(Plato Republic 394d)

What is it, then, that lies at the heart of all problems relating to the study of history, culture, politics, morality, legislation? As we have seen, the problem is one of constructing an adequate theoretical frame. In this section I will use Philosophy as a generic term for describing the way attempts are made to outline the conditions for constructing such a frame. The magisterial history of academic and intellectual thought always reveals an at least implicit but often explicit philosophical basis for theory, in whatever discipline.

But Philosophy is not just a generic term. It is the history of philosophy as a discipline that provides our means of analyzing what problems arise for anyone attempting to clear such a ground. And history reveals the contradictions and paradoxes that emerge in those attempts. We will also find that there are forces that help to form thought that are inextricable from those that help to form history. So this is not a history of ideas. A theoretical treatment of ideas and history must look for ways of assessing what makes these ideas and this history possible in the first place.

The history of philosophy is not one of steady progress from humble beginnings through the gradual accumulation of knowledge to a position of greater understanding. Certainly, profound advances and giant leaps have since the earliest times contributed to fields of technics like medical knowledge and mass communications. But rapid developments, especially during the modern period, have been matched by the consistent failure to develop anything like a total knowledge, or even any sense of certainty in knowledge. Furthermore, in fields like politics, morality, legislation and aesthetic judgment, there remains so much controversy and disagreement that one could hardly justify the belief that, whilst there have been undeniable developments in science and in technics, this is also true in the more general fields concerned with notions like humanity. In fact the most successful forms of advanced knowledge have such a technical feel that it is sometimes feared that advanced technics will overtake the destiny of humankind and the whole of nature to the impoverishment of both. Undoubtedly, though, simultaneous technical achievement and moral frustration in history are inextricably linked.

The history of philosophy reveals a number of often audacious and singular attempts to clear the ground for adequate knowledge about goodness, truth, legislation and science. The classical philosopher wanted a single and permanent principle that would account for all the different, changeable things that occurred in the finite world. But in so far as the philosophers we examine operate in terms, systems and styles that are their own, they do so only with reference to their heritage, i.e., with what is already possible in the realm of thought. So we can see already that a problem is likely to emerge regarding the tension between all the different things that have already been thought and the kind of singular truth that one wants to arrive at. In order to arrive at knowledge one must first have a way of assessing previous knowledge. But the only available resource is previous knowledge. How can one use previous knowledge for constructing a theory that goes beyond previous knowledge?

In fact for many philosophers all previous knowledge is nothing more than an encumbrance to thought, a deceptive time-waster and a lure that entraps the mind. For others it is a passageway through history that must be worked through and then sublimated or transcended in the thought that evolves beyond it. For still others it is a resource for learning how to think, how to be critical and how to construct theories, but never a means to knowledge itself. We will see that the problem of deciphering the role and meaning of this previous knowledge is a key to philosophy as such.

The problems that have faced philosophers since the earliest records of western thought (at least) give us the best clue to understanding what philosophy is trying to do. Nearly all influential early philosophers agree at least that people are chronically vulnerable to deception. They are deceived by myths and stories, believing them to be true, even if they were intended as allegories. They are deceived by the authority of powerful men and men of repute (and repute itself) into believing that their authority has rock-solid foundations, even if the authorities themselves declare suspicion of authority. They deceive themselves into thinking that their own beliefs and thoughts are representations of the world as it really is. They are deceived by signs of things into believing that the signs, which have a peculiar ability to efface themselves as signs, are the things themselves. And so a basic problem of philosophy concerns the difference between illusion and reality.

Our thoughts and beliefs about the world as it appears to us, however natural they make it seem, constitute a subtle and complex deception, woven together from stories and desires, passions and beliefs that take effect from the earliest experiences of childhood. Thus, according to this philosophical argument, it takes extraordinary discipline and a rigorous application of the rational faculties of thought to break through the deceptive web and grasp the way things are in reality. The ancient Greek thinkers named this discipline philosophy (philo, love or friendship, and sophia, wisdom), the desire for wisdom. So philosophy, at first sight, seems to be the aim of being able to distinguish between reality and illusion.

