Letter #185: Jacked Philosophy

Two thinkers, both alike in gainz.

Dad,

I’ve sometimes felt that our conversations reenact the eternal dialogue between Plato and Aristotle depicted by Raphael in his world-famous Vatican fresco, “The School of Athens.” Now, granted, these giants of Western philosophy have certain gifts you and I could never hope to emulate, for instance Aristotle has more hair than you and for some reason Raphael painted Plato with bigger muscles than I have even though the bench press hadn’t been so much as invented yet.

But in our own small-chested way, I feel we mirror the essential pattern that Raphael so brilliantly captured by having Plato gesture upward with his impossibly brawny forearm while Aristotle stretches his enviably masculine hand out over the ground. These two jacked philosophers put forward two opposing but complementary points of view.

For Plato, the physical world was a dim shadow of the spiritual world, truthful only insofar as it displayed traces of ultimate realities like beauty and goodness. As for the objects we see and touch every day, Plato has Socrates say that whoever pays direct attention to them learns nothing: “there is no knowledge of such things as these.”

Aristotle was no materialist, but he was more inclined to believe that the objects we find in the world around us are prime realities and starting points of true knowledge. He argued that “being, in the primary and most exact sense of the term,” refers to concrete entities—“for example, the individual man or the horse.”

The hand Aristotle reaches out over the earth in Raphael’s painting expresses the insistence on data that has always motivated the hard sciences, while Plato’s aspirational gesture leads the mind upward to truths the sciences can’t capture.

I say these attitudes are opposing but complementary because, though they can never be stated together in the same breath, they must at last amount to two ways of looking at one reality. Like the triceps and biceps that rippled so gloriously along the arms of these studly thinkers, material facts and spiritual knowledge have to move in opposition to each other for truth to live.

Abstract speculation that contradicts physical fact is the purest mumbo-jumbo. But to observe the material world without drawing spiritual inference from it is to take a lobotomized view of life, as messianic technologists often do nowadays.

In the matter you now raise, of the allegorical world picture that last predominated in the Middle Ages, I tend to lean more toward the side of Plato—I think even our best physics is only a mathematical symbol or picture of a reality that must, in the end, transcend all models. You, I know, are more uneasy with departure from the solid world and prefer to stay on the ground with Aristotle.

But the genius of Raphael’s painting is that at the center of it is neither Plato nor Aristotle. The core of the picture, the heart of the truth, is in the space between.

Love,
Spencer