there is no Aristotle versus Plato

when Arthur Brooks knocks on your door

One of the great pleasures in life is when philosophers disagree. And not just on trivial matters: not, for instance, on the dreadful, minute, sandwich versus taco distinction, or something hazy like life’s meaning, but a really fundamental opposition. Is it safe to assume the natural world exists, or is it not? Is rhetoric based on irrational instinct, or does it follow learnable laws like everything else? The pre-Socratics are a pleasure to contemplate in part because they delight in setting up these oppositions on purpose: Is everything water, like Thales puckishly claimed? Or should we go with cloud instead?

But apart from these guys, oppositions of this order usually work best when one compares two definite principles—rather than trying to insist, more precariously, that the opposition exists between two people. People are more complex than principles; Nietzsche isn’t the opposite of anyone in particular (unless, of course, he is also the opposite of himself).

Nowhere is the awkwardness of human pairing as grand metaphysical distinction more apparent—or to me, more personally infuriating— than when it comes to Plato v. Aristotle. I come into this fight as the offspring of several post-Heideggerian threads of interpretation vis-à-vis the Greeks, and it’s mattered immensely to me to find a larger context for any hermeneutic choice one might care to make in this regard: to have a sense of the sheer variety of ways people have interpreted Plato and Aristotle across different centuries and continents. They aren’t easy authors, and, fortunately, there’s substantial disagreement. It’s much easier to see what’s at stake in the twentieth century’s various quarrels when you consider how scholars in the few centuries immediately following Socrates viewed philosophy, or how, when Plato’s texts were reintroduced to western Europe during the 1400s, some few bold members of the Italian intelligentsia tried to shake up the dogmatic dependence of the medieval era on Aristotle, either by claiming Plato was superior, and/or softening up some key moments from the dialogues in no minor way (thanks a lot for taking the teeth out of “Platonic love,” Ficino).

This is where our current sense of the opposition began, and you may think of the worst version of this faux-opposition as the vulgar-School-of-Athens argument. (This, notably, as Raphael fans tell me, is not even the real point of the painting!) But this cartoon states that the real fight is Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing out, red pill and blue pill, static point A and static point B, either you eat snails, or you eat oysters. In my view, that doesn’t describe even a moderately interesting sports rivalry, let alone a philosophical agon. And since Plato and Aristotle are a particularly interesting and generative pair, it makes the reduction all the more frustrating and unhelpful. Indeed, often, to me, their engagement with each other seems to defy temporality itself, each anticipating the other without either being the chicken or egg, exactly, each waiting for the other to respond with baited breath. If you find yourself agreeing too strongly with Aristotle one day, his own words will force you to take another look at Plato’s, and vice versa: each is always pointing us back to the other.

Anyway, this is one of the few things I let myself get mad about online (which madness is best for the soul to restrict the circumstances of as much as possible). Usually, people invoke this opposition so that one thinker can be completely right, and the other, completely wrong; which means they are missing half the story, and usually more than half the insight. Sometimes this is so Plato can be responsible for wokeness or something foolish like that, sometimes it is so Aristotle can be demonized the better to valorize Plato.¹ Let’s get over the static structure of some long ago Italian fight! It is both cool in context, and also actively prevents us from having better ones.

Usually, though, the resurrection of this zombie argument is more of a fringe claim to wisdom. So imagine my surprise when, a few weeks ago, Arthur Brooks walked up to my door and rang the bell with this very same zombie opposition.

Arthur seems like kind of a nice guy, his enthusiasm for what he calls Aristotelianism is rather touching, and to be sure, it is always good to see links to the Perseus Project edition of the Timaeus appear in national magazines.² But it’s this desire for basic, simple oppositions as a guide to life, the Meyers-Briggs impulse, if you will, that distorts the good of philosophy past what it can bear, and what it can actually help us with. This is true no less of the good life, than it is for politics, or any other kind of thinking.

Brooks’ philosophical writing, however, has a remarkable lucidity, and there are many crucial distinctions about his subject that he does indeed seem to understand, and indeed, explain quite well. But there’s a jumble going on, some sort of failure to carry through his categories consistently, apart from, let’s be clear, the relatively minor point of just getting some history of philosophy wrong, that pulls me into writing about it. Ultimately, I don’t see a recognizable Plato or Aristotle in the article, but there were also a few things about it that provided real moments of dialectic for philosophical distinctions that are really exciting for me, so behold, here are a few of my thoughts about it.

