Aristotle vs. Plato: Two Theories of Progress — and the Institution That Produced Both

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The disagreement that opens in this episode is as relevant today as it was during the time
of Plato and Aristotle.


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These competing approaches to knowledge, governance, and human advancement, remains very
much alive today.


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Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from antiquity
to the age of AI.


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Two episodes ago, we traced how Plato coined the term philosopher and what that meaning
risked.


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Last episode, we examined the institution he built to make that wager pay off.


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The academy, its curriculum, its method, its claim that philosophical knowledge could
accumulate across generations.


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Today, we find out whether the bet actually paid off.


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The verdict comes in the form of a man Plato trained himself, Aristotle.


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Three key questions will carry us through this episode.


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One, how sharp was Aristotle's break from Plato?


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And when did it actually begin?


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Two, did the two philosophers hold fundamentally different views about whose progress is
for and who can achieve it?


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And then lastly, what happened to their ideas after the academy and the Lyceum closed?


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Did the argument they began inside the same institutions survive the two of them?


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When going through our episode today, there are going to be three terms we're going to
reference.


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Some we've heard before and some that are going to be new.


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The first term is techne, which means craft or skilled making.


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We've seen this word many times before.


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We've seen it in episode two.


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It returns here, though, in a new context, where Plato treated techne as insufficient
without philosophical governance above it.


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Aristotle will argue it constitutes a legitimate form of knowledge in its own right.


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The second term is telos, which means end or purpose or goal.


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For Plato, the telos of human life points towards the forms, fixed and eternal above the
world of change.


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For Aristotle, however, the telos is imminent, already inside things, just waiting to be
actualized.


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So that's a key difference.


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The telos is already inside of us, waiting just to be actualized in reality.


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The third term is the forms, the term forms itself.


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And this is Plato's claim that behind every particular beautiful thing or a just act or an
excellent person, there stands an eternal, unchanging original, the standard, the standard


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we are striving for.


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Aristotle disputed this directly.


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He argued that form is already inside of things unfolding from within.


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As Professor Lloyd reads Aristotle, the seed does not reach toward an external original as
it does with Plato because it is already potentially what it will become.


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The disagreement that opens in this episode is as relevant today as it was during the time
of Plato and Aristotle.


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These competing approaches to knowledge, governance, and human advancement, often rooted
in Platonic or Aristotelian logic, it remains very much alive today.


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So in the mid-20th century, for example, Karl Popper saw in Plato the philosophical root
of closed authoritarian societies.


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Another view came from the political philosopher and well-known academic Leo Strauss.


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He found in Plato a recovery of natural rights, the philosophical basis for judging
political orders that modern liberal thought in his view had abandoned.


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Now on the Aristotelian side, thinkers including the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the
moral philosopher Alastair McIntyre, and the classicist Martha Neusbaum


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drew on this conception of practical reason and political plurality to argue that genuine
human advancement emerges not from the governance of enlightened few, which is what they


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point to for Plato, but from a shared activity of citizens acting in public life every
day.


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These are competing visions of who progress is for and who it is equipped to lead it.


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And the scholarship is not settled on this point.


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It is not settled on which tradition has the stronger claim,


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So for Aristotle, how sharp was the break from the academy?


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There's a well-known image of Aristotle emerged as a hard-headed empiricist who arrived at
Plato's school and promptly started to dismantle it.


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Professor G.E.R.


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Lloyd, however, he disputes this image, arguing that Aristotle was far from a rebel and
instead was initially deeply invested in Plato's work.


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Aristotle held that the soul in its true and natural state is separate from the body, and
that the highest form of human activity is philosophical contemplation withdrawn from the


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world.


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That sounds a lot like Plato.


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So these are not the positions of a critic initially.


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They are the positions of a student and an adherent of Platonic thought.


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Professor Lloyd demonstrates that the break itself was gradual from Aristotle's point of
view, but it began from inside the academy itself.


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Aristotle was already criticizing the theory of forms, Plato's main theory, while still
identifying as a Platonist.


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Professor Guthrie confirms the particular institutional conditions that made this
possible.


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The academy trained its members, and we discussed this in the last episode.


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in dialectical argument without demanding conformity.


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So in other words, it was training them how to think and how to argue and come up with
their own conclusions.


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So ironically, the school's own method produced its most consequential critic, in this
case, Aristotle.


