The Occidental Soul’s Self-Immurement in Plato’s Cave

[klikot]

Part IV

The Cave World

The third moment of the cave existence is the self-enclosed interior room of the cave itself. The inside room of the cave is not just like any interior. It is that special interior that has pulled the whole external world and reality into itself, appropriated it, so as to reproduce it there in miniaturized shadowy form as its own property. We could use for this movement the psychological term “introjection”, although in a not psychic, but logical sense.

There are a number of impressive real examples in which the cave receives visible objective representations and which therefore can serve as so many individual images for the cave. We already mentioned the cinema and television (the living room with its television set). Another one is Disneyland. It is a limited, fenced-in area which has the purpose to recapitulate within itself the large real world in toy model size. The toy model character reveals what is shown of the world as being fundamentally sublated. The enormous fascination of Disneyland is probably based on the fact that it offers to the imagination a real sensible aid and support for experiencing the great Occidental project of the realization of the cave. Disneyland is of course in empirical regards by no means a complete representation of the world. It cannot drag the world as a whole into itself in order to let it reemerge there anew. But this is also not necessary. All the soul needs is “to get the idea”, to see the ideas representatively realized in symbolic form. By demonstrating through a sufficient number of examples this miniaturized reproduction of (aspects of) the world within a well-circumscribed interior space, the imagination is enabled to complete the intended picture that is factually merely suggested (the picture of the successful introjection of the world at large) and so to logically experience and celebrate in Disneyland the cave as realized in sensory reality. This fulfills the soul of modern man (who for the most part has not heard of Plato’s cave and is unsuspecting about the cave as the grand project of the Occident) with great satisfaction and gratification, the external manifestation of which is this fascination (of the ego). The project of the Occident is not individual people’s project or the project of consciousness. It is the project of the unconscious soul, a project that asserts itself and prevails even in sprite of consciousness.

Very expressive as an image is also the project names “Biosphere 2”, an experiment planned in America and designed to last one hundred years. A number of people are supposed to live in a hermetically closed artificial world, which however is supposed to simulate the real world in miniature. In an airtight glass structure of 1.3 hectare areas, a mini-world with a tropical rain forest, a desert, a savanna, arable land and an ocean has been constructed and people, who are supposed to move into it for a limited time only, have to live in it under self-sufficient conditions. The idea is that this might also serve the preparation and as a test for the creation of a space station into which life on earth and man could possibly withdraw as if into a kind of Noah’s ark, if life on earth should in the future have become uninhabitable through a nuclear or environmental catastrophe. This idea, which had already been expressed in numerous science fiction novels and movies, show symbolically or symptomatically to what extent the soul has already made itself at home in the idea of an exodus from the real world and of its immurement in a cave, and how fascinating this idea is for it.

A further image of powerful realness is the shopping mall. Whereas stores are particular rooms which are clearly in and part of the real world and into which one enters for special purposes, the shopping mall is a priori conceived as a self-sufficient world of its own. It is an interior room into which - pars pro toto [k1]  and at least according to the underlying idea - the whole world has withdrawn. In it the consumer experiences the sublatedness of the real world, which is returned to him as a illusory (virtual) world of the infinite variety of consumer goods and of the complete gratification of needs. Soothing music is supposed to lull him into an artificial feeling of comfort and happiness. In addition to the literal shopping malls, whole inner city areas are being stylized in the direction of shopping malls through pedestrian zones and remodeled stores.

In very different, more metaphorical or sublimated ways the immurement of the soul in the cave takes place through the so-called walkman. The person with a walkman seems to move through the real world; he is sitting in a tram, he does his homework, he is jogging through nature, and yet in actuality he is totally enwrapped in the music coming at deadening volume from his walkman and, as far as the soul (not the ego) is concerned, shielded from the external world. This, too, is an interior world. One must not be misled by the external impression that the person with a walkman is in the outside world an as ego may be fully aware of it. In truth, i.e., psychologically, logically, he is inside the hermetically sealed world of sound, swallowed by it and unable to hear anything outside, while from the point of view of the ego he is merely listening to it and in control of it. Walkmans are instruments for the voluntary self-introjection of people into the interiority of the cave, here a “subtle-body” cave of music.

