Plato and Aristotle in Raphael's
"School of Athens"
Whitehead
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All of Western thought,
Alfred
North Whitehead once contended, is merely "a footnote to Plato and
Aristotle." Throughout his writings (mostly in History in English Words),
Barfield comments on both of these Greek philosophers, sometimes considered
individually:
On Plato:
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As in
the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek
philosophy lay two fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning
lay behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato's lucid mind brought to
the surface of Europe's consciousness the stupendous conception that all
matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual "types" or "ideas"--eternal
principles which, so far from being abstractions, are the only real Beings,
which were in their place before matter came into existence, and which
will remain after it has passed away. The other assumption concerned the
attainment by man of immortality. The two were complementary. Just as it
was only the immortal part of man which could get into touch with the eternal
secret behind the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving
to contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part of
himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question of how to
rise from the contemplation of the transient to the contemplation of the
eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates evolved that other great conception--perhaps
even more far-reaching in its historical effects--that love for a sensual
and temporal object is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the
invisible and eternal. (HEW 103)
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Today idea does not
mean to us quite what it did to Plato; but tracing the whole history of
the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative use of these
four letters, began to make it possible for us to get outside of our thoughts
and look at them, to separate our "ideas" about things from the things
themselves. (HEW 102)
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It is not only in the
New Testament and the Prayer
Book, in the
Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Sonnets,
and all great Romantic poetry that the results of [Plato's] thinking [concerning
the nature of love] are to be seen. Through the Church and the poets to
the dramatist and the novelist, and through them to the common people--there
is no soulful drawing-room ballad, no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette
or genteel text on the wall of a cottage parlor through which, every time
the hackneyed world is brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato
does not peep for a moment forlornly out upon us. (HEW 104-105)
On Aristotle:
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To Aristotle's imagination,
the two worlds, outer and inner, met and came into contact in quite a new
way. The mind was, as it were, put at the absolute disposal of matter;
it ceased to brood on what arose from within, and turned its attention
outward. The result of this was, of course, an enormous increase in the
amount of knowledge concerning the material processes of the outer world.
But that was not the first result. For, curiously enough, the first result
was a pronounced hardening and sharpening of the mind's own outlines. Struggling
to fit herself, as into a glove, to the processes of cause and effect observed
in physical phenomena, the mind became suddenly conscious of its own shape.
She was astonished and delighted. She had discovered logic.
(HEW 105)
At other times considered
together:
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While Plato had concentrated
his intellectual effort on mapping out what we should now call the "inner"
world of human consciousness; starting from the point of view of ancient
tradition and myth, and working outward; relating his thoughts to one another
in accordance, as it were, with their own inherent qualities; and deducing
the sense-world from the spiritual world; Aristotle turned to the acquisition
of knowledge about the outer world of matter and energy--that is to say,
that part of the world which can be apprehended by the five senses and
the brain. The two philosophers were alike in their emphasis on the importance
of cultivating immortality--or rather of "immortaling" (for they used a
special verb which we have lost), but otherwise there were few resemblances
indeed. To Plato, the soul of the universe had seemed inseparable from
his own soul, and natural phenomena such as the revolutions of the planets
had interested him rather as tangible, outward pictures of the life within
the soul. To Aristotle the world outside himself was interesting more for
its own sake. Plato had looked up to "Ideas"--real Beings with an existence
of their own, which stood behind physical phenomena rather than within
them. Aristotle deliberately attacked this doctrine maintaining that the
Ideas were immanent; they could not have existed before visible Nature,
nor could they have any being apart from it; and they could only be arrived
at, he said, by investigating Nature itself. When Aristotle laid down his
pen after the Metaphysics, the word idea had taken a long step toward its
present meaning. (HEW 105)
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In Raphael's
fresco of the School of Athens in the Vatican, the two figures of Plato
and Aristotle stand side by side, the one with raised hand pointing upwards
to the heavens, the other pointing earthward down a flight of steps. If,
in imagination, we take our stand between the two, we can, indeed look
forward, through the thinking which found expression in Aristotle, to the
collective
representations of the Western world which were to take their course, though the so-called dark and middle
ages, down to the scientific revolution
and beyond. While though the other, through the star-and-space-involved
thinking of Plato, we may peer backward into the collective representations
of the East and of the past. (SA 104)
See
in particular "Thinking and Thought" (RCA 47-66), "Philosophy and
Religion" (HEW 96-117). |
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