The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

aristotle
Plato and Aristotle were the dioscuri of philosophy who determined the thought
life of more than two millennia. S.T. Coleridge, in repeating a statement of
Friedrich Schlegel, rightly said that all men are born as either Platonists or
Aristotelians.
Platonism and Aristotelianism are two different methods of human
conception and comprehension. Their difference arose from a basis far more
profound than that of jealousy and rivalry between the young student and
his old teacher, who was supposed to have said that his pupil behaved toward
him like the foal who kicked his mother after draining her dry. In spite of
this touch of bitterness, the old Plato recognized the superiority of Aristotle
over his other students and spoke of him as the “Nous of the Academy,” which
meant intelligence personified. And it must be recalled that Plato referred to
Aristotle’s home as the “house of the reader” because Aristotle introduced the
use of a library and had a complete collection of all sorts of manuscripts on
science and art.
The transition from Plato to Aristotle did not appear as that from one
generation to another but rather as that from one age to a succeeding age.
Herein lies the meaning of the divergence of these two greatest masters of
Greek thought.
Plato was a descendant of one of the oldest families in Athens and claimed
ancestry from Solon, the lawgiver and poet. He belonged to the aristocracy, in
which conservative blood-ties still persisted. Aristotle was born in Stagira on
the peninsula of Chalcidice, close to Macedonia and Thrace, as the son of the
court physician of the Macedonian kings. He belonged to a family in which
the blood-ties were already broken and mixed marriage had taken place. Blood
of various tribes and of nations, like the Macedonians and Thracians, who were
considered to be non-Hellenic or barbarian, flowed in Aristotle’s veins. His
was not a family of Athenian lawgivers, poets and aristocrats, but a line of
physicians and natural scientists. He became an orphan early and, at the age
of seventeen, went to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy. He lived as a metic,
which means as an alien without the full rights of Athenian citizenship. He
remained an alien throughout his life. Plato lived in Athens, a wealthy youth
in the beginning, well protected throughout his career, and died there at great