Another sublimated way of encasing oneself in a pure interior world, an idios kosmos [k2] , is obviously the use of those drugs that are often (mis)named “mind-expanding”.

Slot machines, gameboys, computer games, all of which can totally enthrall people for hours (which is part of “being tied up”), are similarly ways how consciousness voluntarily cocoons itself in the cave (again in its sublimated form), namely in a sublated, simulated reality. In many of the computer games it is a question of fighting against monsters, evil powers and intruders from outer space, in other words, of themes that are not in principle different from the topics of tales about the tasks of mythic heroes and from the fantasy games played by children of former times, such as “cops and robbers” or “cowboys and Indians”. But whereas the earlier children’s games were played “out there” in the real world, with the result that the imagination animated this real world and the real players with archetypal meanings, fantasy now resides inside the screen or the computer and conversely pulls man’s consciousness out of the world and into the interior of “the computer”. The computer games no longer open up “World”, the shut consciousness inside their interior worlds. Another even more intensive version of “cave” related to that of the computer games in the hi-tech cyberspace or virtual reality installations where, similarly to flight simulators, a person as “cybernaut” is equipped with communication prostheses (data gloves, data suit, monitor glasses, etc.) and a set of artificial senses so that he can in fact enter an artificial computer-produced reality, move around in it and experience it and his own movement within it including all the tactile and acoustic sensations produced by his moving in it.

The psychotherapeutic consulting room is another significant illustration of the realized Platonic cave, now an illustration with the emphasis on the experiential and existential side of human existence itself. It is a closed inner room, a temenos [k3]  ‘cut out’ of the ordinary real world, in which the patient, by entering it, leaves the real world outside, turns his back to it, “forgets” it, in order to truly turn inwards. But by turning inwards into the cave of his own interiority and of his memory, the whole outside world, inasmuch as it is part of his experience or fantasy, and his own real life out there (his biography) is reborn (to some extent even recreated, reinvented) in shadow form from within this cave, as memory images. One’s own life experience with all its real events, conflicts and relations to others and one’s own true nature is supposed to be recapitulated and viewed in a mirror (“reflected”). [1] Real life is systematically translated into a secondary world of images given out as the primary reality.

Psychotherapy is the astounding ritual in which man logically immures himself in the (Platonic) cave, more then that: redefines himself as cave man, by translocating his essence and his logical place from out there in the real world inside, as an essentially inner reality, the world as image or “idea” (Vorstallung, Schopenhauer: “The World as … Idea”), as irrevocably sublated world. While for the most part still living and working in the real external world, he establishes, through this ritual, his true essence, figuratively speaking, in the interiority of the consulting room, and, in truth, in “the interior of the personality”, or in “his own unconscious”. The psychotherapeutic consulting room is the objective visualization or ritualistic concretization of the unconscious as “the inner”, and the idea of “the unconscious” is conversely the consulting room evaporated and distilled into the form of a mental conception, the consulting room incorporated into man’s self-understanding and as his self-understanding.

The unconscious is thought and felt to be in us - which it needs to be in order to be the Platonic cave as an inner room in the first place. But as C.G. Jung never tired of impressing on his readers, in reality we are in it, surrounded by it on all sides. It is essential to understand that both mutually contradictory views must be maintained at the same time. The cave is in us, but we are really inside this cave that we harbor in ourselves, as its tired-up inmates, who are exposed to and often helplessly subject to the images produced by it. This is the dialectic of “the unconscious”. It is a self-contradictory notion.

