I Know You Understand Me
"I have this beetle here in one hand," Aristotle proclaimed one day, "with a single oval shell and eight jointed legs, and I have here in my other hand this second beetle of lighter hue which has twelve legs and a shell that is longer and segmented. Can you explain the differences?"
"Yes," said Plato. "There is no such thing as a beetle, in either of your hands. There is no such thing as your hand. What you think of as a beetle and a hand are merely reflections of your recognition of the idea of a beetle and a hand. There is only the idea, which existed before these specimens came into being. Otherwise, how could they come into being? And the form of the idea, of course, is always eternal and real, and never changes. What you are holding in what you think are your hands are shadows of that idea.
"Have you forgotten my illustration of the cave in my Republic? Read it once more. That the two beetles you have are different is clear enough proof that neither is real. It therefore follows that only the form or the idea of the form is susceptible to study, and it is something about which we will never be able to learn more than we already know. Ideas alone are worth contemplating.
"You are not real, my vain young Aristotle. I’m not real. Socrates himself was but an imitation of himself. All of us are merely inferior copies of the form that is us.
"I know you understand me."
Comments
While I'm not a fan of Plato's idealism, I do find it a useful
metaphor for the shadowy world our system of economic coercion and imperialism operates under at the highest levels. The thing to remember is what you are seeing daily about military adventures and financial market somersaults are all but ways for a relatively tiny handful of people to maintain their stranglehold over your life, the better to enrich themselves and their heirs.
In other words, remember that the spoons we bend in our posts trying to grasp that reality are only ourselves:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXtO5dMqEI]
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon
plato
was, in the end, playing. Which Heller, in the end, was not. Which is why, years before his Picture This (which is what is quoted above), Heller inscribed this:
It indeed isn't "real," until the flak spills your guts out on the floor. You then have no time or energy to play with the notion of beetles. As you scream into death.