Page 25 - GALIET METAPOIESIS AND TRUTH IV+

Galiet & Galiet
It is true that these three aspects meet in Plato, but once the Forms are seen, grasped, the imaginary ladder of ascension is released. In this sense, Heidegger prevails; the senses are jettisoned once the Form-in-itself is intellectively understood. Hypothesis and Dianoia are only a point of support to ascend to the first principle, which no longer needs the hypothesis. It only prepares one, paideia, for supreme knowledge: νοεσις.
At the beginning of Book VII of the Republic, immediately following the Divided Line at the end of Book VI,87 Plato, in Socrates’ speech, presents the Allegory of the Cave, one of the most celebrated epistemological-ontological allegories in philosophy’s history. It explains the metaphor of the Divided Line, which in turn explains the Allegory of the Cave. Just as the Allegory of the Cave has four progressive stages,88 so does the Divided Line have four ascending segments.89 They express four distinctive degrees of becoming: from less clarity towards more clarity towards being.90 That is, a four-fold ascension from ignorance to the intellectual insight of the Forms.91 The first stage, the imprisonment of humankind looking at shadows, parallels imagination, or the first segment of the line. The second stage, the liberation of a prisoner within the cave, parallels belief or opinion or the second segment of the line. Similarly, the third stage, the genuine liberation of a prisoner to primordial light, parallels thought,92 or the third segment of the line. The fourth stage, the released prisoner’s return to the cave, parallels understanding, or the line’s fourth segment. Everything inside the cavern points to nomos and artificiality: the artefacts, the shadows and appearances, the fire. Everything outside the cavern points towards phusis: to natural shadows and reflections of humans and things in water, first, then to things
87 Plato. Republic. Trans. By G.M.A. Grube. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1992. Book VI. 509e – 511e
88 This progressive stage includes the return of the prisoner to the Cave. Though he returns, it is still considered progressive because he returns into the world of shadows having attained an intuitive understanding of the Forms: noesis.
89 For Plato knowledge cannot be reduced just to empiric or material knowledge (as Heraclitus posited) or purely deductive or formal knowledge (as Parmenides posited). Knowledge is like a line divided into two equal or unequal segments. If you read it as avisa; if you read isa o av isa they are equal. Each of the resulting lines is divided in two other segments. The first partition is made according to what pertains to the visible or to the intelligible. Each is then subdivided in two parts according to the relative degree of clarity or obscurity, knowledge or ignorance, the true and the false, being and becoming. The first half of the visible subdivided line refers to images; the second to living things. The first half of the intelligible partition refers to hypothesis; the second to first principle.
90 This realm of being, of universals, of intelligible Forms is eternal, timeless, permanent, fixed, unchanging in contrast to the realm of becoming, of particulars, of sensible objects, which is temporal, impermanent, mutable.
91 As explained in 3 above, the four-fold ascension in the Divided Line moves, generally, from imagination to belief to thought to understanding.
92 Thought here is to be understood as dianoia and its relationship to hypothesis.
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