Jungian psychology completed this internalization into the cave by no longer restricting it only to one’s personal biography and to current experiences in the world. In Jungian psychology the unconscious even swallowed God as “the God-images in the unconscious” or “the Self” as well as our whole collective past as the “archetypes of the collective unconscious”, which are our sunken, sedimented (and thus sublated) cultural heritage. The cave has become all-comprehensive. It now includes and encompasses even the spiritual reality of human existence, the former world of metaphysics and religion.

Speaking of religion, there is a much crude version of the cave than this very subtle, distilled psychological version of it. This is the phenomenon that we call fundamentalism. This is much more like something we discussed before, the soul’s immurement in computer games and the like, only that it is more permanent than those temporary forms. In fundamentalism, the soul cocoons itself in a given religious creed, political ideology, or world view taken over as a ready-made positivity. In contrast to “the unconscious” this is not a logical move in the sense of a real redefinition of man, but a subjective or ego move that requires some degree of constraint and thus “violence” toward oneself. In the case of fundamentalism, it is the immurement aspect itself (the activity of immuring oneself) which is at the center and which is “acted out” rather then the cave as that into which one immures oneself (which is more or less exchangeable). In the case of the unconscious, however, what counts is the simple result of a translocation, “the cave” as a logical locus (psychotherapy is a ritual that transforms the logic of being-in-the-world). Perhaps one could say that fundamentalism is a constant having to cross a threshold, while psychology in fact settles on the other side of the threshold. And this is why fundamentalism needs a constant vigilance and effort of the will to uphold this immurement; it is easy to see why it is often paired with a kind of fanaticism. The cave remains here without, as a given doctrine (a positivity!) in which one settles, whereas the idea of the interior of man and the psychotherapeutic work based on this ideas have logically interiorized and distilled the cave (although, of course, not yet all the way: not into the pure concept of interiority, but still imagined inner space). The interior of man is an image informing one’s way of seeing, the style of one’s self-conception, not a literal (positive) place and not, like belief-systems, a positivity, either.

Not religion in former times (where it was in principle at the forefront of the development of consciousness), but certainly religion in modernity, where it is fundamentalist or spiritual entertainment, has been rightly characterized by Marx as “opium for the people”. Both fundamentalism and entertainment serve the purpose of numbing the mind, i.e., of turning man into cave man. The one works by providing a ready-made structure for the mind, thereby depriving man of the necessity to think actively, the other by providing diversions, distractions.

Psychology’s idea of the inner or the unconscious is far more sophisticated and advanced as a form of the realization of the cave than is the phenomenon of fundamentalism. But the drawback of this advanced form is that like most of the previous forms mentioned (Disneyland, shopping mall, walkman, etc.), it too is a particular individual symbol of the cave within the world at large and not a representation of the real world’s immurement in the cave. With your unconscious you still know to have the real world all around your. Disneyland and shopping malls are special places that you go to at times and that need your special activity of going there for you to be in them; they are not around you all the time and regardless of whether you want to be there or not. They are essentially temporary, partial, and dependent on your subjective moves. Therefore they all are strong symbolizations of the cave, individual specific visualizations of what the cave reality is about, namely the real world’s having been introjected into a small interior, enclosed room, and reality’s having been translated into the form of illusory being or virtuality. But they are not themselves this reality of the cave as that which has truly swallowed and encompassed the real world within the confines of its inner space. And they are not this encasement as an objective reality that is no longer dependent on subjective doings and attitudes.

Fundamentalism has an advantage here, because its religious or other ideology is thought to be all around you and around the real world all the time, and objectively so, because it is seen as the truth. The only trouble with fundamentalism in this respect is that it is the mere claim of truth, but does not have the form of truth. A truth speaks for itself. It needs no subjective effort, no will-power. It is not an assertion. It simply is.

