Role of the State Essays

Role of the State Essays Role of the State Essay Role of the State Essay This paper is being submitted on August 22, 2013 Role of the State Plato’s thought represents an essential aspect of Modern Europe’s classical heritage. His complex and changing notions of identity and difference, his views of the connection between body and soul, passion and reason, and his own varying assessment of the theory of Forms, as refracted through Aristotle’s critique of all these concepts, have laid the groundwork of Western logic, metaphysics and political theory until modern times.Yet, in assessing what modern European owes to its classical heritage, we need to confront the fact that Plato and Aristotle stood opposed to both the major philosophical and political tendencies of modern liberalism and the more recent theoretical attempts such as deconstruction, Marxism and Feminism to undermine those liberal beliefs. The positions of Plato and Aristotle on nearly all of these issues are concentrated in their respective critiques of democracy.Both Plato and Aristotle based their theories on four widely accepted beliefs of the time; knowledge must be of what is real, the world experienced via the senses is what is real, knowledge must be of what is fixed and unchanging, the world experienced via the senses is not fixed and unchanging. These points led to a skeptic point of view which both philosophers wished to target as both agreed knowledge is possible. In order to overcome this contradiction in the argument it became necessary that each philosopher choose a point to disregard and prove to be unnecessary.Plato chose to reject the claim that the world experienced through the senses is what is real; while Aristotle rejected the claim that knowledge must be of what is fixed and unchanging. This presented problems to be overcome by each philosopher: Plato had to give an account of where knowledge could be found while Aristotle had to account for how to have knowledge of that which is undergoing change. This is what leads to the philosophers’ overwhelming differences (Comparison between Plato and Aristotle; Similarities andDifferences, 2013). If Plato was pre-eminently a radical-thinker, Aristotle was decidedly conservative in his political speculation. While Plato is a deductive thinker, Aristotle follows the inductive method. This is clear if we compare the methods of the two. Plato started with abstract notions of justice and virtue and on the basis of this setup an ideal state. Aristotle reasoned inductively by comparing the working institutions of a large number of city-states actually existing in his own time.The intellectual make-up and reasoning, process of the two was different. Plato proceeded from the Universal or the Ideal to the particular, while Aristotle’s process was from the particular and concrete to the universal, Plato believed that reality laid in the ideal i. e. the idea of a thing while Aristotle held that it lay in the concrete manifestation of a thing. Aristotle regarded himself more as an organizer of already-existing knowledge than as a profounder of new philosophy.The reasoning of Aristotle is less imaginative and more logical and scientific than that of Plato and his speculations and judgments are sounder than those of his master. With him, ethics and politics are not so inextricably intertwined as with Plato. If Plato subordinated politics to ethics, Aristotle gave the pride of place to politics. I believe it safe to say that practical political philosophy in the West began with Aristotle. While Plato aimed at the ideal, Aristotle’s objective was not the ideally best but the best attainable.By his keen and practical political insight and systematic treatment of the subject Aristotle laid the foundations of real political science Politics, with him, assumed the character of an independent science. Plato also combined the ethical and the political but Aristotle gave pride of place to the political. He was more individualistic than Plato as Plato dealt with both ethics and politics in one treatise, and Aristotle dealt with the two in two separate treatises i. . the Politics and the Ethics. The Politics of Aristotle still remains one of the greatest classics on political science because it contains much of universal validity.