Tuesday, July 21, 2026

The People Doing the Being in the Fifth Century BC or there abouts

Damn

 In the corridors of meaning the symbol "immanent" finds a formal definition in one of those silicone dictionaries that goes something like this : "...  the Latin, to remain within ..... existing or remaining within; inherent, intrinsic, or permanently pervading a domain, subject, or reality. It describes qualities or forces that are fundamental and internal to something, rather than coming from the outside."

 The Immanent Socrates, was the Socrates that wasn't going to be changed from the outside. And I think Plato's point in both parts of the dialogue he wrote entitled Parmenides was to demonstrate relationships between the inner and the outer self. When the young Socrates had his chance to meet the great Parmenides, that master of the Philosophy of Oneness and his sooty boy, the very good looking sidekick Zeno, Socrates listened to Zeno read one of his lectures, and at the end of the sermon Socrates had the gall to suggest that neither Parmenides nor Zeno seemed to know what they were talking about with their rambling theory about a Perfect Oneness they insisted the universe consisted of.

 Changing Socrates' mind, the mind of a man who agreed he didn't know anything, he was just asking questions, wasn't going to structurally happen. Socrates could have just been polite, he might have just nodded his ugly head, pretending to agree, but because Plato had a story to tell and a  lot of points to make, he didn't.

 And so, when Plato presented his analogy of the cave, his Ideal Forms out there casting shadows, the Immanent Socrates was not able to think of the Ideal Forms as an objective truth off in the distance, an objective truth the gods had seen as they emerged from the Hyperuranion, the realm beyond the heavens, and which we mortals had also seen as we emerged from the Hyperuranion. But with us mortals enduring a birthing canal to see us into the world while the gods had a chariot to take them ready made to Mount Olympus, we people while we may witnessed the Ideal, if Plato was to be correctly understood, that some of us might be persuaded or taught to remember Ideal bits and bobs, the hellish trauma of entering the earthly plane had caused us to catch degrees of amnesia, maybe PTSD allergic reaction even, which made us wonder whether Ideal Forms actually existed, anywhere, and if they did we probably weren't meant to see them, or touch them, or even smell them.

 No, far from them being behind a hill on a plane faraway, the Immanent Socrates saw fleeting moments of the Ideal Forms in everyday objects, in love, peace, justice, beauty, tables and comfortable chairs. Those fleeting moments soon passed, but they were real, they were here on earth and not beyond the heavens.

 Yes indeed, Plato wanted to save Parmenides from the viseral torment of an afternoon with Socrates, after all Parmenides was visiting from Southern Italy, he was on holiday. Of course the world was a perfect circle of eternal nouns and Zeno was so frightfully clever with his paradoxes even if Socrates wondered whether most of Zeno's paradoxes were actually truisms. 

  And so, here we are with our Being around Objective and Subjective:

 Under Socrates: We are active participants. The objective truth is a living spark that flares up between us and the world in specific moments. We learn by engaging, feeling, and chasing those fleeting views. Rock on Coleridge.

 Under Plato: We are broken, amnesiac prisoners. True reality is somewhere else, totally independent of our lived experience. Our subjective feelings are dangerous distractions; they are just us falling in love with the shadows on the cave wall. Rock on Kant

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