Remembering Jung’s insight that “every spiritual truth is gradually reified and turns into a substance or tool in the hand of man”, the cave in its all-encompassing reality and as the simple truth of modern human existence also has to find its full objective realization, i.e., materialization. And indeed, the gigantic project of a total networking spanning all the world and of the connection by cable (or wireless technology) of all households and institutions, businesses, even all apparatuses in households and businesses is the project of the objective realization of the cave itself in its full form and as the truth of existence. The words “Internet” and “World Wide Web” perfectly reveal what they are about. With total networking, human existence is totally placed inside a closed net or web. Information and communication are the spiders spinning their web around mankind and the world, and they are at the same time themselves this web in which man and world are caught. This web is the cave having come real and true. It is both the materialized Platonic cave and yet, as Platonic, a fundamentally subtle-bodied cave (“information”, “communication”). Its walls are not made of rock. Now it is really true: the frontier is closed. The “web” is all-inclusive, it does not have anything outside itself. It is there all the time and governs our lives even without our personally having to log into it. I am in the web, even if I refuse to own a computer. The open “World”, which was “World” because it originated through, and permanently existed as, the separation of the mythic parents Heaven and Earth, has finally closed. The information and communication cave is the rescinding and undoing of the Heaven-Earth-separation and instead the installation of positivity.

To be inside the cave amounts to an inversion of the relation between man and world. When man still lived in the real world, his sense organs and his intellectual sense (his reason) were an intermediate and mediating third through which he experienced reality (the reality of nature and of the divine). Sense organs and sense (mens) were simply the interfaces between both the real human being and the real world, which thus in fact met. In the cave, however, what before had been means and mediator (organ for experiencing the world) has turned into something in its own right. It has obtained an independent reality and has become explicit as its own end. This means that what had been in the middle has now been turned inside out to the position of the periphery around us, and along with it what had been outside and what it had been the mediation for, the world, has been pulled inside, into the middle. The world as what it once has been has, to be sure, dropped out altogether out of this game. Man now does not face it, the world, but only sense data, information, stimuli (the Platonic shadows). It is to them that he now relates, rather than relating through them and through his reason, which used to connect him with the divine, to what had been outside him, the world. However, between this new “outside” (the flood of sensible stimuli and of the input of information) and man, there arises, as a new middle, that successor figuration of the “World” that is called virtual reality or illusory being. This is the reversal of the relation of man and world.

This also has effects for the nature of man. Although sense and information data come to him as input from outside, he is no longer vis-à-vis them the way he was formerly vis-à-vis the world because as sensible-physical being he is reached by them immediately, without distance. This is the very nature of stimuli. He turns logically, not necessarily empirically into the object of this input, into an appendage of the whole system of data. Just as in a literal virtual-reality setup the human being is, through his data suit etc., enclosed into the virtual-reality equipment and hooked up to it, absorbed into it, so he has also in his logical essence as a cave dweller turned into a technical component within a large information and communication machine, namely into a receiver and a data-processing machine.

The Sun

The fourth moment of the Platonic cave reality is the sun, the Idea of the Good or Money. Whereas the three other moments discussed so far are part of the immediate existence in the cave and thus of the cave as the story-internal image, the sun is, within the story, the cave’s radical other, indeed its own opposite, accessible only through an about-turn and through leaving the cave, although, as we have seen above, it is part of the whole cave reality in the wider sense, namely as the cave’s truth. The Platonic cave made real is the entire relation of “the cave itself” as the system of entertainment and being cocooned within the great web of information and communication on the one hand and of Money as the truth of this system. This relation is a dissociated one (which in Plato’s narrative is represented by the motif of the about-turn). “Dissociated” does not simply mean split, cut into two. It means the contradiction of at once mutually excluding one another and of nevertheless being fundamentally inseparable, even dependent on one another, the one side being the truth of the other and the other the precondition of this truth, but of course in such a way that neither side is allowed to be conscious of the other (completely dissociated relation of the infotainment side and the Money side of the cave reality as a whole can be visualized best with a mandala drawing by Jakob Bohme (which already Jung pointed to [2] ), at least as far as the purely structural relationship is concerned. Bohme drew two half-circles back to back within a large circle (see Fig.1).
 