The problems are easier to grasp than the solutions. Which is to say it is easy to show how the most committed convictions and beliefs on the weightiest as well as the most trivial matters are inconsistent, incoherent, or just plain false. It seems far less easy to communicate the truth about those matters, even when the teacher apparently knows it.

The method that characterizes the arguments of Socrates, the philosopher whose thought is often regarded as the cornerstone of western philosophy, involves the disturbing process of unsettling cherished convictions and exposing false reasoning and failures of logic in others. The aim is always to arrive at an objective knowledge, free from opinion, deception, and complacency, to help others get free of their own deceptions. The process, called dialectic (enchelos), is consistently negative, and it involves a form of refutation that makes use of the interlocutors own definitions to refute the premises on which they are based. Socratic philosophy could not be done without the presence of an interlocutor, whose false convictions and honestly but mistakenly held beliefs are the means by which the light of reason emerges against its dark negative in deceived thinking. What we need to hold onto here is that the so-called light of Reason seems not to shine independently of the confused thoughts which tend to obscure it. It is only by stripping away those confused thoughts that reason makes itself known. If there were no confused thoughts there would be no reason. To follow the logic of the analogy of light, one might be tempted to think that the veil of falsity hides truth. But it would be closer to Socratic thinking to imagine truth as a light, which comes on through active questioning.

That is why Socrates never wrote anything down. The only access we have to Socrates is via the more influential intermediary, his student Plato, whose philosophy emerges as a series of dramatizations. Plato’s dialogues feature Socrates in a range of adversarial debates and discussions with fictional characters (often, though, like Socrates, based on actual people) whose beliefs and convictions are systematically shaken by irony, rational argument and ultimately undone when their attempts at definition and clarification collapse in contradiction. So although in the early dialogues Socrates never presents a theory of reason, let alone an attempt to define it once and for all, the nature and circumstances of the debates, i.e., the arena or theatre of his philosophy, give us a clue to his notion of reason. It is essentially a living activity of argument that involves the necessary participation of an interlocutor in face to face debate. It is clearly not something that could simply be defined and dogmatically presented to a passive reader who would then absorb it as the truth. That very passivity is one main route to error. Two and a half millennia later we may allow ourselves the suspicion that this refusal to write and this unquestioned assumption of the rational virtue of the face to face debate might itself harbor a deception and an unthinking prejudice. If that is the case it is one that lies at the very basis of western knowledge.

But how do we know what Socrates really said as he roved the markets and parks of Athens, unsettling everybody’s most cherished convictions? (In questioning conventional attitudes he posed a threat to the authority of the law itself and was executed in the end for insurgent activities, forced to drink a flask of poison hemlock.) Plato forms something of a bridge between Socratic philosophy, which is essentially oral and aporetic (designed to expose puzzles), and the written documents that characterise philosophical works afterwards, which are more likely to be demonstrations and logical arguments presenting, defending or attacking some thesis. But Plato does not say anything directly. The entirety of his corpus is constituted by fictional debates. It is not possible to say with certainty what Plato’s conclusions were or even if he had any. And although his dialogues might seem to pose the same kinds of problem as a literary drama, where one must be careful not to confuse the statements of a character with the beliefs of the author, we must be very cautious about reading them as if they were simply literature (Plato is sometimes confusingly compared to Shakespeare).