“Does the true essence of a person or thing reside in its unchanging nature, being, or in the fact that it is in flux, becoming? Plato argued the former; his student Aristotle, the latter.”

So Arthur writes, and well, unfortunately, it is not really so. Personally, I love a good opposition between being and becoming. But my favorite text for this is Plato’s Republic 476e: the real opposition that Socrates makes there is between being and non-being, with becoming taking the place of the uncomfortable middle, the blend. Unfortunately, it is only possible to know the truth of things that hold still, Socrates fears; and the one thing we can say about becoming, as metaphysical category, is that it simply won’t do that, at all.

“But I will say that where you come out on this question—whether you believe that you are primarily being or becoming—says a great deal about how you see the world.”

It would say a great deal, yes. To see yourself as pure becoming would be a difficult task indeed. The problem with pure becoming of the self is that nothing at all could be stable, to the extent that nothing could persist from day to day: nothing you did today would affect who you were tomorrow, or even in five minutes. Nothing about you would persist. The self naturally recoils at such a state of affairs.

As such, becoming was Aristotle’s focus, rather than some perfect, invisible being.

Extremely fortunately for us, while Socrates’ argument implies that humans are stuck within the realm of becoming, Aristotle does not argue that we, we humans, sit within this category. And this is a relief indeed! Nothing stable in us, no possibility of virtue, either. What Aristotle does instead is to try to solve the problem as set by Plato’s Socrates’ Diotima: we see that much about us and the world is constantly in motion and constantly changing. Is there, therefore, anything in us that persists? Are we longing for eternity uselessly, or is there anything we can do to persist more?

“None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature,” Aristotle wrote. “For nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.”

This is correct. Nature is that which is fixed, unchanging; that which happens always or ninety-nine percent of the time. So, the moral virtues can’t come from what is purely fixed in us. To be human is to be unalterably so (sorry, Heracles). But the thing is, to be human also contains certain kinds of alteration. The human being is the strangest mixture imaginable of being and becoming, and it is our task to figure out just in what way we partake of each. This rescues us from Socrates’ worry, potentially, but then the burden of proof remains on us.

This becoming, he amplified, is largely in your hands, not determined by nature. . . . In other words, through your habits of moderation, you create yourself as a temperate person—and that becomes your essence.

All right M. Brooks, nearly nearly but no. Our essence, our what it is to be, is to be human. This does not change without essential mutilation. But we do partake of this strange “habit” like thing, the metaphysics of which I have always found both fascinating and not easy to parse. What if there was something in us that was capable of growing being, as it were, not merely through any chance act, but what we in full possession of ourselves chose to do, and managed to pull off, with our whole soul, all parts and pieces working together? This, I think, is what Aristotle means by “hexis,” our capacity for this kind of mixture, and “ethos,” the real possession of a mixture locally achieved in some particular arena. This is hard to see, but as Aristotle might say, possible to be.

The result is not a new human essence, but a different order of being, still in accordance with our nature, and indeed, what our nature already stretched out towards. But it took our rational act and choice to complete, and that’s what makes it interesting phenomenon amongst the beings. Virtue isn’t just nice; it’s a new way of being, and it is Aristotle’s attempt to satisfy the longing we have for more being. We can decide later if this really does the trick, or if we are at this moment pushed back to Diotima.

But what I appreciate about Brooks’ misunderstanding here is that it’s not an accidental problem that it is legitimately hard to explain how and why virtue is a metaphysical mixture: human beings find mixtures of being and becoming hard, and it is a genuinely difficult category to wrap our heads around, as Socrates anticipated.

Which brings me in turn to the thing Brooks most of all messed up, but for reasons that go deeper than the quarrels of some Italians. In his misguided praise of Aristotle as the champion of becoming, he also makes truly the most annoying claim of all to me, personally—that “Plato” believes there is a human, separated, “transcendent” Form of the Human, and also that all other things have this. Behold:

Veterinary science studies individual dogs, which are growing, changing, and dying, but philosophy alone can ponder the unalterable essence of perfect dogginess.