Fig.1: The schematic structure of the in-itself dissociated mandala according to Jakob Böhme’s “Forty Questions Concerning the Soul” (1620). In our context, the full circle represents the cave as the whole structure displayed in Plato’s parable, the two half circles the parable-internal cave (the cave in the narrower sense) and the world of sunlight respectively. [Diagram taken from Jacob Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, Facsimile Edition, trans. John Sparrow (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1997), p. 45.]

The world outside the cave (in the narrower sense), the world of Money, permits a clear, unimpaired view of the real situation behind the entertainment side of the cave (in the wider sense), just as Plato’s sun provided access to a higher and eternal truth over against the transience and shadow nature of the world inside the cave. That Money is in all the aspects so far discussed the ultimately decisive force and that Money is all-present and all-mighty, inasmuch as nearly everything can be “sold” and everything, even people, are venal, does not really need to be shown. One just has to keep in mind the incredible sums that are paid for the television rights for big sports events or the proceeds for video games and the like. From the outside perspective it is possible to see through the sentimentalism, the underlying nostalgia, the hollowness of the experience inside the cave and to also become aware of the captivation or addiction aspect. The naked glance at the financial forces underlying “the cave” may well appear as cynical because it mercilessly reveals the emptiness and shadow nature of the entertainment world, which here includes also the “higher” entertainments such as the ones called “the search for meaning” or “indulging in a sense of meaning”. It even includes the sciences, which can no longer be upheld as the form of truth in the innocent sense of the world, being themselves to the highest degree dependent on Money and being in the process of getting commercialized. And it includes everything of the “life world” in Husserl’s sense, just as of the educational systems, health systems, etc. It is all reduced to Money, to the bottom line. It can be seen that Money has gained a preponderance over against the still so-called real, which in turn is seen though as illusory being. But Money is also the means for pulling the real more and more into virtuality. Again I must warn the reader against mistaking a logical analysis for a moral judgment. To reveal mercilessly the emptiness and shadow nature of the entertainment world is here a description of its character and status, not a verdict.

I mentioned the Roman phrase and reality of panem et circenses. Panis and circenses are not opposites, the one pointing to and belonging in the cave, the other representing the reality outside the cave. Both panis and circenses together are abbreviations for the cave existence, and both have their truth outside the cave, in the Money that finances them.

Four essential features reveal that Money is indeed the highest “Idea” and the whole realm of the Ideas.

1. Money is today immaterial, not substantial. A banknote in German is called Geldschein, where “-schein” was originally used because the Geldschein was understood as Schein-Geld, fake money, illusory money, by comparison with gold or silver coins. In reality it brings out into the open the truth about money, also gold coins, namely that it has been Schein, illusory being, from the outset, even as a banknote or paper money is a universally exchangeable substitute for commodities, a substitute whose materiality has been reduced to nothing but paper, in contrast to gold or silver. With “plastic money”, money having become electronic, the nonmaterial nature of Money has become objectively represented even more decisively. The plastic credit card as a sensibly existing entity is not itself Money. It is merely something like the entrance ticket to the non-material realm of Money, which on its part has become completely distilled into a purely intellectual reality. In its new form as information stored as bits and bytes, it has shown itself able to do without any material substrate whatsoever that could and would still want to “symbolize” or “embody” purchasing power.

2. Money did not only free itself from its material substrate. It also to a large degree cut itself loose from its relation to consumer goods as realities, for which it could be an exchange medium. Nowadays merchandise is not the only thing that is traded; whole merchandise-producing firms are bought and sold like consumer goods. But most important: the daily turnover of capital in the world is many times higher than the daily turnover of goods. The former exchange medium on the markets of goods and commodities has now has been completely reflected into itself and it thus “illusory being”, this way, its purely speculative nature has received its objective representation. On each stock market trading day, around five hundred billion dollars are traded. At the New York Stock exchange alone up to one hundred million shares are sold. With the new derivative speculation instruments (swaps, futures, options, etc.), Money has surpassed itself once more and eludes even more any corporeality or concrete understandability.

