Plato v. Aristotle: The Ideas That Shaped Rand, Kant and the World

you can't really understand history without some knowledge of Plato and Aristotle their ideas have shaped the world for the last 2500 years and you can't really impact the future without some knowledge of their Chief exponents the manual Kant on the side of Plato Ein Rand on the side of Aristotle [Music] Plato held that there's an intellectual Elite that has a monopoly on knowledge and because they have a monopoly on knowledge they also should rule over all other people that idea might sound familiar it's it's really the blueprint behind every dictatorship in history Plato got there

in an interesting way what makes a given thing the type of thing it is Plato asked what is the dogness of dogs or the chairness of chairs whatever it is it must be something Universal and unchanging yet all the dogs and chairs we see are unique and fleeting Plato said beyond this world there is an immaterial non-spatial immortal world of forms and the things in this world are merely imperfect reflections of those forms well who has knowledge of the world of forms not the every man or the every woman not the average Joe not the

person on the street no the person who has the time and the resources to sit around and think about this stuff off for decades and decades until they become enlightened [Laughter] until they have a certain Revelation or intuition and then they have that knowledge nobody else has it they ought to rule Aristotle by contrast opposed all of Plato's fundamentals whereas Plato spurned and devalued the observable World Aristotle was obsessed with it whereas Plato sought supposedly pure knowledge that transcended observable facts Aristotle took observable facts as the starting point for everything Plato started with abstract ideas

Aristotle started with observation the Middle Ages were a time when Plato's ideas sublimated into various dogmas dominated by contrast the Renaissance Enlightenment Scientific Revolution Industrial Revolution and American Revolution all were products of Aristotle's influence Ein Rand wrote If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western Civilization on his shoulders it is Aristotle Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history whenever his influence dominated The Scene It paved the way for one of History's brilliant eras whenever it fell so did mankind Randon intended her philosophy objectivism actually to revive the

Aristotelian method to solidify that method and to buttress it against attacks by other philosophers most notably Emmanuel Kant in rand's view Kant Consolidated all the errors of his Enlightenment era predecessors and initiated a full on counter Enlightenment what he was doing in essence was Reviving the mystical approach of Plato and in fact cutting man off from existence and knowledge all together he said that in fact there are two Realms that probably sounds familiar right the realm of forums and around the realm of actual appearance well Kant had the same thing with different language he called

this realm of experience the phenomenal realm and the realm of actual reality the realm that we have no access to he called that the numeral realm and so we can go about our lives and do science in this realm but actually what we're doing to amounts to very little because this reality is not the true reality Kant held that man's mind and senses deceive him all of our understanding of the world is filtered through these categories that he thought we imposed on existence and so for instance causality is one of his categories we see the

fire and we feel the heat and we think that the fire causes the burn but no that's just part of our minds imposing that sort of causation on what's Happening the mind can't thought is not a tool for grasping reality it's actually a tool for creating reality Hegel fragmented kant's monolithic Theory holding that the categories by which we shape the world evolve over time Karl Marx then came along and splintered it further saying that different classes the working class or proletariat the bourgeoisie the aristocracy have totally different ways of viewing the world they even have

different Logics and today those working in Marx's Shadow who was in turn working in kant's Shadow divide us even further by race gender sexual orientation and so on as Professor Andrew Bernstein has written con subjectivism was fragmented by Hegel weaponized by Marx and transmuted into a seething culture War by postmodernists so there's no world out there that we ought to be trying to grasp and all come together and understand the truth about rather each of us in our own sort of identity tribes have these different categories of grasping what is and we're all vying for

power by fashioning these narratives that enable us to gain that power over other people Kant also held that we have a moral duty to sacrifice our values not even for the sake of other people but merely for the sake of sacrifice further kant's notion of Duty entailed a duty to accept the dictates of political rulers John Locke had said that people have individual rights and they ought to revolt against Emperors and Kings who violate those rights but not so said Kant in an essay he titled Perpetual peace he argues that whatever the king might do

whatever the supreme leader might do it is your duty to accept it and to go along with it einrand aimed to save the enlightenment by Reviving Aristotle's ideas against the mutant virulent form of platonism that Emmanuel Kant had Unleashed on the world she said that in every fundamental respect objectivism her philosophy is the exact opposite of cons and whereas Plato had said that the essence of Any Given thing is this form often another dimension Rand said no actually where we get the Essences of things is via human cognition we have the ability we have this

conceptual Consciousness this incredible tool to look out at the world and see likenesses and differences to both differentiate between things and also to integrate things to see how they're similar so our concepts are objective meaning our basis of knowledge is objective we have this ability to build objective knowledge on top of sense perception to get a better and better grasp of our world just like our concepts are objective based in reality based in fact so said Rand are legitimate values in rand's view values derive from the requirements of life which is the precondition of all

values all living beings need certain values in order to remain alive the values of Any Given organism are based on the requirements of its life every organism in order to stay alive needs certain values plants need a certain amount of water and Sun a tiger needs a certain amount of meat and shade a human being needs many different things he has many many needs but his identity the the type of animal that he is sets the requirements of his life and thereby set the values that he must attain to keep his life in existence to

keep from dying so man has to use his mind use his reason to create the values on which his life depends but reason is a faculty of the individual not of the state or of the collective Rand held that man must use his own reason to create the values on which his life depends what's more he has a right to create those values and a right to use them and to make his life the best it can be we need to understand reality in order to create those values and make our lives great and what's

more we need to be able to act on our own judgment to create those values if we are able to figure out how great Technologies could work but not able to implement them then well we don't really have the power to make our lives great do we we don't have the power to maximize and actualize our potential so we need the ability to act our own judgment in fact we have the right to act on our judgment to make our lives great so long as we don't violate other people's rights to do exactly the same

thing and all of this stands in direct contrast to the ideas of Plato and of Kant and of marks and of Hegel yet the ideas of Plato Kant Hegel and Marx continue to sow Division and destruction today that's why Iran's ideas are as important as ever so Ein Rand aimed to save the enlightenment by Reviving The Aristotelian this worldly approach to knowledge and fortifying it against the platonic content approach that was rampant in her day and has only gotten worse since then so again if you want to have an impact on the future of the

world you really need to understand the ideas of Plato's most important exponent Emmanuel Kant and Aristotle's most important exponent Ein Rand