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When Plato died in 347 BC, Aristotle left Athens.


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Professor Guthrie notes he departed with Xenocrates.


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conservative Platonist heading toward another Platonic circle in the area of Asia Minor.


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The departure was political as much as philosophical.


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Aristotle was a metic, which is a term for a resident alien who had no citizen rights in
Athens.


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And he had Macedonian ties in the city inflamed against Macedon.


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So it was not a rupture, it was an exit the Academy had made inevitable.


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Now between Plato and Aristotle, they each had two different theories of agency, of human
agency.


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The philosophical disagreement between Plato and Aristotle when it comes into full view is
a disagreement about who progress is for.


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For Plato, as Professor Annas reads the Republic, progress is ascent towards the forms.


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We just discussed this, these perfect forms, So progress is an ascent towards those forms,
but it's available only to those who complete a full philosophical formation.


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And we'll discuss what that formation was, but it was quite a dedication of time and over
a long period of time.


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Whereas Aristotle locates the telos differently, the direction differently.


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The end of a developing thing is imminent, built in and waiting to be actualized.


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So Aristotle thought that what something would ultimately become was already inside, but
that you had to go through a various set of steps to complete that.


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that journey, if you will.


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So whether Aristotle's telos liberates human potential or quietly limits it, because
again, the plan is inside, by fixing in advance what each thing can actually become,


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that's a question that scholarship has not fully resolved, but we will return to this
later.


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Form in Aristotle's model, as Professor Lloyd argues,


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is something gradually acquired during the process of change, not contemplated from above
as Plato argued.


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So the example he uses is the builder, whereas he states that the builder already knows
the purpose of the house.


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He does not need a philosopher to tell him.


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And this is a key point, because what Aristotle is not saying is that this is not
predetermined.


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The builder doesn't necessarily have to build that house.


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He might fail in building the house.


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But his role is building that house.


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And when he reaches his end, he will have built that house.


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Professor Jaeger, in his reading of the cave in Paideia, adds further nuance to Plato's
conception.


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He treats it as a story about the human capacity for transformation available in principle
to anyone.


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So this is how Professor Jaeger views Plato's allegory of the cave more as a story than as
a


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prescription or formula.


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curriculum Plato designed was grueling and selective in practice he argued.


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So to get there was quite a journey as I just mentioned before.


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Professor Jaeger does not however resolve whether Plato intended restriction or whether
restriction was an institutional consequence.


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So in other words Professor Jaeger is not stating either way whether or not Plato intended
this process of a long process to get to be able to interpret these forms.


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as a necessary built-in restriction, or if that's just kind of a restriction that came
through the institution?


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So that question also remains open, and it's precisely the gap that Aristotle steps into.


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Then comes the topic, going back to Plato, of the vertical cumulativity test.


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Professor Christopher Moore, in his well-known book, Calling Philosophers' Names,
identifies what makes Aristotle's departure philosophically decisive and interesting.


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On the question of knowledge accumulation within the academy, Professor Moore argues that
Aristotle took his predecessors very seriously.


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So Aristotle looked at those who came before him.


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and he assumed that they were genuinely wise and engaging and he engaged carefully with
their arguments as a form of philosophical progress.


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Conversely, Plato held that what earlier thinkers truly meant could not be recovered.


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Philosophy began fresh with its own inquiry.


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So Plato did not go back through the record to see what the others had said.


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Every process was a new process towards working towards those forms.


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For Aristotle, the answer was cumulative inquiry.


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So he constantly building on the past, open to any serious thinker, not reserved for those
who had completed the arduous ascent as prescribed by Plato.


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Professor Moore argues that it was the Academy that made this possible.


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It formalized Socratic discussion into full-time systematic inquiry, the first institution
designed to produce cross-generational philosophical progress.


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This was Plato's original vision.


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And ironically, as I mentioned, Aristotle was its greatest product.


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And his departure puts the founding bet of the Academy itself to the test.


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Professor Moore identifies the principle Aristotle carried out at the academy.


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And it went as follows, since progress in philosophy is possible, bring everything of
relevance to bear on every question.


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So let's look back to the historical record and add all of it when doing our analysis.


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And Aristotle applied it fully and eventually it led him away from Plato's forms, away
from the curriculum at the academy and into a school of his own.


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The bet succeeded in producing a thinker capable of exactly what it promised.


