Interfaces, Medien, Bildung: padeia (Meyer)
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page 104: padeia
Plato put the following sentence into quotation marks: Zeugung* (creation) is eternity and immortality for mortals. And the fact that there's not just one pair of quotation marks makes this matter so complicated. He brings in a series of Zeugen* (witnesses), postmen, accomplices to create this sentence. But why these detours? Is he describing a game: Stille Post* ("Silent Post", equivalent to Chinese Whispers)? Why does Plato build such a system of nested reported speech? Does he need Zeugen* (witnesses), authorities? Will it become more truthful if many of them bear witness? Or is it a strategy of relativization? It could also simply be a rumor, a "herrenloses Wort" (an abandoned word) [1]. They say that's how it happened. But who really knows?
Snell explains the constitution of the symposion quoting the "repetition of content within a formal stucture": "Plato has used his art of writing in detail to give the reader a kind of feeling that he/she is coming closer to the essence only very slowly [...] In an artful and even artificial way Plato keeps the reader at a distance, away from where he wants to take the reader; only slowly can we come closer and closer".[2]
We are coming closer and closer but we will never arrive. We can't bridge the gap because it is too big. "After the orations of the speakers reached a higher level to culminate with the speech of Socrates speech, and once his speech turns out to be serious, the ultimate and highest is again only presented as a report, as a report on the speech of Diotima. And this does not only happen, because Socrates is agnostic and can't appear as the enunciator of truth, but because in order to disguise the gist and put it into a last perspective".[3]
One could almost describe these quotation marks as Plato's literary style, this reported speech, these statements provided by witnesses. And one could even go further and claim that Plato anticipated the "authors' death" with his postcards (in fact not only since Phaidon!) that passed through so many hands. He is the producer who appears as a narrator. "It is he himself, who invents myths and lets his Socrates push for them [...] The artistic myths of the platonic dialog are always partly an illusion".[4]
page 105: cave allegory
Plato put the following sentence into quotation marks: Zeugung* (creation) is eternity and immortality for mortals. And the fact that there's not just one pair of quotation marks makes this matter so complicated. He brings in a series of Zeugen* (witnesses), postmen, accomplices to create this sentence. But why these detours? Is he describing a game: Stille Post* ("Silent Post", equivalent to Chinese Whispers)? Why does Plato build such a system of nested reported speech? Does he need Zeugen* (witnesses), authorities? Will it become more truthful if many of them bear witness? Or is it a strategy of relativization? It could also simply be a rumor, a "herrenloses Wort" (an abandoned word) [1]. They say that's how it happened. But who really knows?
Snell explains the constitution of the symposion quoting the "repetition of content within a formal stucture": "Plato has used his art of writing in detail to give the reader a kind of feeling that he/she is coming closer to the essence only very slowly [...] In an artful and even artificial way Plato keeps the reader at a distance, away from where he wants to take the reader; only slowly can we come closer and closer".[2]
We are coming closer and closer but we will never arrive. We can't bridge the gap because it is too big. "After the orations of the speakers reached a higher level to culminate with the speech of Socrates speech, and once his speech turns out to be serious, the ultimate and highest is again only presented as a report, as a report on the speech of Diotima. And this does not only happen, because Socrates is agnostic and can't appear as the enunciator of truth, but because in order to disguise the gist and put it into a last perspective".[3]
One could almost describe these quotation marks as Plato's literary style, this reported speech, these statements provided by witnesses. And one could even go further and claim that Plato anticipated the "authors' death" with his postcards (in fact not only since Phaidon!) that passed through so many hands. He is the producer who appears as a narrator. "It is he himself, who invents myths and lets his Socrates push for them [...] The artistic myths of the platonic dialog are always partly an illusion".[4]
page 106: to not know what a cave is
The Truman Show could be rewritten as the first episode of the Cave Allegory: The cave is the artificial tv-studio, Truman is the one who is chained to a pole due to the traumatizing experience of seeing his father drown before his eyes, which renders him unable to ever leave his island by seaway. The fire in the cave is represented by the artificial sun in front of which Christof and his staff carry "all types of devices" generating shadows, which constitutes Truman's Bild* (image) of the world.
