January 20, 2006: Out of the Cave
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once wrote about the need to "reverse" the effect of Platonism (read: idealism) on the history of Western thought. If, to begin with, we were to think of such an effort in terms of Plato's own famous Allegory of the Cave, we might put it this way: who will lead the prisoners out of the cave? A properly educated philosopher? Or those prisoners themselves?
Comments
What questions serve to get the philosophers to go back into the cave? In some ways, there is no way out, so our job is to conceive the group of people gathered around the image as a collective field and therefore the actual source of power.
Posted by: Wayne Rothschild | January 21, 2006 02:49 PM