“It portrays throughout history the ways in which all progress has depended on people making judgments,” Murray explained, judgments about ethics, aesthetics, science, and the like. Murray praised Herman for providing an antidote to the “nonjudgmentalism” prevalent on so many contemporary college campuses. “I, too, want Plato in there as sort of the loyal opposition, but in the minority,” AEI scholar Charles Murray said to describe the desirable balance between Aristotelian and Platonic ideas. “But I also ended up pulling for Plato, because I understood that degree in which that heroic willingness to stand and say this is true no matter what – Martin Luther, ‘here I stand, I can do no other’ – you need that in a culture.” “When I started in this project, Aristotle was, I have to say, the guy I was pulling for, particularly when thinking in the political realms and the impact that Plato’s view of politics has had, the destructive role it’s had in the 20 th century,” Herman said at AEI. Not so in Western Europe, Herman says, because of Martin Luther, who thought excessive fidelity to Aristotle had led the church into error. Aristotle’s scientific and logical treatises became the basis of a fossilized orthodoxy in Arab culture, dry and lifeless and unchanging over the centuries.” “t wound up getting too much Aristotle too soon, which deprived it of its growth and dynamism. Unfortunately, “the Islamic mind turned its back on Plato,” Herman writes. Islamic intelligentsia treasured Aristotle long before Aquinas indeed, Western Christians received access to “the Philosopher” (Aquinas’ name for Aristotle) through the use of Arabic texts. Muslim culture stands as a cautionary tale. Such an individualist philosophy appears more congenial to American politics, but has its dangers. “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,” Herman writes. ![]() Thus, true knowledge comes from studying the created order and particular things within that order. is in fact itself the product of precisely the same kind of battle and precisely of one side – particularly the Platonist-Hegelian side, the Marxist side – having in a sense dominated and taken over the intellectual discussion,” Herman told the AEI assembly.Īristotle inverted Plato’s view of the world because he regarded God as the Unmoved Mover who caused all things to exist. “I have historicized the historicizers and shown that the whole race/class/gender approach. He believes that they demonstrate the danger of Platonic thought triumphing too completely over Aristotle. Herman regards the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth-century (along with their more moderate cousin, American progressivism) as bat-faced children of Plato. This idea leads to Plato’s vision of the ideal society as one governed by a Philosopher Ruler, one of the rare few who truly understands those principles and can order human society in accordance with them. In the book, he offers the Reformation and the Renaissance as Platonic repudiations of the arid Aristotelian scholastics. “But it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t hold – because it can’t,” Herman said at AEI, during a lecture and discussion with Alex Pollock and Charles Murray of AEI and the Hudson Institute’s John Weicher. Aquinas’ singular achievement was “the fusion of Platonized Christianity with Aristotle’s science of man.” Aristotle ended Plato’s hegemony in the 12 th century when Thomas Aquinas relied on his ideas to reconcile natural reason with divine revelation. Augustine relied on Plato for “the conceptual spine” of their faith, he said, and this relationship accounts for the religion’s rapid spread. Herman narrates the last 2,400 years of Western history in terms of this contest. “The periods of time in which one side or the other tends to win out, those are times of stagnation and decline.” 12 presentation at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s the constant tension between these two ways of seeing the world – the material versus the spiritual, the practical versus the insightful-intuitive side – it’s the creative tension, like the drawing of a string of a bow, that creates the dynamism that’s been so characteristic of western culture throughout its history,” he said during a Nov. Western civilization depends on both for its vigor, according to Herman. ![]() ![]() “The path of Aristotle, by contrast, observes reality through the sober eyes of science and reveals the power of logic and analysis as tools of human freedom.” “One path – Plato’s path – sees the world through the eyes of the religious mystic as well as the artist,” he writes in The Cave and the Light.
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