And there is an exit out of his cave even though there is darkness on the other side. In contrast to Plato, Peter Weir doesn't explain where Truman is actually going once he leaves his cave.
Remember the exit-scene of the Truman Show: Truman's boat, called "Santa Maria", knocks against the wall of the tv-studio. In this moment he grasps – in the true meaning of the word – what a cave is. "To not know what a cave is" ("Nicht zu wissen, was eine Höhle ist") is the heading of the first section in the third chapter of Hans Blumenberg's book "Exits of Caves" ("Höhlenausgänge"). In that section a question neglected by Plato is being discussed: At the end of the cave myth, how is the returning philosopher supposed to teach Plato's theory of ideas to the people left behind in the cave? After all, that was the whole idea, Plato's raison d'être.
It's possible to pose the same question in regards to the Truman Burbank allegory: How and why did he find out about everything, the truth? Both allegories are conceptualized in a way, that there is actually no reason for escaping this unconscious imprisonment. They are well off in their caves. They are comfortable there. They have jobs, a pretty town house, a dependable car, friendly neighbors, sometimes they have sexual intercourse and they always have something to talk about. But Plato's returning philosopher has come back with "spoiled eyes", diseased, delusional. Why should someone strive for this fate? "...it's not worth it, and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death"[1]. That's one difficulty. It is directly related to the "death of the author". Plato insinuates what he finishes in the Phaidon: "If it seemed to be possible they would have killed him".[2]
He will have to speak for his own survival. His seminar will be a matter of life and death. The returning philosopher has to achieve to teach a mandatory seminar in front of bloodthirsty listeners who don't know what a cave is – who can't know, because it lies in the very character of the cave to be the whole for its constant inhabitants. Blumenberg asks "What could be the content and method of this embarrassing seminar?"[3]
page 107: the plural of the whole
Blumenberg comes to the conclusion (regarding the platonic version) that the returning philosopher can only retreat to "evoking the imagination of a cave"[1].
The plural of the whole can only exist in imagination. "They are also prisoners of the inconceivable, the concrete incapability to understand their position, being locked within a shell. In short: They don’t even know what a cave is and what it means to be told that they are inside of it."[2]
According to the teleological conception, it lies in the nature of a "cosmos" to be the only one of its kind. "We would like to say the "contingency" of the cave was beyond everyone's grasp like the contingency of the world had to be until far into the Middle Ages.
That they should be in "one" cave that's supposed to have an exit came before all comparatives and superlatives of the Seiendsein* (the being of being), of relations of Urbild* (archetype) and Abbild* (copy), the primitive truth of all truths, which must be introduced to the cave inhabitants, at least as a claim: A cave is one of many possible habitations... "[3]
It would have to be a "teacher of media pedagogy", so much is clear. But how to create this imagination of something that is unfamiliar? Didactically? Methodically? A lecture(frontal) oriented along the lines of logos can be excluded as a didactical means. The "teacher" has already lost this competition. In the battle of theories against the sophistically evoked silhouettes he will be ridiculed by the cave inhabitants. He would have to apply sophistical tools as well and become the "Bildermacher* (image creator) using words". It would be necessary to use something Blumenberg calls an "absolute metaphor".[4] A metaphor creating an outside to this situation of locked totality. It will amount in persuasion instead of argumentation, like telling a myth for example or an allegory. Maybe a cave allegory. But "the iteration of the same myth within the same myth would be another type of irony: [...] Enchantment by scaling of infinity wasn't an ancient seduction yet. It belongs to the "dialectics of pure reason" and therefore belongs to the failure of reason due to the absolutism of its claims."[5]
