Lloyd Gerson’s Aristotle and other platonists:
Aristotle versus Plato. For a long time that is the angle from which the tale has been told, in textbooks on the history of philosophy and to univer- sity students. Aristotle’s philosophy, so the story goes, was au fond in opposi- tion to Plato’s.1 But it was not always thus. The indispensable historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius tells us, for example, that Aristotle was Plato’s “most authentic disciple.”2 Beginning perhaps in the 1st century B.C.E., we observe philosophers already claiming the ultimate harmony of Academic and Peripatetic thought. Antiochus of Ascalon is frequently recognized as a principal figure in this regard.3 A similar view is recorded by Cicero, a disciple of Antiochus.4 Later, in the 2nd century C.E., we find the Platonist Alcinous in his influential Handbook of Platonism simply incorporating what we might call Aristotelian elements into his account of what he took to be authentic Platonism.
5 Finally, and most important, for a period of about three hundred years, roughly from the middle of the 3rd century C.E. to the middle of the 6th, Aristotelianism and Platonism were widely studied and written about on the assumption that they were harmonious philosophical systems.6 The philosophers of this period who held this view are today usu- ally given the faintly pejorative label ‘Neoplatonists.’ The label, originating in early nineteenth-century Germanic scholarship, has a dubious value as a category of historical reality. For the so-called Neoplatonists regarded them- selves simply as Platonists; that is, as interpreters and followers of Plato.7
They would have probably been more comfortable with the label ‘Paleo- platonists’ than with the label ‘Neoplatonists.’ In addition, the presumptive designation of later followers of Plato as ‘neo’ subtly suggests that Aristotle must have been a ‘non’ Platonist. This book aims to give an account of how the perception of harmony arose among these Platonists, how it was articu- lated and defended, and to what extent it is justified.8 I use the acceptedlabel ‘Neoplatonists’ with the hope that the reader will keep in mind that ‘neo’ is the last thing that these Platonists wished to be. The case for harmony is partly cumulative. The more one sees harmony in a particular area, the more one is inclined to consider it in another, per- haps hitherto unsuspected. And naturally, the more one views Aristotle’s philosophy as a system, the more is one inclined to view partial harmony as suggesting, if not entailing, complete harmony. Still, from the Neoplaton- ists’ point of view, resistance to an account of Aristotle’s philosophy as a sys- tem is not all that troubling. Platonism itself provided all the systematic structure necessary. Many scholars have noticed and argued for a Platonic influence in one or another of the texts of Aristotle. Not infrequently these interpretations are rejected for no other reason than that they “make Aristotle too much of a Platonist.” But when a large number of such texts are put alongside each other, such protestations begin to seem hollow. At some point one might well begin to wonder whether perhaps the reason Aristotle appears to be a Pla- tonist is that in fact he is one.
The case for harmony is also partly inferential. That is, most of the Neo- platonic material—both the commentaries and the personal writings— assumes harmony rather than presenting a brief on its behalf. Since the plausibility of the assumption is in large part what this book is about, my task is often to try to show how it helps us to illuminate some otherwise very puz- zling texts. Most revealingly, we shall see time and again that a text seem- ingly resistant to any reasonable conclusion regarding its meaning has been rendered so by an antiharmonist assumption. When scholars repeatedly say, “This is what the text appears to mean, though it simply can’t mean that because that would be Platonic,” it is perhaps salutary to reexamine the assumption that leads to this cul-de-sac. ‘Harmony,’ when used of two philosophical positions, can of course mean many things. Most innocuously, it can mean ‘not in contradiction’ or, simply, ‘consistency.’9 There are countless philosophical positions that are harmonious in this sense simply because they are logically uncon- nected. Usually there is little point even in mentioning that A’s position does not, in fact, contradict B’s.
Those who held Aristotelianism to be in harmony with Platonism did not mean merely that their views were not in contradiction with each other. Another relatively weak though significant sense of ‘harmony’ underlies the principle ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ With the rise of competing philosophical schools in antiquity, a member of one school might be viewed as an ally of members of another school owing to their joint antagonisms.10 The idea of the harmony between Platonism and Aristotelianism that drove the philosophy of our period was different from these. It was also typically not explicitly thema- tized. In many cases we have to infer the meaning a Neoplatonic author gives to ‘harmony’ from the specific claims made about putatively harmo- nious doctrines. Though necessarily somewhat vague, the concept of har- mony contains a rich description of a nexus of relations, which emerges in the following discussion.
There are, however, some relatively clear boundaries within which all our authors were working. First, the idea of harmony rested on a per- ception of a sort of division of labor. Roughly, it was held that Plato was authoritative for the intelligible world and Aristotle was authoritative for the sensible world: “In every case he did not want to depart from nature but to consider the things above nature according to their relation to nature, just as the divine Plato, for his part, and in the manner of the Pythagoreans, examined even natural things according as they partake of those things above nature.”11 But this division of labor rested upon and flowed from jointly held philosophical principles. What this meant was that Aristotelian philosophical claims could be subsumed under the more capacious and ultimately true Platonic system in a way roughly analogous to the way that Newtonian mechanics can be subsumed under quantum mechanics or sentential logic can be subsumed under the pred- icate calculus.12
In any case, Gerson’s point is that instead of restricting ourselves to the texts of Plato and Aristotle on their own, we should take seriously the perspective of late ancient (neo)platonism as a viewpoint from which the two systems can be seen to be in harmony. This was indeed a common view, and you find it as late as Boethius. The perception that there is a sharp split between the two arguably owes quite a bit to the form of aristotelianism that became popular in christian scholastic philosophy, which developed at a time when Plato’s works weren’t available in the west and which interpreted Aristotle in a rather novel way. The classic issue here is the status of the active intellect. The stronger interpretation, and the one favoured by late ancient commentators and the islamic tradition, is that the active intellect is essentially God, and that Aristotle’s epistemology is a kind of divine illuminationism very close indeed to the view suggested by Plato. On the Thomist reading, however, the active intellect becomes a faculty individuated with each person, and from here, you start getting this caricature of Aristotle as “the empiricist” who “took the ideas from the lofty heavens and planted them in the sensible realm”. Not that this reading has no basis whatsoever in the aristotelian texts, the point is simply that it really exaggerates the difference.
https://historyofphilosophy.net/aristotle-plato