On one hand, the fictions are clearly designed to guide a reader to a philosophical conception of the truth about things. Although Socrates did not write, his teaching informs Plato’s representation of it. Plato writes where Socrates did not but he writes the words of Socrates. Socrates speaks through Plato’s writing. Nonetheless it is Plato who puts words into Socrates’ mouth. Most commentators believe that the earlier dialogues represent a more accurate (true to life) Socrates than the later ones, where (it is assumed) Plato’s own maturing philosophical vision increasingly informs his text. This seems fine except that it would be structurally impossible to show, even in the very earliest dialogues, where Socrates ends and Plato begins. This is a genuine aporia in which it is structurally impossible for us (or anyone) to say for certain what either Socrates or Plato actually (really) believed. But that is no real problem. So long as that is recognised as being the case, then Socrates’ basic premise is maintained. Everybody is vulnerable to deception and the only foil against it is a singular and active quest for the truth about things through rational argument. What matters, in other words, is what and how you think, and by extension here, how you read.

On the other hand, to regard Plato’s philosophy as simply literature would be to hold to a vast unquestioned assumption about what literature is. And in a sense derived from Plato, which will gather urgency as the centuries roll forward, that is another problem that lies at the heart of philosophy. I began by saying that one key to the problem of philosophy was the question about interpreting the role of previous knowledge; and I said that another basic problem of philosophy is the distinction between illusion and reality. Now I am saying that it is also the question about what literature is. The question is more urgent when we ask, what, precisely, is the difference between Plato’s dramatizations and literature? What is the difference between philosophy and literature? Who decides? We now need to explore the ways in which the problem of previous knowledge, the distinction between illusion and reality and the question of literature are decisively entangled at the very heart of the philosophical project.

The first problem that philosophy teaches us, then, is this: We are all in the dark. No matter who you are or where you are you are badly in need of some good clear thinking to free you from your illusions and deceptions. Otherwise you just let others do your thinking for you. From the very beginning the answer to the problem is always singular. There is only one truth yet many ways of error. Before there was philosophy it appears that people had to rely on myth to augment their understanding of their world and reflect on their place within it. In a later chapter I will explore the role and concept of myth in some detail. The Greek cosmology of symbolic gods--including the figures of Zeus, Jupiter, Aphrodite and Minerva (chaos or Deus, war, love and wisdom)--and the endless cycle of stories involving the gods with man comprised a complex series of allegories, which helped to give meaning to the Greek experience. Each god is symbolic for some force (love or war for instance) and the narratives show how these forces are related in the whole (the cosmology), which thus constitutes a massive allegorical narrative that reflects human experience. In other words myth provides an explanation. But this is not the sort of explanation that philosophy aims to provide. The philosopher in ancient times emerges as a figure whose aim is to free people’s thoughts from mythology. Myth doesn’t work. People end up believing in the figures as if they were real (they believe in real gods). They miss out on an understanding of the single truth.

In 500 BC, while the ancients were still developing the field of thought later to be called philosophy (long before Socrates), someone called Anaxagoras arrived in Athens and said some things that seemed to capture everyone’s imagination. He said:

Let’s not try to understand all this too quickly. It was written a very long time ago and this is a transcription of the original, of which only a fragment remains. It is the first recorded occurrence of the use of the Greek word nous in the philosophical sense that it later gained. Nous means mind. In parts of England you will hear people use the Greek word in a colloquial sense--e.g., anyone with any nous . . . meaning anyone who knows or who has understanding or uses their head, any reasonable person. Here it denotes the controlling power of the very universe itself. In a universe that is according to the convention of the time ruled (albeit in a rather capricious way) by gods, this statement rather stands out. First, mind is a faculty of the human soul (in Greek the psyche). And this gives to the human agent a power that mythology hardly allows. Secondly nous is described as "something infinite and self-controlling." This means that it is never used up, it is eternal, and that it is not contingent on anything else.

This is very important. In the finite world of experience absolutely everything is affected by other things. Everything is an effect of some cause. In the modern world the light in my study at night is caused by a number of things: my hand on the switch, the live electrical energy lying latent in the wiring, experiments by 19th Century chemists, the generator, the millions of tons of burning coal, the archaic forest that is turned into coal deep underground, this terrible desire for light. No one has ever seen the first cause, however, so that is God or the big bang or whatever, something supposed to be out there beyond experience. To call it mind seems pretty daring. Thirdly, it is "alone itself by itself." There is a beautiful purity in the thought. Mind is not compromised by its relations or attachments to any other thing. It moves by itself, it is independent, autonomous and, according to Anaxagoras, it is the only thing in the universe that is.

