Two approaches have been pre-eminently influential in Western philosophy: Platonism and Aristotelianism. But regardless of their foundational influence on Western understanding, these two philosophical approaches capture something essential to all human understanding, such that you can see them reappear again and again, in different guises, across the history of human thought.
One approach says that we should trust what we think over what we see, because our perception is unreliable: we should place ‘mind over matter’.
The other approach says that we should trust what we see over what we think, because our thinking is unreliable: we should place ‘matter over mind’.
The contrast is obvious in ancient Greek philosophy. Plato wants to take us up to the highest intellectual understanding exemplified in mathematical understanding; Aristotle wants to keep our feet firmly on the ground. Both approaches have consequences, good and bad.
Matter Over Mind
Aristotle’s ‘look first, think after’ or ‘matter-over-mind’ approach is constantly bringing us back down to earth, holding theory accountable to our observations of the physical world. And the thing about the physical world is: it doesn’t change all that much. This allows Aristotle’s approach to remain relatively constant in its slow and incremental progression towards scientific understanding.
But it also runs the risk of becoming shallow, superficial, and reductive, and it leaves you very much in danger of getting locked into observational biases. We see this with the Aristotelian ‘geocentric’ view that ‘observes’ the Earth to be at the centre of the universe. This view originated from Aristotle’s metaphysical theory about the ‘heavy’ elements falling as far as they can in the void, which means falling to the middle, meaning the heavy earth beneath our feet must be at the middle of the void. And this theory is confirmed by observation, as we stand on solid ground and watch the fiery stars move around us, above us. It seems as if we are still and they are moving. It takes a long time and a lot of counter-evidence to break out of this observational bias, but we were stuck in this view for nearly 2,000 years.
If you don’t want to wait that long for science to catch up, it helps to have the option of a higher philosophical perspective that questions what we see.
We know that there were philosophers of Aristotle’s time who believed that the stars were fixed and the Earth rotated on its axis, and we know this mainly because the Aristotelians wrote so dismissively of them. It’s possible to see this view in Plato too, although it’s a bit cryptic in his Timaeus.
The point is not so much who had the right answer and for what reasons; the point is that seeing the true meaning of something is often a matter of finding the right perspective.
The 20th century philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe recalls a conversation she had with Wittgenstein, where he asked her why she thought people thought for so long that the sun went around the Earth. She responded that it was probably because it looked as if the sun went around the Earth. To which he replied: ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?’
Mind Over Matter
Perhaps geocentricism is a relatively innocent mistake and not one that’s going to impact your day-to-day life, but not all observational mistakes are innocent.
For instance, Aristotle ‘observed’ that women were inferior to men, noting that they could not do and so didn’t achieve all that much in his Greek society, at least when compared to men. But if you let this observation determine what opportunities your society allows to women, such as literacy and education, you will soon end up locked in a vicious cycle. It takes a higher perspective to recognise this for what it is: not observations but shadows projected onto the wall in a dark cave of ignorance. These are chains that need to be broken.
Plato’s ‘mind-over-matter’ approach, by contrast, wants to take us away from what we observe and up to the higher understanding found in the intelligible world. From that higher perspective – investigating the idea of human beings and not our observations of them – Plato recognises the truth of the idea of gender equality as well as the role that social convention plays in generating gender inequalities.
In simple terms, he notices that society tends to burden women with childcare responsibilities and this prevents them from taking up roles in his Greek society that would lead to more renown. To move society towards a more equal and meritocratic ideal, Plato says that the state should provide childcare, thus freeing women to live as they choose and to achieve no less than men. (Full disclosure: what Plato actually argues for – possibly ironically – is the dissolution of the nuclear family and for all children to be raised by the state, with procreation itself being governed by a kind of managed lottery. But the extremity of this dystopian solution doesn’t diminish the accuracy of the analysis of the problem.)
Plato’s investigations of the idea of a perfectly just society exposes the injustice of gender inequality in a way that Aristotle’s observations do not.
Free Your Mind (then put your thoughts to the test)
Moving away from our observations of the physical world and towards an investigation of our ideas allows you to ask important questions, freeing you from social conventions and even from your own biased perspective, and from there you can make an attempt at gaining a higher understanding. But once you untether understanding from the observable world in that way, you let it fly free. Who then gets to decide what that higher understanding is or ought to be? And what holds it to account?
If you are wise, like Socrates, then you will cautiously find your way out of the dark cave of ignorance and make some progress towards the light of the world as only a cultivated intellect can understand it. But it takes a disciplined humility to stop yourself running away with yourself: you must hold yourself to account, constantly putting your thoughts to the test, endlessly committed to living the examined life. That’s why it’s so important for Socrates to have conversations, because sincere conversations put you to the test and hold you to account. They expose your shortfalls; they often show you things that you did not expect.
If you are not wise but instead are stupid and arrogant, then you will not hold yourself to account, and so you will populate the intelligible world with your own mystical theories and speculations and, believing them to be true, convince others to do the same. You end up in a world of your own making; you see what you want to see, whether or not it’s really true.
Aristotle’s matter-over-mind approach of prioritising observation over theory – an approach we see reflected in modern science – is less vulnerable to this problem. But Plato’s mind-over-matter approach is perpetually vulnerable to corruption via mysticism or arrogance. It remains constant only by becoming dogmatic, since there is nothing holding it to account beyond its own account. And dogmatic philosophy is not really philosophy at all; because, as we all know, that a famous philosopher said it is no reason to take it as true. If it is true then there will be reasons that make it true, and you can find those reasons; you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
Once you free philosophy from the conventions of society or any other common sense observations, nothing holds it to account beyond philosophical wisdom. And philosophical wisdom is often a matter of being willing to reflect on your own thoughts, put them to the test, and be glad to discover when you are wrong.
That’s the kind of wisdom that Socrates had but that Plato’s heirs did not. It seems as if they were led astray by an inflated sense of their own importance, as ‘leaders’ of the most famous philosophical school, convinced, because of this, that they knew better than anyone else. They lost all humility, and with that all intellectual humility. They didn’t have conversations, like Socrates, but gave lectures, and thought enough of themselves to charge fees for doing so. Anyone who would look to call themselves a philosopher should know better.
We should return to the wisdom of Socrates. And where does Socrates’ philosophical wisdom start? We begin by realising that we do not know as much as we think.
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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