Read part 1 here: https://jb-talks.com/plato-or-aristotle-the-great-debate-of-western-philosophy/
Part 2 – Aristotle
In part one of this article we looked at the influence of Plato. The way in which he both pioneered and, to this day, encapsulates a way of thinking which aims philosophy at the abstract, at the purely rationalistic. A view which places knowledge in a realm of disembodied concepts and perfect forms. Now we turn to Plato’s student and one of his most ardent intellectual opponents, Aristotle.
A figure whose influence can truly never be understated, Aristotle can be largely accredited with formalising the logical and linguistic structure of western philosophy. Indeed, it took until the mathematical advancements of the 19th century to build, in a significant way, upon the foundation of logic Aristotle laid down millennia prior. Although, again, it is difficult to give an accurate account of someone’s life who lived in 300BC, it is understood that Aristotle came at philosophy from a scientific, biological perspective, and used this grounding in the facts of the physical world to inform and direct his approach to the world.
Aristotle’s approach
For Aristotle, knowledge comes from the world right in front of us. Our senses, what we see, hear, and feel. These are our windows through which knowledge is attainable, and all reasoning and abstraction must be traceable back to sensory experience. This, as you may well imagine, lead his philosophy down a path which bore such little resemblance to that of his tutor (Plato) that it would come to characterise the primary, opposing view of philosophy of in west.
Aristotle rejected the idea that our experience in this life is merely of shadows on the wall of a cave, and the notion of a ‘world of forms’ which holds the eternal truths of the universe. Instead, he argued that the form of an object existed in its physicality, and that it is from the physical world that we draw concepts from. In this way, Aristotle did not recognise the ‘eternal’ truths which Plato based his theory of forms on, claiming instead that such knowledge, like the total degrees in a triangle, is inherent within the triangle itself. This view places the enquiry of knowledge firmly in the reality we all have access to, and grounds knowledge in personal experience and strict empiricism.
Now, that said, it is crucial that we differentiate Aristotle from the more contemporary empiricist thinker. Empiricism in this modern sense – modern here referring to figures in the last five hundred years or so – characterises a view which often rejects the capability of the human mind to make rational calculations and restricts our search for knowledge to the senses alone. This belief comes off the heals of Descartes and his mind body distinction, formed in the 1600’s, and so has major differences to the Aristotelian idea of philosophy. Empiricist thinkers such as John Locke hold that all knowledge comes exclusively from our immediate, sensory experience.
While on some level Aristotle would agree with this as the foundation for knowledge, he would take issue with the empiricist view of concepts. Locke, for example, claimed that reality is too particular for universal, or even general concepts; the concept of apple cannot really be found in reality because each, individual apple is particular in its nature. Aristotle, in a rare instance of agreement with his mentor Plato, argued for the universality of concepts, that we can take reality and, through reason, draw concepts from what we observe in the world. In this way Aristotle harmonises the apparent dichotomy between the rational and the empirical. Reality serves as our source, our gateway into knowledge, while reason is the tool which we use to make sense of these empirical observations.
The influence of Aristotle
As for the influence of Aristotle’s ideas, history tells of how his work was both embraced and rejected throughout the western world and beyond. Indeed, his philosophy proved hugely influential in the so called “golden age” of the Islamic enlightenment in the 9th to the 14th century. Where his translation into Arabic formed the basis of the scientific revolution that propelled Muslim culture onto the forefront of the world stage at that time. Of course, perhaps the most prominence Aristotle ever enjoyed was during the Renaissance, which saw Thomas Aquinas drag western thought out from the doldrums of religious dogma, which had characterised the preceding thousand years of philosophy. This study of Aristotle and his Greek contemporaries set the stage for the scientific revolution and consequent rejection of religious authority in the west.
Furthermore, the equally as significant enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries can be characterised as a backlash to these Aristotelian theories and concepts which rose to such prominence in the preceding centuries. Indeed, many thinkers of this period sought to improve upon the ideas of Aristotle, devolving ever more complex and convoluted theories to describe reality, morality and everything in between. It is from this effort that our now familiar mind body dualism arose. Philosophers such as Descartes, and later Emmanuel Kant, began turning away from Aristotle’s empirical foundation, in favour of an increasingly rational perspective, which had more in common with his mentor, Plato.
I recount this history in order to illustrate what is the key point of this discussion. As we see, despite the wealth of philosophical minds and revered intellects which the western world has to offer, the rejection of Aristotle lead, almost immediately, back to a distinctly platonic perspective. This is because, in my opinion, there is little else to go. Either we take reality as the starting point, the fountainhead of knowledge, or we don’t. This latter option necessitates the question of where then, do we get our knowledge from? When reality gives way to scepticism, we are forced to retreat further into our own minds for concepts, for morality, for answers. And such a fevered retreat tends to spiral into ever more outlandish, unintuitive conclusions, which, despite seeming to follow from strict, logical argument, have no grounding in the real world, and so can say nothing of practical significance.
What we have then is two figures, two ways of doing philosophy and two perspectives on reality itself. While Aristotle identifies what we experience as the crucial starting point of knowledge, and builds his philosophy from this basis, Plato rejects what is in front of us as mere “shadows on the wall” and looks elsewhere for knowledge. It is this dichotomy, this choice of where to look for the answers, which I believe has come to characterise a debate which has raged for centuries and will continue to rage, perhaps never finding consensus.