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Plato, Aristotle, and the 2000 Election

Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Aug. 4, 2000, at 7:05 PM ET

Who do you like better, Plato or Aristotle? The answer may determine your vote in this year's presidential election. Chatterbox reached this tentative conclusion after poring over a 1995 book by Lynne Cheney, wife of Republican vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney, titled Telling the Truth. Buried within Telling the Truth--a somewhat plodding jeremiad against political correctness, moral relativism, and other neoconservative bugaboos--is a passage denouncing the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, for disrespecting the Enlightenment in his book, Earth in the Balance:

Overlooking the fact that these thinkers were a major source of inspiration for the founders of our country, Gore describes them as the source of almost everything that has gone wrong with the world. Their emphasis on reason and their insistence on objectivity-on standing apart from what is being studied and evaluating it disinterestedly-have caused us to become, Gore says, a "dysfunctional civilization," obsessed with consuming, prone to polluting, and deeply unhappy. As Gore describes it, the worldview that led to the scientific revolution has been responsible for everything bad (including "the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin") and nothing good, which does cause one to wonder what worldview the vice president imagines gave rise to anesthesia, the polio vaccine, and-his pet project-the information superhighway.

The claim that Gore sees "the worldview that led to the scientific revolution" as being "responsible for everything bad" and "nothing good" is a distortion that's characteristic of Cheney's thuggish approach to intellectual discourse. But Cheney is right that Gore's book criticizes Enlightenment thinkers like Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. Earth in the Balance is a somewhat sophomoric exercise in philosophical discourse, but when you strip away its grandiosity and show-offy rhetoric, its arguments tend to be more commonsensical than Cheney lets on. What Cheney caricatures as a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment is really an attempt on Gore's part to engage some of its bigger questions. Here is a summary of Gore's "what's wrong with the Enlightenment" argument:

1.) The Judeo-Christian tradition, in establishing mankind's "dominion" over the earth, also charged mankind with environmental stewardship. (The same passage in Genesis that mentions "dominion," Gore points out, also requires humans to "replenish"-i.e., care for--the earth.)

2.) When the Enlightenment came along, Descartes remembered "dominion," but breezed past the idea of stewardship. This allowed Descartes to place the idealized world of rational thought on a higher plane than nature. In this sense, Descartes was emulating Plato and yielding to what Cheney's fellow neoconservative, Michael Novak, has called the "great temptation of the West."

3.) Bacon then did Descartes one better by separating science from religion.

4.) Instead, Descartes and Bacon should have emulated Gore's favorite Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Where Plato thought "the thinker is separate from the world he thinks about," Aristotle thought "everything in our intellect comes from the senses, and thus the thinker is powerfully connected to the world he thinks about." Aristotle, in other words, understood that man had both dominion over and stewardship of the earth.

Even Chatterbox, who is an atheist (and therefore inclined to look more favorably than Gore on Bacon's secularism), can't really quarrel with Gore's basic point here that the realm of rational thought should be connected to the realms of morality and nature. To Cheney, though, Gore has positioned himself as enemy of the western canon. This is nonsense. Aristotle is as much a part of the western canon as Plato is; so is Genesis. If Chatterbox were as irresponsible as Cheney, he might accuse her of positioning herself against the Bible!

George W. Bush, like Cheney, seems to embrace a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian view of the universe. He has a terrible environmental record in Texas. When he talks about what he'd do as president, he almost always spouts generalities. He famously can't remember the names of world leaders. Gore, on the other hand, is Aristotelian. He wants to reduce emission of greenhouse gases. He has an oppressively specific set of policy proposals, and tends to bore in on (sometimes irrelevant) minutiae when attacking rival proposals. He knows everybody's name. If you like Plato, vote for Bush. If you like Aristotle, vote for Gore.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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Reader Response from The Fray:


