THE CENTRAL ANGLOSPHERIC INSIGHT...:

It might seem odd to search for "the soul of Western Civilization" in the work of two philosophers from the fourth century B.C. In the pantheon of Dead White European Males, are there any specimens more deeply interred? But Mr. Herman takes the reader on a rollicking trip from classical Athens to 21st-century New York to make the case that "everything we say, do, and see" has been shaped--"in one way or another"--by the ideas of Plato or Aristotle.

And what were those ideas, exactly? Mr. Herman turns to Plato's allegory in Book VII of "The Republic" to explain. Socrates compares the lot of most men to bound prisoners in a cave. A fire behind them casts a play of shadows on the wall in front, and these shadows they naturally mistake for reality. As Yeats said in "Among School Children": "Plato thought nature but a spume that plays / Upon a ghostly paradigm of things."

Imagine the prisoner set free. His eyes would be dazzled first by the fire and then, as he emerged from the cave, by the sunlight outside--a world of ideal forms, the true reality. This journey upward, says Socrates, is like the "upward journey of the soul" from the deceptive realm of the senses to a realm of timeless if abstract certainty. For Aristotle, by contrast, the world wasn't a shadow-filled cave but a provocation to curiosity, a place to be investigated for itself. Mr. Herman several times quotes his declaration that "the fact is our starting point."

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