were to accept the interpretation of irony presented by Leo Strauss,12 an interpretation I accept, one can neither overlook the power of the argument presented by the Forms13 nor the whole conception of Hell which was, for the very first time, presented in the book as a means for getting the attention of those who might think objective moral configurations articulating right and wrong were nothing more than figments of man’s imagination. Here, in the joining of the Beautiful and the Good, Plato hoped to formalize the life of Socrates.
It is again quite a complicated argument; but the implication for men and pots is huge. For men, the emphasis of the human mind shifts away from the tripartite union of nous, logos, and altheuein to a tension between just nous and logos. Still available to men was the vision of the gods and of Goodness through nous; still available to men was the ability to articulate that vision through logos. But with the advent of the philosopher-king, a man who could live both among the forms and with men, a man who could articulate the “true” vision to all men, there was no need for aletheuein, the motor of desire underpinning participatory conversations of men with other men about their respective visions that would serve as the essential link between the world of being and the world of appearance, between divinity and humanity. Philosophers were now to rule as kings: and their visions were articulated through dictates to be obeyed, with serious consequences in the afterlife for those who did not.
In this subtle shift, the relations between men and other things became transformed. They became muddied. No longer did men sit in silent contemplation of the everlasting; they did not even, in their step backward into action, engage one another in conversation about the everlasting, testing and tempering their personal visions. Now a philosopher-king beheld formal presentations of the Beautiful and the Good, or so he proclaimed, and prescribed how men and women should behave. The philosopher-king was, in other words, the only person this particular society needed to “see” the form of the perfect triangle, or the perfect pot, and dictate what “representations” and/or actions would be or should be allowed. Sure, there were advisors of art and religion and politics within The Republic (the number and machinations undertaken by such people should alone convince a person of the irony underpinning such a proposal); but the philosopher king was the final word – precisely because, whereas once men collectively served as the essential link between what is and what ought to be, there was now one man, standing alone, who was capable of judging for all.
But in reality it was not this invention, the invention of the philosopher king, which caused man’s fall from Grace. Plato realized Man’s relationship to all external substances, things in-and-of- themselves, subjects unto themselves, had changed. Men no longer believed in the Forms, in gods, or in Goodness. Had they still believed in the independent existence of “other” things, they would have at least hesitated to kill Socrates. All other things were simply “objects”: men were objects to be ruled, and pots were objects to “appropriated” for man’s own needs. (Remember: man had chosen not to turn around in the allegory of the cave, receiving individual enlightenment by realizing the shadows he worshipped upon the wall were nothing more than his/her own reflection generated by the light behind him. Had he, he would be ruling him/herself.)
Again, one need remember: this is the second apology of Socrates. Plato needed to find a transition to protect the philosopher from kings; and he did so by making the philosopher himself king, who in all power reached beyond the grave through the myth of Hell. Can you, can anyone, possibly imagine such a man standing humbly before a pot, any pot, most precisely before a representation of the one true pot residing in formal presentation amongst the Forms? Of course not: Plato was interested in saving a man, he was not interested in recognizing or saving a pot. And in due course man tumbled toward Modernity. Pots and man’s relation with them would never be the same.
The transition is articulated more fully in Aristotle. Sure, there remained a prime mover in Aristotle’s cosmology who thought about thinking, spinning off the material world as but an after-thought. But the primacy of such a being was, in many respects, sublimated to an almost non-material status with the creation of the metaphysical “Categories”–categories of being: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, passion– which man defined to be the basic foundations of existence. With this move, Aristotle turned Plato on his head. The true form may not, Aristotle recognized, exist in the Forms as Plato argued but in the individual representations made by men. Our world, the world of men, was the world in which meaning resided. In such a world pots would be truly an after-thought of the above-mentioned categories. Pots would, in other words, be valued as nothing more than what their use defined them to be–a large pot would produce more value than a small pot if holding water, but quite possibly less than a small pot holding a cache of gold. The point being: pots were defined not in terms of their nature, but their categorization.14
The real transformation, however, if it proves itself to be a transformation at all, comes with Descartes. Descartes truly recognized what trouble men were in if men could not know things at all–or know things in but a “little” way if any way at all. Descartes genius was to realize that if we knew but one thing with certainty, then we could know all things. As men, the one thing we know is we think; therefore as thinking beings we must necessarily exist. Cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” The world is what we make it, in thought. In such a world, the world itself would be an afterthought (think Aristotle’s prime mover). A pot is what we think it to be, nothing more and nothing less.
Hume? Well, Hume still held forth the possibility there could be something out there. Man just couldn’t know it, in-and-of-itself, except from the sensations it produced and which we received–the impressions of sensations, in other words. So though a dual world was still recognized, knowledge itself was subsumed into what man might possibly, could possibly, perceive. If there was such a thing as a pot, it would be defined by men through the sensations of experience they received from the pot. (Kierkegaard’s position is similar: if there is a god, he is beyond knowledge. As such, the most we can do is bump up against god or the infinite, maybe taking some bit of knowledge away in the scrape.)
The image of there being two sides to the same coin was bloody brilliant, however. This recognition allowed Kant to postulate two ways to look at things: at things in-and-of-themselves, what consciousness saw or defined as their essential nature (the Thing-in-Itself, the noumenon), and things as might be represented for the mind, the thing as the mind understood or received them to be (the appearance of the object, the phenomenon). Man could be regarded as a subject for himself, and an object for other men; a pot could be regarded by men as a thing, a subject as a “pot” as conceived possessed of an essence by men, but also an object, as a phenomenon, appearing before men’s mind.15
As Hegel was quick to note, this revealed all things could be seen from two points of view: the subject, as the object would see itself per se, whether man or the pot; and the object as things would be seen by others per se, whether
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