While I was gathering material for this months readings, I was reminded that Ayn Rand's views on aesthetics were guided, at least in part, by Aristotle. I'll write about that connection later, but while I was looking for it, I found this Rand quote on Aristotle:
"Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back to the cave of his antipode: Plato.
There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man's mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy's basic questions - and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man's long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness."
I've written before about the bright spots of Western history (ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Enlightenment Paris and England). I don't really know enough about the darker spots to find common reasons for their declines. This is something that I'll keep an eye out for now.
I do want to write something that is at least a bit in Plato's defense. After I wrote about Plato last year, Stan left this comment:
"I've always liked the Whitehead quote, and I've always viewed systematic
interpretations of Plato with suspicion. Take the Republic: Is
Socrates Plato's mouthpiece? Didn't Plato write the arguments of the
other characters as well? Does dialectic lend itself to system? We
don't think of Shakespeare as any one of his characters, so why think of
Plato as any one of his? Whitehead is suggesting that the seeds of
even contradictory philosophies are all found in Plato. For me, the
dialogues are best read as a training ground for philosophic thought,
rather than a source for statements of Platonic dogma."
This year when I read Plato I tried to keep the 'training ground' idea in front of me and that helped.
Hey, Peder, I'm glad my comment continues to serve you. I'm not a big fan of Rand. She is full of hasty generalizations and straw men versions of her opponents, all cloaked in the guise of rationality. She is a creative satirist when she takes certain viewpoints to absurd logical extremes.
ReplyDeleteI won't defend everything about Rand but in some ways she is indispensable. From what I've read, her writings on freedom and the individual were fairly lonely in the 20th century. She also had some important things to say about aesthetics. I don't know of any other writer who did as much to push back against the post-modernist movement.
DeleteHaving said that, I don't have nearly the expertise to defend her writings on, say, Kant. And I don't think she ever really had a handle on some fairly important subjects like 'love'. I wouldn't be surprised if her black and white viewpoints led her to go to far in her attacks.
I'm curious on this specific question though. Are there good examples of societies that were more Platonic than Aristotelian that created one of those bright spots on history?