Gore is kind of Aristotelian, but it's silly to say that Bush is a Platonist. Plato, after all, believed in rule by philosopher king and if there's one phrase that doesn't apply to Bush, it's philosopher king. And I would be surprised to hear that there was a passage in Plato that called for the destruction of the environment. Still, if Noah connects his (obviously facetious) theory about Bush as a Platonist with Laura Bush's professed love of the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov, he might actually have something. Do the Bush's share a secret hankering for transcendental tyrannies? (Or does Laura see the passage as an anti-government parable, one showing that the well-intentioned state--the state that substitutes itself for spontaneous human compassion, caring, and charity, ie the liberal state rather than the "compassionate conservative" state--leads logically, inexorably to the burning of Jesus?)

--Adam Lehner

(To reply, click here.)



Not to put too sharp an edge on my criticism of this so-called debate, I think it would be best for politicians and pundits to stick to the more accessible portions of Plato and Aristotle such as (respectively) the Republic and the Politics. As far as Descartes and Bacon and the Enlightenment, the whole argument becomes muddled. For example, St Thomas Aquinas was a staunch Aristotelian, even though he also was, as we all know, an extremely influential Christian theoretician. It simply is too facile to bifurcate politicians into Aristoteleans and Platonists. It is true that Aristotle was an early naturalist and Plato if not an idealist then at least a supernaturalist. However, how this translates to anything useful about political philosophy is certainly not something that Lynne Cheney or Al Gore could polish off in a popular book.

--Andrew Straticzuk

(To reply, click here.)


Mr Noah might want to actually present evidence that Aristotle was an environmentalist and Plato wasn't. Because I've read, I've translated both writers and off the top of my head I can't think of a single thing to support that claim. Or is it being asserted on the basis of this: 'Where Plato thought "the thinker is separate from the world he thinks about," Aristotle thought "everything in our intellect comes from the senses, and thus the thinker is powerfully connected to the world he thinks about." Aristotle, in other words, understood that man had both dominion over and stewardship of the earth.' Noah's quoting someone, but it isn't clear who he's quoting. I hope his acceptance of this characterization of both writers has more basis than that. Please let's leave this sort of simplistic Plato vs. Aristotle generalization to those to whom it belongs: first-year university students bullshitting in the coffee shop.

--Keith M. Ellis

(To reply, click here.)


I wish someone could show me just how either Plato or Aristotle can be viewed as environmentalists. The point of environmentalism is to preserve ecosystems exactly as they are, not transform or domesticate them. Can anyone show me anything in either philosopher that would support a belief in "wildness" for its own sake? The "deep ecologists" are very clear about all Western philosophy being the enemy. As for the Judeo-Christian tradition, the familiar passage in Genesis has God saying to humans "be fruitful, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over ...every living thing that moveth on the earth." How can having dominion be read as caring for the earth in the environmentalist sense? "Replenish" must be a reference to agriculture. Gore/Noah ought to concede that environmentalism has very little to do with traditional Western values of any kind. Perhaps this explains why activists are always trying to promote their point of view on traditional grounds of public health. They know that wildness purely for its own sake wears rather thin.

--Edward Brynes

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As to Lynn Cheney, it's unclear where she stands. Presumably, she believes in a God--which is sort of Platonic. But her hero (?) Aristotle was a crypto-atheist. My guess is that Cheney is a 'one from column A, one from column B' type, and damn the contradictions. Has she said anything about the evolution debate? I don't think so. (Neither, by the way, have any other conservatives. They should be ashamed.)

Any attempts to firmly attach Plato or Aristotle to current schools of thought are doomed. The Christian church was Platonic until 1200, when St Thomas Aquinas brought Aristotle in as a replacement. Platonic thought was an early stimulus to mathematics, an important tool that allowed subsequent Aristotelian empiricism to function, and science to develop. So which is it? The answer to those questions is: Both. It is refreshing to see these sorts of issues being discussed in the pages of Slate. Very refreshing.


--Mark Poyser

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