Are you an Aristotelian or a Platonist?

Beneath ideologies, political affinities and moral mindsets, there is at bottom the way we go about thinking of the world. Are you an Aristotelian or a Platonist in how you think of the world? This is the subject of an article by Stephen Messenger published in Quillette, entitled "Towards a Cognitive Theory of Politics" (20 April 2018).

Two "cognitive styles" predominate: Plato's world of Forms, of rational intellectualism, where the material world is an imperfect actualization of the eternal concepts of reality, that is, of the Forms; and Aritotle's intellectual empiricism whereby the material world is in contrast the fount of reality and all conception thereof.

This should not be news to anyone acquainted with the Western canon. What is interesting about the article is the science that is now affirming this known fact. It seems a laggard science is once again catching up to the drowsing humanities. Jonathan Haidt and the article's author Messenger have only re-discovered what we knew already.

Discussion of world affairs is almost invariably caught up in some form of the left-right, liberal-conservative frame of values and ideals. It largely gets nowhere good because there is no common ground, common starting point for negotiating where we aim to go. A return to basics, to the foundation is in order, it might be the only way forward.