This concept of mind has been celebrated by philosophers through the ages, even though most of them express some disappointment that Anaxagoras chose not to explore the nature of human mind a bit more. Plato, about a hundred and thirty years later, was disappointed that "the man didn’t use his mind at all--he didn't ascribe to it any explanations for the arranging of things." Plato would have preferred to see a development of the ways in which the human mind arranges human experience. For him the examination of the human mind should arrive at the truth of experience. But that is Plato’s project. Plato’s Republic is a book about how a perfect community might be set up on the sole principle of reason. This singular controlling power, if properly applied, would ensure smooth functioning in whatever changing and otherwise unpredictable circumstances. Plato, notoriously, disqualifies poets, dramatists and artists from his Republic on the basis of the tendency for people to be deceived by the representations of imaginative writing and art, including, of course, mythology. We must come back to this point later.

Plato’s famous student Aristotle (whose influence on later philosophy is hardly calculable) has this to say about Anaxagoras:

G. W. F. Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher, translates Aristotle as saying that Anaxagoras stood out as a sober man in the company of drunkards. The suggestion is quite powerful. A party of drunks with their random and nonsensical theories, bitter arguments and disconnected ideas is put to shame by the sober thought of this early philosopher whose concept of mind grounds all philosophy on a principle that will bear on the beginning of science. Does Anaxagoras sound sober to you?

Perhaps rather disconcertingly one of Plato’s most affecting and influential arguments is an allegory. In The Republic he describes a long cavernous cell, which he also calls a "prison house," deep down underground. There are people down there who have been there since early childhood. Their legs and necks are tied so that they are forced to face the back wall of their cave with firelight flickering behind them. Between their backs and the fire is a wall, about the height of a conjurer’s table, behind which are people carrying little model artifacts, statuettes and toy animals which stick up out from the wall like puppets. The puppet masters talk to each other all this while. So what the tied-up people passively experience as their complete reality are the echoes of the sounds of talking and the shadows of the puppets flickering in the firelight. (Incidentally, 20,000-year-old cave drawings of hunters and hunted animals are suspected of inducing a kind of ecstasy in the cave dwellers as the figures flickered in the firelight at night). The elements that compose their only reality are the echoes of sound and passing shadows of puppets. Plato says that we are all like that. He then asks us to imagine what it would be like for one of these people to turn and loosen their bonds, to face the firelight and the truth about their existence. How much harder would it be for someone then to proceed beyond the fire and out ultimately into the light of day, to gaze at the sun, which for Plato stands for the light of reason itself? A difficult process, certainly, but Plato also points out that anyone who had been outside would be reluctant to return to their former unenlightened circumstances. If they did, then which of the cave dwellers would believe or understand what he had to say? And here, in a nutshell, is the task and the desire of the philosopher. The modern version of Plato’s cave would comprise the globally networked mass media, the uncountable layers of consumption and reception of information beyond which we may hardly dare to aspire in a search for Platonic truth. We must come back to the question of the media in a later chapter. In a milieu where forces over which we have little control mediate just about all our knowledge for us, Plato’s problem clearly still stands.

What is the relationship between Plato’s use of allegory, on one hand, and the myths, the dramas of the Greek theatre, and the great epics of Homer, on the other? In other words, what is the difference between philosophical allegory and literature? Plato’s answer is that the poetic form (like a picture) presents a whole and complete image. The Gods are there in their richness, fleshed out with character and narrative density. The drama presents a complete action, a ready-made to be consumed by its audience. An epic brings its characters to life in their actions. Mythology gives you the gods themselves. Plato’s allegories, on the contrary, leave out the very thing they are designed to instruct us on, the process of thinking itself, the truth as such. They show us the truth only in negative. They tell us that what we think of as the truth is not the truth at all. But they do not ultimately give us the truth, for that, Plato insists, is transcendent and cannot be pictured in the finite world. So any picture or description of the ideal truth, the truth of mind, is necessarily false for Plato. The allegories of philosophy must refrain, therefore, from attempting to represent it as something. Plato can show us the cave but he will not tell us what we will find once we have emerged from it.

