Plato’s Idealism & Aristotle’s Realism: An Introduction

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) in The School of Athens by Raphael, 1509–1511.

You have probably seen that picture: it being the centerpiece of Raphael’s most renowned paintings of all time, The School of Athens, and in the larger picture of the painting, it represents the most distinguished philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists gathered together and sharing each of their ideas.

In the middle, Raphael captured two of the most prominent figures of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. They are seen conversing, lost in midst of their philosophical arguments amongst the hubbubs of the hall. Plato could be seen pointing a finger up, whilst Aristotle holds his hand down.

Plato was an idealist and believed in a perfect society, meanwhile, Aristotle was a realist and believed in a working governmental system.

An idealist is a person who is guided more by ideals than by practical considerations, and a realist is a person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly. If we were to put it simply, based on their views, Aristotle was a pragmatic, empirical, down-to-earth man meanwhilst Plato was much more of an abstract visionary.

Plato’s depiction of a quintessential society is composed of children segregated from their parents from birth and raised in a communal surrounded with others, and where there is no private property or owning belonging to an individual. A man’s belonging is everyone’s belongings, a man’s son is everyone’s son. Plato believed that selfishness in man when it comes to private property is what causes discord in society. Thus, Plato strove to eliminate selfishness in humans by having them live in a federated communal. He yearns for societal unity even though it interfered with his zany conception of how it could be created, however unconventional it was.

Meanwhile, Aristotle disagreed with Plato’s views, and his realism is a rejection of Plato’s idealism. He believed that selfishness is one of the fundamental formulae of human survival, as in stepping on others to get ahead in life. Aristotle instead wanted to acknowledge selfishness rather than dismissing it. To him, selfishness equals survival and a good man is ‘particularly selfish’. Plato however, wanted to transcend selfishness.

To Plato, as an idealist, he believed that if any kinds of reality were to exist whatsoever, it would be in a form of ideas inside the mind, and the objects of thought are the true reality. He also believed in perpetual ideas outside the room of time and space and behind the physical realm, which are called forms.

Plato thought that there must be more to the world than the reality we see around us, which was how he founded forms. Forms are sorts of ideas and blueprints of something in your mind that you have perceived in reality. If you want to be well at something in life, you would have to grasp the idea of what you want to achieve and envisage it so you could master it wholly. He referred to a world of ideas, a metaphysical world where perfection exists. How do we make sense of this cacophony of objects and things around us? How is it that we have the discerning ability to perceive and classify things and objects in the mind? How do we get and understand knowledge?

His perception when it comes to forms were much more fluid, such as justice, courage, truth, etc. How can we discern what is just and what is not? How can we know if a man had just committed a courageous act and when a man has not? How can we detect the truth?

To summarize Plato’s theory of forms, the concept in the mind is in a sense more real than the physical object itself.

Compared to Plato, Aristotle was a much more pragmatic man. He, as a realist, studied the nature of things and not only did he believed the material world to be real and independent of our imagination but also for it to be the human comprehension’s ultimate objective. He believed in a much realistic approach to things and stuck to the actual character of it compared to Plato’s forms and ideas. He didn’t believe in solipsism and indirect realism, and he was also the person who founded the fundamental structure of the development of western philosophy.

Contrasting to the other thought-formed, idealistic philosophers of his time, Aristotle focused on science, classification, astronomy, and observation.

For a primary example of Aristotle’s scientific classifications, he had the theory of forms of life which are divided by three: the nutritive soul (plants), the sensitive soul (animals), and the rational soul (humans).

Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of forms but he didn’t reject the notion of the theory by its whole. His argument was that forms are inherent to the objects and cannot exist apart from them, so it has to be studied in relation to them.

In Plato’s dialogue, Republic, he limned his portrayal of a utopia. In this utopia, as it was mentioned above, children are segregated from their parents from birth and are raised in a communal. In Plato’s utopia, people are divided into three classes: the producers, the auxiliaries, and the guardians.

When Dionysius of Syracuse, the man that once sold Plato as a slave back to Aegina, passed away and was replaced by his young and freshly throned son, Dionysius II, Plato saw this as a chance to practice his idea of the perfect society by talking it through Dionysius II’s head since he was inexperienced when it came to public affairs and the only thing he mastered at the time was woodworking, thus Plato went to Syracuse in an instant. Although he soon found Syracuse to be unfit to implement his utopia and went back to Athens, but Dionysius II had been too infatuated with Plato, furthermore missing his presence as soon as he left. He was envious of Plato and Dion’s closeness and threatened to take every piece of Dion’s individual belongings along with his riches if Plato didn’t return to Syracuse immediately.

Volume 1 of OnPhilo, originally written in Dec 2018