By JOHN YOUNG
It has been said, with a degree of truth, that everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. It has also been said that all the big questions of philosophy are contained, at least implicitly, in Plato’s philosophy. So, they are well worth examination, especially in contrast with the philosophy of Aristotle.
G.K Chesterton compares our knowledge of the past thinkers with democracy: It is the democracy of the dead. The democrat, he says, takes notice of the opinion of a good man even if he is your groom; the believer in tradition takes notice of the opinion of a good man even if he is your father.
So let us look at the thoughts of two of our intellectual fathers: Plato and Aristotle.
Plato saw this material world as a place of becoming rather than being. It is forever changing, never remaining the same for a second. In contrast with this there is a spiritual world, and our souls inhabited that world before they came into the bodies that we now have. A definition of man in Plato’s Academy shortly after his own time was, “A soul using a body.”
Aristotle, by contrast, saw the material world as fully real, and human beings as essentially a compound of body and soul. He compared the compound of body and soul to a piece of wax and the stamp impressed on that wax: There is not wax plus an impression, but impressed wax. The soul is like the seal, making the matter to be a human body. Aristotle believed that a part of man lives on after death, but he says little about that future existence.
The strict unity of body and soul, together forming one being, was not understood by René Descartes in the seventeenth century, who saw the human soul as “a thinking thing” and the body as “an extended thing,” thereby destroying the essential unity of man, although Descartes didn’t realize this.
Aristotle’s position is in harmony with the Christian view of man, whereas Plato’s is not. And more generally, Aristotle’s philosophy is in accord with Divine Revelation in Scripture and Tradition to an extent that Plato’s philosophy is not.
Regarding knowledge, Plato believed that we do not get our higher knowledge from this changing material world, but that before our souls came into the bodies we now have they existed in an intelligible world, a world of real being rather than a world of becoming.
Therefore, our knowledge of goodness, beauty, and other realities that transcend matter was in our soul before the soul entered our present body, and what we think of as learning is actually a recall, a memory, of that spiritual world.
Aristotle, by contrast, believed that our intellect at the beginning is like a blank slate (a tabula rasa) and that all our knowledge comes through the five senses, with the intellect abstracting the meaning of what the senses show us.
Plato sketched out, in his most famous work, the Republic, a plan of society, or rather of the rulers of society, in which among other things there would be no marriage among the rulers and children would not know who their parents were, but would be brought up in common.
Aristotle, disagreeing with this, says, “He who is everybody’s child is nobody’s child.” A commonsense judgment.
Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus, dealing with the material world, is excessively abstract and mathematical, whereas Aristotle’s works on the material world, though with many scientific inaccuracies — inevitable given the state of science at that time — show a very keen interest in empirical facts.
Alexander the Great, who as a boy had been taught by Aristotle, ordered his rulers in various parts of the world to report to Aristotle any interesting facts of nature.
Plato has some sublime passages about the Supreme Truth and Beauty. In his dialogue the Symposium he says: “What if man had eyes to see the true beauty — the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with pollution of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life. . . .” (Symposium, 211).
Although he didn’t realize it, that applies to the Beatific Vision to which we are all called after the present life, and Plato had a partial awareness of it. Human reason at its best can posit the vision of God as an ideal but, without Divine Revelation, cannot know whether it is our true destiny or whether it is even possible.
Aristotle is more cautious about what happens after death. In asking whether something of us survives death he approached the question by applying the principle that the activity of a thing indicates the nature of that thing. But we exercise intellectual activity that transcends what the body is capable of.
Therefore, the human power that exercises this activity must be more than a bodily thing. So, he held that the highest part of us lives on after death.
Christianity is a revealed religion, proclaiming truths that human reason alone could not know, but it also contains truths knowable by reason and which sound philosophy examines, and both are necessary for the development of a sound system of theology.
This is evident above all in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, who constantly employs philosophically known truths to gain a more profound knowledge of Divine Revelation. But what happens if a theologian employs erroneous philosophical conclusions when he investigates Divine Revelation? He very easily falls into heresy. That is a key reason for the numerous theological errors of the present time.
Numerous Popes have insisted on the need to hold to the perennial philosophy deriving from Aristotle and developed much more fully by St. Thomas. This philosophy is in harmony with common sense and is essential in developing Sacred Theology.
Much philosophy, on the contrary, is opposed to our healthy commonsense knowledge.
Philosophers have denied the existence of the material world, while others have said there is no reality except the material world. Some have said that the existence of God is self-evident; others have claimed to prove that there is no God.
If we stick to common sense and St. Thomas we won’t go wrong.
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