If we recall that Anaxagoras described the mind as infinite we can quickly get a sense of why it is not strictly representable. The cave, in Plato’s description, can represent our experience of the finite world. Being finite is, of course, one of the most frustrating aspects of existence. Everything is limited. We will never have enough time to know everything there is to know. (One common experience of anyone embarking on serious study, e.g., in higher education, is that the more you find out the more ignorant you feel. Knowledge seems to tower above in greater and greater magnitude the closer you move towards it. It is like walking towards a mountain where, at first, gentle hills make the ascent comfortable, yet the further you go the steeper is the climb and the more immense appear those increasingly distant peaks). But even if it were possible, say with the help of some as yet barely imaginable computer, to document all knowledge (the internet and CD-ROM only prove the point), knowledge seems not to be containable, it is not strictly a matter of quantity. There are infinite relationships between all the parts of knowledge. As will often be the case, the example of language can help us to understand why. If you documented all the meaningful sounds and marks in all known languages you would have a huge volume of dictionaries. You could even imagine someone very clever who could learn a large percentage of these marks (call them words for the sake of argument). Then if you added everything that has been written to this already quite large library you would have a huge database. There are however two things missing. If you tried to add all the possible marks or sounds, not so far as we know meaningful (yet) in any language, your library would already be tending towards infinity. If you then attempted to add all the books, articles, fragments, whatever, that might be written (but haven’t been yet) your library would indeed be infinite. And it would probably take you several lifetimes of browsing to find even one coherent phrase. Searching amongst the chaos of infinity for ordered systems is like searching for life in the immensity of the universe. There is hardly any. But that is what being finite means--our very real restrictions at least let us communicate with each other across time and space, in a necessarily limited way. The other thing is the future. The modern period has given us probabilities but never guarantees. And the various means of forecasting the future--e.g., dream analysis, astrology, divining of various kinds, fortune telling--are notoriously unreliable. We know that misfortune, bad weather and ultimately death will come for us but we don't know when. The future is missing in our universe and we, even now, can only vaguely guess at it. One thing we can be quite sure of is that it is very dangerous. Infinity, beyond space and time, into the future, that is what lies outside finite experience, and that is the domain that philosophy, from its earliest days, has failed to make its own.

Plato does, however, appear to believe that a scientific (properly philosophical) approach is possible. The philosophical "concept" called eidos or idea by Plato is the universal type of all its imperfect copies in the finite world in the same way that the abstract existence of a geometrical form like a triangle is the universal type of all such triangles (drawn or modelled) in the finite world. But while Plato certainly assumes that the ideal shape of a triangle has always existed, there are some ideas that appear in history. What do the following have in common: a wedding; a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the 1995 Penguin edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; a copy of The Magna Carta; a totem pole; a print of John Constable’s The Haywain; a photograph; a washing machine; a motor car; Bow Street Magistrates Court; Pythagoras’ theorem; a table? One obvious answer is that they each represent something that originated in culture and is historical. But less obviously perhaps we can also say that they each embody one of various kinds of "ideal object" like the right-angle triangle. Each stands as a particular example or representation of a general type. An "ideal object" is an object that can exist independently of its embodiments. Once the principles of the electric washing machine exists any number of actual machines can be made. In the same way, each time a particular type of wedding ceremony is performed we can say that an ideal ceremony is embodied in the actual event. No two ceremonies will be exactly the same--the vicar may stumble over the words during one, the bride or groom may cry or giggle or faint, it may take place in a church, a registry, even on a ship, etc.--but essentially the same ceremony is performed. Where then does this ideal ceremony exist, to be repeated in slightly different ways but many times (potentially infinitely)? Plato suggests that there is an ideal realm of forms or types, which exist outside time and space but which are embodied by their examples in the "real" world. We get the word "idea" from the Greek word that Plato used for these forms or types, eidos. According to this theory it doesn’t matter how many times one draws a right-angle triangle, or makes one out of wood or some other material, the ideal form of the triangle itself remains absent to the senses because all the real triangles we see are simply copies of that abstract original. Each of the historical and cultural examples I have listed can be understood in the same way.

