BY
M.C. GARDNER
What is being, insomuch that we should concern ourselves with it? We might as readily ask who are we, insomuch that being concerns itself with us? Deity tells Moses that his name is I Am. The Buddha’s defining principle of self is anatman or no self. Hamlet ponders whether to be or not to be and Descartes determines that because he thinks he therefore is and we all sleep more peaceably for this fortuitous discovery. Heidegger believed language is the temple of being. In that temple we might fitfully begin.
Some years short of a half millennium before Christ, a wide shouldered Greek of aristocratic bearing and a Pythagorean pension for mathematics and the metaphysical, noticed that the meaning conveyed by language might be less than perfectly connective to the end it was commonly believed directed. When Plato spoke of a rock or a tree or a wine dark wave arising on the Aegean, he discerned among his students sympathy of understanding. At some point he came to believe that no repetition of these statements could refer to the same phenomenon, wherein equivalence could be maintained. The world of becoming was not tautological – language could not assert the certainty of his beloved mathematics. He made the simple observation that no two rocks or no two trees had ever repeated themselves.. As circular as the world might purportedly be – in it he could find no circles. That language conveyed equivalence to anything in the phenomenal world was, it seemed to him – a play of shadows.
In book 7 of The Republic he elucidates Philosophy’s premiere allegory – That of the Cave and its attendant Shadows. He asks us to imagine a world deep within the earth. In this society live two peoples. The first group has been chained by foot and neck to a post on the floor of the cave. They are so secured that they can only stare straightforward to a flat wall some distance in front of them.. Behind them is a wall not unlike that of a screen that shields a puppeteer from revelation to his audience. Behind this wall ( a man’s height below it) is a walkway. Behind the wall and walkway a large fire burns, warming and illuminating the cave. The population that uses the walkway also carries their goods and artifacts on their heads during their peripatetic sojourns along the walled walkway. This perambulation produces a series of dramatic shadows on the flat wall of the cave. These shadows are the only entertainment the chained people have come to know – as if captives of Network Television – it is the only world they know. Vases, sculptures, tree and animals are poised atop a multitude of heads. They cast their celebrated shadows as they are paraded between fire and cavern wall.
Behind this fanciful world of shadow, artifact and flame is the world illuminated by the Sun. Plato imagines a chained person escaping his shackles. The now freeman is amazed to see this world of artifact and flame. He is further amazed to discover an even richer world outside the depths of the netherworld from which he issued. He returns and liberates his brothers. He tells them of his discoveries. He finds that they prefer their shackles and their shades. They gather rocks. They stone their liberator to death and return to their comfortable illusions.
The shadows participate in the lowest level of Plato’s reality. Up from these are the artifacts that cast the shadows. These, like artistic creations, are imitations on a higher tier than the illusory shades but still a great distance from truth. Higher still are the contours of the world we take to be the reality of our lives. Plato avers that this world is very much like the shadows in the caves. Behind our Shadows are Plato’s eternal ideas. Recalling the conjectures of the more somberly disposed Heaclietus confirmed his suspicions of the shadowy reality of which his senses partook. The fixed groves outside the Academy would, at times, seem as ephemeral as the older man’s swift flowing streams. Whatever qualities the forest might share with a tree, the reality of a tree was not to be found in any forest. No two trees could be said to equal each other. At the behest of worm and winter no one could be said to equal itself.
Plato takes the notion of flux and shadow and applies it to the underpinnings of the phenomenal world. To his mind this world is as illusory as the Hindu’s Maya. Taking that lead as Plato had before him Shakespeare’s Prospero suggests that we are such stuff as dreams are made of and our little life rounded by a great sleep. Plato agreed with the Sophists on the relativity of truth. He t went on to conjecture a sphere in which the light of the Sun would never fail or fall to falsity. To this he was as inevitably drawn as any mystic seeking union with the flame of God. . The Ideas, when embraced by the unifying illumination of the Sun become what Plato calls The Good. What that might be has tantalized Western thought for over two thousand years.
One line of his thought is connected with his disparagement of drama: “Neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of Homer and Aeschylus,” wherein the virtue of the gods is called into question. The Good in this context is God as represented by Plato the moralist who, later in the laws, becomes Plato the proto-fascist.
The Republic is, justly, the most famous and influential of his Dialogues. In it Plato postulates a society governed by Guardians protected by a military and served by guilds that supply the material needs of the utopia.. The guardians would know the truth of the eternal ideas and their unity in the Good. The rest of society would be told the fairytale of a hereafter of rewards and punishments. It was hoped the Great Lie would keep the democratic rabble in a bovine contentment as they served the state in which they resided. Medieval Europe followed much of this design. Christendom was to adopt the philosopher as if the last in the long line of Old Testament Prophets. Augustine’s City of God was a Platonic Ideal conjured in contrast to a Roman world that was falling even as he wrote it. And if Plato’s ‘Great Lie’ would one day bring Galileo before the inquisition and Bruno to the flame it also appointed monks to be the Guardian’s of classical culture through the dark centuries that commenced in the cataclysm of Rome’s dissolution.
The Good is an ontological principle. For Emerson Plato was Philosophy and Philosophy was Plato, to wit: “This is the ultimate fact which we so so quickly reach on this as on every topic, the resolution of all into the everblessed One.”
The everblessed one is found in Plato’s imagination whenever seeks for the final unity of the Good:
“And may we not say of the philosopher that he is a lover, not a part of wisdom only, but of the whole? … Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge and knowledge is to know the nature of being … philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable and those who wander in the region of the many and the variable are not philosophers… the true lover of learning … desires all truth.. Move spontaneously toward the true being of everything… the true lover of knowledge is always striving after being… he will not rest in the multiplicity which is appearance only…. But will go on until he has obtained the knowledge of the true nature of everything…. Neither injuring nor injured by one another but all in order moving according to reason. The good is… the author of Knowledge and all things known.”
The Good to Plato was the Universal confluence of the isolated shadows in the realm of the Eternal Ideas. And as to our earlier query as to what being might have to do with us we will close, once again with the Platonism of the Yankee whom Nietsche called American’s Plato, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the power of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff … the world globes itself in a drop of dew … The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb… In how many churches is man made sensible… that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind … that he is drinking forever the soul of God. In the woods nothing can befall me … I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all, the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.”