The Sleepwalkers (22 page)

Plato
is
equally
hostile
to
the
Pythagoreans'
first
and
favourite
branch
of
science.
"The
teachers
of
harmony,"
he
lets
Socrates
complain,
"compare
the
sounds
and
consonances
which
are
heard
only,
and
their
labour,
like
that
of
the
astronomers,
is
vain.'
³

None
of
this
was
probably
meant
to
be
taken
quite
literally,
but
it
was
–
by
that
extremist
school
of
Neoplatonism
which
dominated
Western
philosophy
for
several
centuries,
and
stifled
all
progress
in
science
–
until,
in
fact,
Aristotle
was
rediscovered
and
interest
in
nature
revived.
I
have
called
them
twin
peaks
separating
two
epochs
of
thought;
but
insofar
as
their
influence
on
the
future
is
concerned,
Plato
and
Aristotle
should
rather
be
called
twin-stars
with
a
single
centre
of
gravity,
which
circle
round
each
other
and
alternate
in
casting
their
light
on
the
generations
that
succeeded
them.
Until
the
end
of
the
twelfth
century,
as
we
shall
see,
Plato
reigned
supreme;
then
Aristotle
was
resurrected
and
remained
for
two
hundred
years
the
philosopher,
as
he
was
commonly
called;
then
Plato
made
a
come-back,
in
an
entirely
different
guise.
Professor
Whitehead's
famous
remark:
"the
safest
general
characterization
of
the
European
philosophical
tradition
is
that
it
consists
in
a
series
of
footnotes
to
Plato"
could
be
amended
by:
"Science,
up
to
the
Renaissance,
consisted
in
a
series
of
footnotes
to
Aristotle."

The
secret
of
their
extraordinary
influence,
intermittently
stimulating
and
choking
European
thought,
during
such
a
near-astronomical
period,
has
been
the
subject
of
passionate
and
neverending
controversy.
It
is,
of
course,
not
due
to
any
single
reason,
but
to
the
confluence
of
a
multitude
of
causes
at
a
particularly
critical
point
of
history.
To
mention
only
a
few,
starting
with
the
most
obvious:
they
are
the
first
philosophers
of
antiquity
whose
writings
survived
not
in
odd
fragments,
in
second-
or
third-hand
quotations,
but
in
massive
bulk
(
Plato's
authenticated
dialogues
alone
make
a
volume
of
the
length
of
the
Bible),
embracing
all
domains
of
knowledge
and
the
essence
of
the
teachings
of
those
who
came
before
them;
as
if
after
an
atomic
war,
among
the
torn
and
charred
fragments,
a
complete
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
had
been
preserved.
Apart
from
bringing
together
all
the
relevant
items
of
available
knowledge
in
an
individual
synthesis,
they
were
of
course,
in
their
own
right,
original
thinkers
of
great
creative
power
in
such
varied
fields
as
metaphysics,
biology,
logics,
epistemology
and
physics.
They
both
founded
"schools"
of
a
new
kind:
the
first
Academy
and
the
first
Lyceum,
which
survived
for
centuries
as
organized
institutions,
and
transformed
the
founders'
once
fluid
ideas
into
rigid
ideologies,
Aristotle's
hypotheses
into
dogmas,
Plato's
visions
into
theology.
Then
again,
they
were
truly
twin-stars,
born
to
complement
each
other;
Plato
the
mystic,
Aristotle
the
logician;
Plato
the
belittler
of
natural
science,
Aristotle
the
observer
of
dolphins
and
whales;
Plato,
the
spinner
of
allegorical
yarns,
Aristotle
the
dialectician
and
casuist;
Plato,
vague
and
ambiguous,
Aristotle
precise
and
pedantic.
Lastly
–
for
this
catalogue
could
be
continued
forever
–
they
evolved
systems
of
philosophy
which,
though
different
and
even
opposed
in
detail,
taken
jointly
seemed
to
provide
a
complete
answer
to
the
predicament
of
their
time.

The
predicament
was
the
political,
economic
and
moral
bankruptcy
of
classical
Greece
prior
to
the
Macedonian
conquest.
A
century
of
constant
war
and
civil
strife
had
bled
the
country
of
men
and
money;
venality
and
corruption
were
poisoning
public
life;
hordes
of
political
exiles,
reduced
to
the
existence
of
homeless
adventurers,
were
roaming
the
countryside;
legalized
abortion
and
infanticide
were
further
thinning
out
the
rank
of
citizens.
The
history
of
the
fourth
century,
wrote
a
modern
authority,
"is
in
some
of
its
aspects
that
of
the
greatest
failure
in
history...
Plato
and
Aristotle
...
each
in
his
different
way
tries
(by
suggesting
forms
of
constitution
other
than
those
under
which
the
race
had
fallen
into
political
decadence)
to
rescue
that
Greek
world
which
was
so
much
to
him,
from
the
political
and
social
disaster
to
which
it
is
rushing.
But
the
Greek
world
was
past
saving."
⁴