The idea of this "other realm" outside space and time defies both experience and common sense, but there have been remarkably few convincing alternative explanations for the existence everywhere of what we are calling ideal objects. What does Plato mean when he says that these ideas (like the idea as such) are universal? If something has the quality of being universal then it is available everywhere and at all times. This is the case for right-angle triangles of course, but it is true also for "ideas" of every kind. Remember that an idea is only ever represented, it can never be made present in itself. If an idea is universal then it can only be made present in the form of an example or a representation of it, a particular wedding, for instance, or at least an account of a possible one, even a fictional one, or a drawing of a right-angle triangle. As with all the most important philosophical concepts, the concept of universality is linked inextricably with another concept, sometimes regarded as its opposite, the concept of particularity. An example of a particular triangle is this one here: _. Now while it should be easy to see that the universal idea of the triangle can only be made present in its particular worldly forms, it should also be easy enough to see that without its abstract universal form no particular version could appear at all. The same law seems to apply for cultural and historical objects as well. If the wedding ceremony did not have its universally knowable and repeatable abstract existence, a "wedding" would only be a one-off, something two people and their guests did once, never to be repeated (which paradoxically is often the way people think about their particular weddings, but a wedding is only unique for the ones who participate in it). In principle the "template" of the service can be repeated infinitely, performed as many times as there are people to do it, legally or illegally. In practice of course cultural objects do change with the times, though sentimental people can always revive old-fashioned forms. The point is that there is something that allows the infinite repetition of a singular form in different particular embodiments. These embodiments will never be exactly the same.

The concept of universality also carries the sense of availability. No one is in principle barred access to a universal idea. Any two people may get married. The marriage ceremony itself is universally available and takes on whatever significance is appropriate in the context, even if this is outside legal bounds--as with the marriage of two gay men in the United Kingdom or of two people one of whom is already married--and even if it is staged--as in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or in children’s play. Anyone can make a washing machine or a combustion engine, given that they take the time to learn how and can afford the materials, but not everyone is allowed to make an Ariston or a Ford. Ariston and Ford are names given to ideal objects like domestic machines and motor vehicles so that those particular types may only be copied legally by the authorized manufacturers. One can see, then, that the laws of copyright and patent respond to the complex relationship between universal ideas and particular (historical, cultural, legal, economic and political) processes. Repeatability of ideas makes things possible. But it also makes problems when one considers the law. Or, rather, isn’t it this that makes law necessary?

Plato was so taken with the mathematical abstractions that inform his theory of types, or ideas, that he filled his academy (one of the first and most influential strictly philosophical institutions) with mathematicians and geometers. Here several threads are found together that emerge centuries later as the complex of relations between philosophy, science and technology. Literature and art will have been firmly relegated to a less powerful office.

We began with three problems that philosophy in its early days seems to be responding to. First, the problem of previous knowledge, in whatever form, constitutes the only knowledge available. All that we can think is made possible by what has already been thought. This is often contradictory and rarely reliable and certainly offers no guarantees for knowledge about the present or future. Secondly, the problem of the difference between illusion and reality emphasizes the fact that we might always be deceived, taken in, by the things we regard as knowledge. What we think of as reality might always be just an illusion. Thirdly once we have established a way of distinguishing between illusion--deceptive knowledge--and reality--true knowledge--how do we maintain that distinction? Plato considered poetic and artistic works to be the most dangerous forms of previous knowledge. Poetry was for him a kind of mythology, meaning fictional stories that people nonetheless believe to be true. In other words unguarded dissemination of mythical stories might deceive people into believing what is false.