Ah, this is just the question. When the seventeen year old Socrates rolls up to the Panatheneian carnival party, to show off his new theory of the Forms (this is in Plato’s Parmenides), he is very willing to stake the claim that there are Forms of things like the beautiful, the just, and the good, but as to whether there is some Form of the human or even of Fire or of Water, troubles him to the extreme (130b-c).³ This is because the human is a mixture of being and becoming, and it is simply easier to make the smaller and more elegant claim that the only true Forms that exist apart from what we see are these things like the beautiful and the just.

But many people, oh in what century, ah you guessed it, the twentieth, wish to multiply the Forms past Socrates’ hesitations, to anything to which we give a general name (thanks, W.D. Ross 1951).⁴ But this starts us off in a very strange path indeed, that leads with some directness to Goethe’s notion of the Eternal Feminine (an even weirder metaphysical notion that the Form of Human). Suffice it to say, what “Plato” thinks often becomes the very thing that Socrates held off from saying, that seemed to him an insuperably difficult problem with what for him was a sincerely treasured philosophical argument, and one that pursued him over the whole course of his life.

But something happens when there is an essential form of something that we imperfectly participate in, that, in some unholy blend of what we consider as Aristotelian essence, a “Platonic form” in the cartoonish sense, something perfect that is also strangely judgmental—why are you not already the Form of the Human, work harder!! (You are femme but not essentially so, work harder lest you fail of what you already . . . are.) Brooks equates this with the modern sense of “identity,” certainly a strange metaphysical category in the way we popularly mean it, though not quite the same kind of thing. (An “identity” is something we already are, though it does also contain the anxiety of not being the right exemplar of it.)

But on these grounds, he concludes:

Our culture today is likely to push you to be a Platonist—to define yourself as being a particular sort of person, with a fixed, permanent character. . . . For Platonists, I am this and you are that . . . .

Good lord, if only our culture today pushed us to be more Platonist in a real sense, I would rest a happy woman. But Brooks’ main problem is, if he is going to embrace Aristotelian virtue, he is going to have to admit to the necessity of the human aiming through a kind of change to a kind of fixity-stability, and right now, he’s dodging the issue by claiming that virtue is about becoming, while still aiming at an essence that we, through choice and habit, can do something about. Perhaps he will figure this out fairly soon, possibly in a day or two, and so add it to the list of his lucidity.

In the meantime, all of this is to say, I strongly agree that the cartoon Platonism exerts a force that seems to undermine our careful attempt to live out the mixture of being and becoming that we inescapably are. (Indeed, I shall rest content tonight, because I’m closer to my long term project of why the Form of Human is not the same as a judgmental Aristotelian “essence.”) But saying this is Plato’s fault, or that Aristotle is the saving grace for precisely the wrong reasons, will not help us in the slightest, in the most basic self-help sense of the terms. And that’s worth knowing! Indeed, it might even help.⁵

1. I will never get over the tweet, since deleted, that claimed that Aristotle was a proto-atheistic thinker. A care for nature is not proto-atheistic.

2. “Now first of all we must, in my judgement, make the following distinction. What is that which is Existent always and has no Becoming? And what is that which is Becoming always and never is Existent? Now the one of these is apprehensible by thought with the aid of reasoning, since it is ever uniformly existent; whereas the other is an object of opinion with the aid of unreasoning sensation, since it becomes and perishes and is never really existent.” (Timaeus 27a)

3.

4. Gail Fine’s really remarkable essay, “The One Over Many” (1982), helpfully puts Ross’ expansive sense of what gets to have a Form within the context of the patterns of the corpus as a whole. It’s marred by the developmental thesis but there’s still a lot there. One thread is the sense from the Meno that whatever is a general noun will do, but as she argues, this is not always compatible with what she calls Plato’s “imperfection assumption” (231, 232n53), that the notion of specifically separated form can only arise when we notice the imperfection within a group of things, rather than their “essence” or perfection

5. This essay, by the way, is dedicated to Eva Brann, without whom I would never in a million years try to explain this kind of thing, to myself or to other people. But she made it look easy-difficult, beautiful and good. A rose to her!