The Schools of Athens Isn't Hot?

The School of Athens

If you read the title of this article and shouted affirmations, you would not be wrong.

You may know this painting, The Schools of Athens, as the lone attempt at interior decoration in the resident pretentious asshole’s freshman year dorm room. Yet, the work’s real origins are a bit more historic than 2019.

The School of Athens is a fresco in the Vatican by Italian Renaissance painter Raphael. It depicts most, if not all, of the famous Greek philosophers. Plato and Aristotle are the two figures at the center of the piece. Plato points up to his Forms, or the ultimate, unachievable forms of all earthly goods and actions. Aristotle motions towards the Earth, stressing the daily striving of man towards eudaemonia, or human flourishing. The two men are read in every survey course of Western thought and have acquired a god-like reputation in common parlance. This depiction of these two famous men has become a contemporary calling-card for those that regard themselves as philosophical in any sense. Yet, how and why do we expect one image to adequately capture the totality of philosophical study? And yes, why have the old white men prevailed again?!?!

I contend that Plato and Aristotle have a (qualified) relevance through to today.

To dismantle any system of oppression requires an understanding of it. As an American studying in England, I am thoroughly steeped in what we have come to define as the West (a note that the notion of “the West” is an invention in its own right in a world with a global past and present). To refuse to read and learn about the thinkers that have shaped the systems and societies I live in would be irresponsible and unrealistic. Not only do they have an incredible intellectual presence in our institutions, their reach is physical as their names adorn buildings like Columbia University’s central library, watching over the less than stellar problem sets and essays of Columbia undergrads.

However, I qualify this argument with the reality that Plato and Aristotle are famous for a reason. They are celebrated because the people that have historically held authority and power thought that they mattered. To read them in isolation would be a two-fold failing. First, it would ignore the interconnectivity of the world they lived in. Second, it would ignore the other complex and independent systems of thought that existed simultaneously in the rest of the world.

Further, just because our ancient thinkers were critical in the past, does not mean they have to be the critical thinkers of our future. By engaging in discourse with a more diverse set of thinkers, we shift the intellectual focus from thinkers like Plato and Aristotle and towards contemporary thinkers who represent the globalized reality and world we actually live in.

Plato and Aristotle need to be read, but we have to understand why. It is not to celebrate and cherish the great men of Western civilization. It is to understand why a dominant part of our world exists as it does, and how we can both function within it and change it for the better. Philosophy is fundamentally the act of questioning. We engage with the thinkers of The School of Athens to question why we study what we do and how it helps us understand the questions they asked and we ask now.

I think The Schools of Athens is still hot. Not as a comprehensive reading of philosophical thought, but as an element of and resource for contemporary thought.