iron (efficient), the shape and the size (formal), and the purpose of holding the shoe on the horse (final).
And God, the unmoved (or prime) mover, is the only alternative to an infinite regress of causation (with any of the four causes), a notion Aristotle apparently thought too absurd to bother refuting. Take final causality: thing #1 exists to serve thing #2, which exists to serve thing #3, and so on. Aristotle thought that there would have to be some ultimate purpose to be served by the chain of servant things. To think otherwise would be like trying to explain a hanging chain’s suspension in terms of each link’s being held up by the one above it. The idea of a world which exists in its links of purpose to serve a single ultimate purpose is called teleological.
Aristotle was utterly catholic (meaning universal) in his interest, and his contributions to many diverse areas of knowledge were considered authoritative, beginning around the 11th century and continuing for centuries to follow. It was around the 11th century that the Church preference for Aristotelian thought began to replace Plato’s influence.
COMMENTARY: EITHER/OR
It has been suggested that you are born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian and that whichever you are, you will never change. Perhaps it is genetic. There is no independent party. No straddling of the metaphysical fence. No bi- or trans-philosophicals. No hybrids, no combos, no best of both worlds.
Blow hot or cold.
PlatonistAristotelians are like CatDogs in their nonexistence. If you are a Platonist, the earth is your prison. A cave. If you are an Aristotelean, you are “down to earth.” The Platonist is forever in an orbit of abstraction, while the Aristotelian maintains an immanence in the world. This life, for the Platonist, is a shadow, a procession of ghostly shapes, a gross approximation of the angelic realm. The Aristotelian accepts fully the worldliness of life and expects in return the world’s full cooperation with the rules of reason.
The Platonist looks at the physical world and sees an obvious falling-short of the reality that glistens in the understanding and that is pure and eternal. The Platonist wonders how the Aristotelian can take experience for more than a dream, a shadow of Truth, even as Being shines through and upon the world, illuminating it for the mind, calling the mind upwards and out of its sensory confines.
The Aristotelian kicks a rock and feels being in the pain, feels the hardness of matter and wonders how the Platonist can be so numb to the brute reality of the material world. The form is in the thing, not removed, not existing on a higher plane. The form needs the thing, the Aristotelian insists, and who could not see that?