Two Routes to the Same Good
Plato and Aristotle were very different thinkers. They came at the same fundamental philosophical problems from radically different directions. Rafael nicely characterized this in his famous “School of Athens” painting – Plato, ever the tutor, sternly pointing to the sky; Aristotle, the indignant pupil, gesturing reflexively toward the earth. But this image is somewhat deceiving. To anyone unfamiliar with the territory, you might walk away from the work thinking that Plato and Aristotle differed fundamentally, rather than merely instrumentally. Indeed, since the Enlightenment, this is the dominant story told about the thinking of the two men: Plato is the “idealist”, concerned with transcendent objects of pure thought, and disdainful of the material world. Aristotle is the “empiricist” (or, at least, “nominalist”), determined to derive his general understandings from the experience of his senses only, and unconcerned with vaporous notions of transcendence. But this characterization is somewhat misleading. Both men were in fact aiming at the same end, and nowhere is it more plain to see, than in their divergent approaches to The Good. Let’s explore why.