Socrates and Plato, developing a precedent set in earlier Greek Philosophy, establish some powerful and influential answers to these problems. First, the application of persistent questioning will help individuals free their minds from their unfounded beliefs. This involves pushing notions, opinions and beliefs through to their logical conclusions until some aporia (some insoluble puzzle) has been reached. Secondly, the persistent valorization of what is abstract, what is theoretical in the strictest sense, will enable the philosopher to attain independence from the grip of worldly illusions. Thirdly, this valorization of abstraction can be disseminated, communicated, even taught, by the use of a kind of allegory that works in a different way to mythical allegory. Plato’s allegories are pictures, tales, representations of the powers of abstraction. The model of mathematical and geometrical abstractions can be used as a basis for theories of just about anything. Look again at how this works. A right-angle triangle, in whatever shape or size or colour, whether drawn in the sand or carved out of stone, always and everywhere has the same abstract geometrical properties. Therefore all right-angle triangles are just versions of a more original abstract right-angle triangle that has no existence in the finite world, except in its embodiments, which are its imperfect copies. It is thus possible to say that this triangle has an abstract, theoretical reality that is prior to and independent of worldly existence. The abstract one is necessary. The embodiments of it are contingent. Furthermore, everything else in the world can be said to operate on the same principles. Given the multitude of tables of all shapes and sizes, one can say that there exists beyond this world the abstract, theoretical idea of a table. These rickety wooden ones and this sloping stone one are pleasant enough but they are just imperfect copies of the single abstract ideal. In which case this whole finite world is just an imperfect copy, partial and fragmentary, of the perfect world of perfect abstract forms to which only the human mind has access, through its theorizing abstractions.

Now it’s not difficult to see that this supersensible world of Platonic ideas, if we take it literally, is going to have the same effect on us that Plato feared from myth. Clearly, all concepts, ideas, types etc. are infinitely repeatable. That cannot be doubted. Nor can it be explained just through empirical observation (the answer must be supersensible). Careful geometrical and mathematical manipulation can indeed produce inventive technological marvels.

The theoretical response, however, which is the one I am promoting here, must ask the question about the emergence and force of the idea that underlies all this, that is, the idea of mind itself. I’m fine about the repeatability of forms. Everything that can be understood must be repeatable in some form. But what is this infinite and independent mind, disembodied, disinterested and disengaged like most of the Gods? It should not have escaped our notice that a very specific kind of myth about human reason is emerging in place of the more ancient Greek mythologies. That emergence seems to go hand in hand with the development of what already feels like a modern science. Plato seems to be promoting a type of allegory that does not complete the picture, on the one hand; but he gives us allegories that do seem to give a complete picture, on the other. It is a complete picture of a world in which something essential is missing.

One further complication lies in the fact that Socrates introduces the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic to illustrate not the truth as such but an analogy that he has just given. We know already that Plato’s picture of the world is divided into two dimensions. It is this theoretical, or hypothetical, distinction that the analogy of the visible and the invisible presents, so called because one side of the division represents the visible world and the other represents the intelligible (which is not visible). The visible dimension describes everything that we perceive of the world through the senses. This is also, therefore, called the sensible or the palpable and it composes the basic experience of what we call the empirical.

The intelligible dimension, on the other hand, describes ideas and thoughts that are independent of empirical experience. For this reason it is closely related to what is called the ideal and, by further extension, the transcendental. The empirical dimension is grounded in the world as we experience it through our senses. It is composed of perceptions, memories, images and expressions of all kinds. The intelligible dimension gives us that part of the world that has meaning, relationships, thoughts, concepts and ideas. Plato divides each side into two again in order to construct an analogy that can give us an idea of what the pure abstract world of ideas is like. The analogy is often called the divided line.