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A thinker that could think on its own.


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However, it failed in that the institution could not contain him.


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The verdicts are not in contradiction, but they both stand simultaneously.


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Was the academy a success by producing a student that could no longer be part of the
academy?


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Or was it a failure because it couldn't contain one of their own students within the
academy?


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That's the question that was being posed.


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Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BC.


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Spousippus, and he was the leader of the academy who succeeded Plato, had subsequently
died by the time Aristotle returned.


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Xenocrates now led in his place at the academy.


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Aristotle established himself instead, not at the academy, but at the Lyceum, which was an
existing public gymnasium open to the city with a competing mission.


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building around it a community of inquiry with a shared library, common meals, and rules
of procedure.


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Many of those were things that Aristotle was trying to do while in the academy as well.


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Professor Guthrie notes the customs were modeled on the academy, as I mentioned.


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A counter proposal to the academy, but not a repudiation.


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So whereas the Academy institutionalized ascent, Plato's ascent towards those perfect
forms?


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The Lyceum,


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alternatively, it institutionalized inquiry, systematic research across many different
domains and carried on and extended well after Aristotle's death by his successors.


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As Professor Lloyd describes it, the organization of research gathered momentum in the
last period of Aristotle's life.


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They were researching an enormous number of different topics.


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Lloyd's account makes the institutional contrast plain.


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Whereas the academy trained the philosophical elite to govern, this is Professor Lloyd's
account, the Lyceum was built to accumulate knowledge across generations open to any


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serious inquirer, not just those who had completed the arduous ascent that Plato
prescribed one must do in order to reach the level of understanding the forms.


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Over time, both traditions have outlasted their founders.


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Plato's conception, progress through philosophical formation and governed by those who
made that vertical ascent,


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it continued and ran through Neoplatonism and many other traditions that locate
advancements in the enlightened few.


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Aristotle's conception,


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knowledge accumulated through practice and open inquiry,


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later surfaced within various medieval universities, the empirical tradition itself, and
the modern research institution.


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It's an idea that was taken up by many prominent social theorists, including Karl Marx,
for example.


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Marx's conception of praxis,


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which is the equivalent to purposeful human action as the engine of historical change,
draws directly on Aristotle's account of practical knowledge as scholar Richard


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Bernstein has argued as others.


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Professor Lloyd interestingly notes that the two philosophers actually shared a common
conviction.


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that the world exhibits a certain order and that knowledge of that order is possible.


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So that's an interesting thing that they both had.


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They had different ways to get there and what they couldn't agree on was exactly


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how to get there and who gets to build it, who gets to build that society?


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Is it the few as they ascribe to Plato's theory or the many as they ascribe to
Aristotle's?


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So look back in retrospect, we started with a word, but the word was philosophos, and a
wager, that philosophy could be institutionalized, accumulated, and transmitted across


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generations.


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And then we watched the wager being placed.


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The institution was built, which we discussed in episode nine, and its greatest product
walked out the door, which was Aristotle.


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Scholars also disagree about which tradition has the stronger claim on human agency.


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So which of those theories between Plato and Aristotle empowered human beings more?


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Or whether progress requires a governing vision from above, as in Plato's forms, or
whether practice accumulated honestly was good enough, as in Aristotle,


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So two conceptions of progress emerged from the same institution, the academy, during the
same generation in ancient Greece.


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Plato's, that genuine advancement requires philosophical formation guided by those capable
of seeing what most cannot.


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Or was it Aristotle's, that knowledge accumulates through practice, observation, and open
inquiry.


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These two visions have surfaced across two and a half millennia, and they continue to be
relevant in the present.


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So this podcast in general will document the appearance of these theories along with
others throughout the arc of this series.


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In upcoming episodes, we will seek to hear more voices on these ideas of progress.


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but leaving the debates open for you to consider.


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Until next time,


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If you enjoyed this episode, can find Notions of Progress on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and
Spotify.


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And all the sources, reading recommendations, and further context for every episode are in
the show notes.


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If you are enjoying this series, liking the episode on YouTube and signing up for the
newsletter at notionsofprogress.com really helps more people find these ideas.


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For those who want to go even deeper, the Curator's Flame blog and Substack newsletter
accompany each episode with the questions that scholarship leaves open.


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I'm Marshall, tracing ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI and leaving the
debates open for you to consider.


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Until next time.