Plato and the Communal Ontology

A Brief Reflection on a Great Book

I have no doubts that D.C. Schindler’s book Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason will make my “Favourite Books I Read this Year” list and will most likely place near the top. The book essentially argues that Plato was a proto-communal ontologist and that the Sophists are those who cannot surpass their one-sided, self-relational perspectives to grasp the “whole.” 

One of the most original and, from the perspective of the communal ontology, valuable insights Schindler has is that those trapped within Plato’s cave (we are speaking here of the famous “Allegory of the Cave”) are imprisoned by their own self-enclosure. Specifically, they are “imprisoned” because they are bound by their self-relational perspectives, what Plato calls “appearances.” It is worth quoting Schindler at length: 

Why does Plato present sheer phenomenality—appearance as severed from its relation to being—as imprisonment? If appearance, taking it as we did in our discussion of the Theaetetus in the last chapter, represents a thing insofar as it is given “to me,” then appearance absolutized would be sheer “self”-relation. Sheer “self”-relation, in turn, implies the complete lack of movement: it is impossible to move without getting somewhere, and thus moving beyond where one was, beyond one’s mere “self.” Movement depends on the sort of otherness that sheer “self”-relation excludes in principle. At the bottom of the cave, a person has contact with things only insofar as they move into immediate relation to the “self,” which is not in any way turned toward things. Their reality is perfectly reduced to their “for me” significance. Sensible images, received not as images of a reality beyond them but only as absolutized in themselves, thus represent a relation of pure immediacy in which the perceiver on a moment-by-moment basis presents the sole measure for the meaning of the thing perceived.¹

All activity is relational/communal, so the failure to commune (i.e. to self-relate) necessarily negates one’s capacity for activity. Those who hold mere appearance to be the truth as such negate their capacity for intellectual activity, as appearances only ever exist “for oneself,” i.e.  through one’s own individual sense perception. In the very beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel demonstrates that the immediacy of “sense-certainty” cannot be the absolute truth, as what we see, hear, taste, touch, and feel is continuously changing (and the absolute is unchanging). However, what remains ever-present is the sensing subject; indeed, the subject is the only thing that does not immediately pass away (unlike fleeting perceptions/appearances). Thus, as Schindler says, appearances have only one “measure,” and that is precisely the perceiver him/herself.

It is hard not to notice that Schindler puts the word “self” in quotation marks when he speaks of self-relation. Why is this the case? It is because, as we have discussed before, pure self-relation is an ontological impossibility (and is conceptually equivalent to nothing at all, as being is communion). The ouroboros can consume its whole body, but it cannot consume its very mouth. Thus, those trapped in appearances merely “approximate” pure self-relation. In Christian language, they engage in sin, but they are not sin as such: “Sheer self-relation, as exclusive of all otherness, is strictly speaking not possible insofar as relation requires some otherness.”²

If Plato identifies “appearances” with self-referential perspectivity, then one would expect that the movement from appearances to encountering true being would consist of the ekstasis of the self. And this is precisely what Schindler argues: 

Love and reason thus essentially coincide, insofar as both entail an identification of the self with its object in some respect. Falling in love, an experience in which one is literally driven outside of oneself through the encounter with what lies beyond one’s comprehension, is the mirror of the shift from opinion to knowledge. It involves a renunciation of the Protagorean measure, because it is a consent to be measured by what is other than the self. Knowledge means taking something, not merely as it is for me, but “non-perspectivally” as it is in itself, and this requires the essentially ascetic movement of inserting oneself into its goodness.”³

True knowledge does not negate the otherness of the other, but, through self-transcendence, “meets” the other without reducing it to a mere appearance. The “goodness” of the object of knowledge is not derived from myself–could there be a more prideful proposition? True knowledge begins with a gesture of humility, a recognition on the part of reason (the very faculty of knowing) that it does not know the other. This recognition, which is true, is the very precondition of genuine knowledge. The recognition of lack propels the philosopher towards the other in love, but the Sophists experience no lack–they think they’ve figured it all out (this is very clearly depicted in the Platonic dialogues). And this, perhaps, explains Socrates’ famous(ly enigmatic) declaration: “I know that I know nothing.” While the arrogant Sophists claim to have grasped the truth, Socrates humbly admits his own ignorance. The antinomy is that the humility of Socrates reveals that he knows more than all of the Sophists (trapped in their self-relational perspectives) combined because it is only through this humility that one exits the cave of self-relational appearances.

1. D.C. Schindler, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.