3. Money’s having been cut loose from the concrete connection with material goods does not, however, mean that as a self-serving speculative, noetic world it would be split off from the world by a chórismos (separation, hiatus). It is precisely the other way around. The money market reacts in a highly sensitive manner to the real economic and political situation. All essential information is incessantly registered and processed by means of personal computers, large workstations, or even mainframes. The material acquired in this way enters into the decisions to buy or sell, whereby often on the basis of the computer-produced analyses and dynamic processes alone automatic buying decisions are induced by computer programs. In this way, all of reality is reflected into Money, and this is, after all, its true speculative nature. Conversely, Money determines almost all socially relevant decisions to a degree unknown before. It not only permeates our acting, but also our thinking. Consciousness adapts to Money and is assimilated by it. And Money and the money economy increasingly subsume the whole world. They bring about ever tighter international involvement and thereby in fact translate the world into the global village.

4. The banknote was still an entity and somehow, despite being no more than a piece of paper, had a thing-like character. Money in its present form is not only immaterial and of ideal (noetic) nature, it can no longer be imagined using the model of a thing, not even that of a spiritual entity. It is sheer motion: continual flow of capital, unending transaction. It constantly circles around the globe at the speed of light, electronically controlled. It must work incessantly. The world of finance does not really know the difference between day and night any more. When the Stock Exchange in New York closes, the one in Tokyo opens. The world of finance is a self-regulating and self-regenerating system, a system in which the compulsion to move at an ever increasing speed is built in. Inasmuch as the streams of capital literally flow in the sky via the satellites of modern communications technology and via digital networking, and the worldwide economy forms a continually rotating and vibrating web above us and our lives, Money is now in fact and objectively shown to be our haven - not sensible sky, but truly heaven, Plato’s supracelestial (hyperoyranios [k4] ) heaven.

The Immurement in the Cave: An Inexorable, Self-Accelerating Process

The soul’s immurement in the cave is an uncanny process. The description and compilation of many of the examples given may evoke emotions that go into the direction of cultural criticism, feelings of a loss, decline, and degeneration that need to be bemoaned, or even in the direction of moral condemnation. But this would be a wrong assessment, at least one not appropriate to and inherent in my psychological argument. What happened is not an unexplainable catastrophe that befalls us a kind of accident, even where, for the moment and as the first immediacy of something new, it shown in the form of excess or pathology. It is the (beginning) conclusion of a project of the soul that began almost 3000 years ago and this means a goal pursued by it with fervor. The goal is, as shown, to expel human existence from “nature,” that is, from the immediacy of the human being-in-the-world, and its transportation into the logic of reflection or reflected being-in-the-world. Such a fundamental change cannot merely happen in mente, as a mental one, because it would happen only subjectively, as a personal attitude or belief. It must happen in the alchemy of the soul, that is to say, in the “material” medium of concrete life. Any real transformation must be an objective change in and of the real world and manifest in its transformation, in order to be fully real, just as according to Jung any spiritual truth is gradually reified. It is therefore to be assumed that this process will not come to an end until all remainders of the “natural” status of human reality have been completely abraded and transported into the status of illusory being or virtuality.

Inasmuch as it is not the project of people, but the project of the soul, it would be an illusion to assume that we could stop it. There is inherent in the development of communication technologies, the media and the multimedia world an autonomic dynamism that cannot be curbed or invalidated. It is a process that wants to arrive at its end, its completion. This development toward a virtual reality concerns only one side of the Parable of the Cave, the world of show or the cave itself. But for its other side, the light of the sun, the same is true. The continually moving and self-accelerating system as with Money exists cannot really be checked or its development stopped. The financial system rules over us, not we over it. It has a momentum of its own.

