Not the Same Plato: An Appreciation

Two re-translations of Plato by Kvond strike me as definitely worth reproducing here. One of them deals with an aim toward showing (calls to)ontologies of difference to be inadequate. Another deals with Truth and Heidegger’s endemic butchering of the word alatheia.

Give me Water

Plato often referred to myths in order to bolster his own deductions or to account for those ultimate truths which are beyond his own capacity to demonstrate. The Orphic myth was certainly a favored source for Plato.

 In Orphism, the initiate journeys (guided?) through desert into the land of the dead, and comes to the plain of Oblivion so that his soul can be reincarnated. At arrival, the initiate is severely in need of drink, and has been instructed to drink not from the river of Lethe (forgetting) but from the cold, refreshing river of Ameleta to retain his cares.

If Plato’s theory of Truth is based on this Orphic myth, then we (according to Kvond) can take alatheia to mean “the not un-caring”. “Quite to the contrary of Heidegger’s lexical reversion which will eventually make a “cloaking” out of human Dasein engagment with the pragmata (affairs, things of concern), the very nature of aletheia is that of retaining concerns and care.”

Heidegger applies alatheia to external “objects” where as in the Orphic/Platonic in it taken to be concerned with the well-being of one’s own body, of one’s thirst. If we take Heidegger’s misappropriation of this Greek conception of truth and run with it we end up with intentionality.

“It seems to me that as Heidegger turned to Aristotlean notions of truth, categorizing them widely as Greek, and adopted a primarly optical metaphor for qualifications of Being, he did so in a way quite friendly to the pre-existing Idealist dyad of self/world. In this fashion, in his foreclosure to the immanent capacities of “care” in the Greek mind, he obscured the very third leg of the triangle, others, which would otherwise show how “care” in all things, including things “non-human” is actively involved in our mutual construction of the world, in degrees of ontological freedom. Because “aletheia” was for Idealist Heidegger primarily an EYE/OBJECT relation (that metaphor), the constitutive movment from “lethe” (dissipative oblivion) to “a-leth-eia” (condensed internal relations of expressive care) was robbed of the very depth of the dimensionality of others. More Augustine, more Achilles was needed.”

The Even Field of Experience

Many have felt the need to found an ontology in difference as opposed to Platonic Sameness. This move is founded in order so that females, blacks, homosexuals, those that aren’t in the majority, can have an adequate claim to being. (Irigary, who wants to replace the flat platonic mirror, that reflects man back to himself, with a speculum suited the contours of the female body, is an interesting case.) The Same is shifted from the Political hegemonic to the hegemonic Ontological category. It is not necessary to make this shift, and this is not to say the ontological is cut off from the political.

According to Plato’s conception of experience, we must have known the Same before we could recognize any equality. This is often taken to be, as Kvond points out, reductionist. How can our experiences be less real than something else? How can our experiences of difference in particular be merely derivative of the Same? But looking back into the text, perhaps we need to re-discover this idea of the Same as it is found in Plato for what it really is:

“But, thinking on what it would mean for Sameness to be the origin, the great basin for Differences, I went back to Plato’s text, and looked at the word for “same” or “equal” (as it is translated). It is Ison, from which we get our words like isometric or isomorphic. What is immediately conjured up is mathematical equality, and this is generally the purity of Same towards which this binary heads. But contingently the LSJ dictionary had among any of its easily recognizable uses, one use which contained a subtle difference. It not only meant “equal” but “even”, as in can describe ground as “even or flat”, or the cadence of an army as marching in iso. As always is the case with the Greek, as much as we would really like to rationalize them into a near mathematical purity (given the tradition of their depiction), there is always a depth, a material depth to their conceptions that we miss. There is not a great difference between ison as “equal” and ison as “even”, but it a difference that opens up what Same is, not only for the Greeks, but for us as well.”

The Same is not an identity but an experience of the evenness. The ekg is evoked (also a mountain lion, but I won’t attempt to retell that story). The Same should be taken as equilibrium, and ‘new’ information (disturbances in equilibrium), arise from the relations and NOT ‘objects’. What we percieve should not be taken to be ‘objects’, for we can only see anything because everything is interrelated to the entire ‘up and down’ equilibrium. Identity need not be taken as Sameness. Internal differences can be recognized though, only if we have a conception of the terrain.

Definitely read the posts. Here and here.