On the left-hand side the visible is divided into two. The extreme left is supposed to represent images of the next bit. So on the left you find shadows and reflections, while in the next section you find actual animals and trees and things that we perceive directly. The left-hand portion of the right hand side represents all the geometrical and mathematical abstractions and hypotheses that serve as shadows or reflections of the ideal forms. So the fully ideal and intelligible realm is just unattainable. But we know of it in the same way that reflections or images presuppose the things that they are images or reflections of. So A is to B as C is to D. Or reflections and shadows are to empirical objects as hypotheses and geometrical figures are to ideal objects. The final dimension of the analogy is as follows: A is to B as AB is to CD. In other words the relationship between images and objects is the same as the relationship between the empirical dimension and the ideal one. The world we see, hear, touch, taste and smell is just a shadow of the ideal world of abstract forms. The real complication here is that the hypothesis itself is this analogy, the analogical or hypothetical form. We never get beyond it. We understand the reflections (look at something in a mirror). We understand the actual things (look from the mirror image to the thing). We understand geometrical shapes and analogies (which belong in the intelligible dimension). But we never go further than that into the final section of Plato’s line, as he freely admits. We always get to a kind of last stop before the real last stop, as if your train to Kings Cross had stopped at Finsbury Park but as you waited for it to continue the journey you saw that that’s where the tracks ended with buffers and nothing beyond them; you have reached the end of the line before the end of the line. Kings Cross is where we are going but we cannot get there. Unkind critics might suggest that Plato assumes he is at Kings Cross even though he never got as far and Platonic philosophy remains stranded at Finsbury Park. But don’t be taken in by the levity of my analogy. If this failure to arrive at the final destination is a serious problem for philosophy it is a major resource for critical theory. This is an aporia because while we are forced to admit that the empirical world alone cannot account for all human experience, it is nonetheless difficult to fill in what is missing without creating mysteries, myths and stories. The analogy is one of the finest manifestations of this aporia: something visible is used to describe something invisible. Plato’s answer to this problem takes the form of a closure because it closes off the empirical world and asserts that the abstract truth about it cannot be accessed.

Plato’s use of the Cave allegory is thus a further remove from what we are already removed from. Speaking of the relationship between the allegory of the Cave and the analogy of the visible and the invisible, Socrates says:

The cave, or "prison house" is our whole universe. The relation between the sun and what we see is analogous to the relationship between truth and what we can know. It illuminates and allows us to see more clearly. Look at the presentation of Plato’s argument. There are at least three layers of rhetorical device. First there is the fictional dramatization of a dialogue between Socrates and others. Secondly, the argument is presented in the form of an analogy (the divided line). Thirdly, the analogy is illustrated with an allegory (the cave or prison house). At each stage the notion of truth, the final destination, is presented as unattainable. Whence the need for allegory. His chain of dramatical-analogical-allegorical arguments is themselves beautifully clear but they never take us there to the truth itself.

This final aporia resides in the nature of allegory itself. The possibility of allegory (saying something but meaning something other than what is said) is so basic to experience that it is very difficult to examine objectively. Can you think of an allegory for the possibility of allegories? What about Plato’s allegory of the cave? Allegories, Plato says, can lead to illusions. That is the truth. But the truth can only be presented in allegories, which are potentially deceptive. The possibility of the truth thus lies in the possibility of allegory. It is therefore possible to argue that the reality of human existence is something like allegory, that we are always gesturing otherwise in the things we think and say. In that case the truth would not be simply elsewhere in the sense that if one worked hard enough one would arrive at it. Rather the truth would be the impossibility of arriving at the truth. To say this would be to say that the only true account of human existence is one that avoids arriving at the abstract truth. Critical theory today is one way of engaging seriously with this possibility.