The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
age in peace and honor; while Aristotle had finally to flee from Athens, being,
like Socrates, condemned to death by the Areopagus. He escaped to Euboia
and died deprived of his second home, a doubly homeless man, in utmost
loneliness.
It has often been stated that Socrates and Plato were truly national figures,
inspired by an inner love for their country, and that they could not have become
what they were without the landscape of Attica. Aristotle was a cosmopolitan
who always looked at mankind.
As Plato was the greatest of Socrates’ pupils, so Aristotle was the only
genius among the students of Plato’s Academy. According to ancient records 174
Aristotle spent twenty years with Plato. “It was his experience of Plato’s world
that enabled him to break through into his own. It was the two together that
gave his intellect the marvelous tautness, speed and elasticity, by means of which
he reached a higher level than Plato had, in spite of the definite difference
between Plato’s unlimited and his own limited genius. Thereafter, to retreat
from that level would have been to turn the wheel of fate backwards.” 175
The words of Aristotle: “I am a friend of Plato, but a greater friend of
truth” hint at a decisive divergence between his own and his master’s mind,
a difference of viewpoint, methods and conceptions, consideration of which
afterwards has occupied the world for more than two thousand years. The
cleavage between Plato and Aristotle culminated in their conceptions of ideas
and the method of their cognition. For Plato ideas existed outside of nature,
for Aristotle within the objects out of the soul of cognition. Plato taught that
all our knowledge is anamnesis, a memory of the existence of the soul before
birth. Aristotle looked at the entelechy as idea, having its aim and purpose
within itself, and he considered it as living immortality. Plato divided the soul
into an immortal part (located in the head) and a mortal part (located in heart
and liver), while according to Aristotle the entelechy lives within the body and
expresses itself in our central organ, the heart. But the decisive point in this
struggle of the two minds was the difference in their conception of nature.
Plato looked upon nature as an obstruction to the human spirit. The soul in its
desire for learning and cognition has constantly to fight against the barrier of
nature and strive for the liberation of the spirit. This view sprang from Plato’s