The process will probably find its end only when we will have gone deep enough into the “cave”, so deeply that it has completed itself. But truly completed it will only be if the fulfilled cave can be in fact realized to have been, and to be, no more than the first immediacy of the absolute interiority of the soul, the still positivized, concretized form of this interiority, and if this interiority of the soul can be released into its own and from its being held down in the state of positivity.

Jung saw that “no culture before ours was ever forced to take this psychic [or soul] background as such seriously. Always the soul was merely a part of a metaphysical system. But modern consciousness can no longer resist the knowledge that there is a soul… This distinguishes our time from all others” (CW 10 &161, trans. modified). But he identified the (for modern consciousness) inescapable “knowledge that there is a soul” with that he called the “discovery” of the unconscious, and particularly that unconscious that was the sublated spiritual past and that one was supposed to turn to in order to regain an access to the divine. But the unconscious and the inner are themselves forms of the cave (in the narrower sense). This is why Jung’s marvelous insight into the absolute revolution of our being-in-the-world (“no culture before ours was ever… “) miscarried. The wind was taken out of its sails. It lost its very point, was domesticated, safely encased and held down in a compartmental aspect of life in the world.

The fact that modern consciousness could no longer resist “taking the soul background as such seriously” shows in the historical move into the age of the media and mediality; it shows in that the intermediate and mediating third through which man had always experienced reality (the reality of nature and of divine) has now become something in its own right. It has been turned inside out, from its unobtrusive mediating (not really background!) position to an external and explicit position as the successor figuration to the former heaven with its gods or God, so that it turns into an object and focus of attention. The real revolution is that from medium to object of consciousness. “The medium is the message” (McLuhan [3]). “The linguistic turn” (Richard Rorty [4]). The soul as “language” (as the medium as such) is all around us. And Money is the way I described it, as world-encompassing incessant motion and liquidity above our heads, is the objective representation of the soul as “language”, however “language” in still positivized or literal form, still held down in the form of “letter” (Lacan), of “writing” and “gramma” (Derrida), not yet released into its form as soul: absolute-negative interiority. Modern man as cave man is he who has in principle realized to be inside mediality, inescapably enwrapped by it.

The modern world as “medial” reality provides, nay, is the sublated immediate (Platonic, metaphysical) reading of Plato’s Parable of the Cave. The whole system of thought since its inception in early Greece with the Pre-Socratics has been the project of realizing what first became explicit in Plato’s parable. For this realization to become possible, the slow passage all the way through metaphysics in all its stages to its final conclusion had been necessary. But a full realization of it would consist in its full sublation, in the complete abrasion of its “letter” or “writing” form. The historical phenomenon of Occidental thought can now be realized to have been the project of the revolutionary transposition of human existence from man’s interiority in the world (“nature”, myth) into his interiority in mediality, i.e. in interiority per se: “cave” existence as the existence in “the soul”, “in language”, which ipso facto implies that the natural world with its things and gods or God, the cosmos, and Being as such have irrevocably been sublated (become “illusory being”). [5]


[1] C.G. Jung, CW 9i &534.

[2] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)

[3] Richard M. Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967)

[4] With its emphasis on “the imaginal,” archetypal psychology does justice to this situation. “Image” as a form is the sublatedness of what it is the image of. It is synonymous with Plato’s shadows. But to the extent that archetypal psychology then transfers the quality of substantial being simply to “the image”, i.e., to the product of the historical sublation process of substance and Being, by insisting on esse in anima and that “image is psyche” and that the image is the ultimate basis, it undoes, and falls behind, its own progressive insight and become nostalgic. Semantically the emphasis of “image” acknowledges the logical status of illusory being and of the sublatedness of “nature,” but syntactically it reassigns the sense or feeling of substantial dignity to it and paves the way for the ego’s cocooning itself once again in a world full of gods, i.e., in “natural being”. Immurement in the Platonic cave.


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