metonymy4u

Dialectics began in the west with Plato, at least as far as the written record is concerned. The classical Greek word dialectic refers to a debate or discussion in which multiple perspectives are presented. It is related to our word dialect, and captures the sense of verbal exchanges. Plato conceived of human experience dialectically. In a move that inspired the 18th century writer Immanuel Kant, Plato depicts Socrates, the first anti hero of the western tradition, examining classical Greek pretensions to knowledge as represented by a series of discussants, some portrayed as wise and sophisticated, some as rascals or buffoons. Through dialectic Socrates unpacks the implications of his interlocutors’ ideas of knowledge and demonstrates their inadequacy. With these discussions, Plato examines what must logically be true if our experience of knowledge is to be more than just a contingent illusion. The most famous account of knowledge is the myth of the cave and the divided line. These parallel metaphors describe Plato’s notion of how we may, through dialectic, escape the cave of mere opinion and rise to the eternal light of truth and knowledge. The divided line assures us that knowledge and opinion, though related, are distinct and separable. These metaphors have been redescribed many times throughout the course of western history as a series of footnotes to Plato’s original account. We have the dialectic of nature vs. society (Hobbes), cognition vs. passion (Hume), receptivity vs. spontaneity (Kant) or reasonable mind vs. emotion mind (Linehan).

Where we have finally begun to emerge from the redundancy of Plato’s cave is in the anti-philosophical undermining of words as representations. The notion of a thought which outlasts its thinking or a word that stands for something else is now no more useful to us than the notion of a walk that outlasts its walking. Where did walking go, when you were finished? The walking was an event in a series of events. Nothing more. So the notion of an unconscious thought is nothing more than what Quine called the “idea idea” whose cash value has never fully appreciated in 2500 years of maturation. Plato divided his line in order to convince us to get out of the cave on a road paved with true words, to en-courage our belief in a higher form of being. Yet we now understand that the cave is a cave of our own creation. And as soon as we allow the idea-idea to live and die a natural death, like all events that pass into time, we can live where-ever and when-ever we want. Indeed, I often wonder where we might alight at the end of an un-divided line? To say that a series of words may end at the truth is to say that we could arrive as a set of unconditional word-events outside of space and time. And although some still like to amuse themselves with talk of the beginning of all events (the big bang) or the end of all events (the big crunch), we understand now that this represents nothing more than the last faded vestiges of Plato’s smile, unregenerate glowing still in the warmth of a cave lit camp fire.