Ontology's biggest clown Plato believed that there exists an immaterial Universe of `Forms', perfect transcendental templates of everyday objects such as: a table, a chair, a cat, one of Tony Blair's bombs for the decimation of Iraqi civilians, and ideas/emotions, joy, piety, nobility, etc. The material objects and ideas in our objective world are only `shadows' of the Forms.
What I have done in the cartoon (just to please the far saner philosopher Parmenides) is to modify the usual Platonic underground torture-chamber and create a cave with Plato, Socrates and Heidegger as the prisoners chained to a bench and being forced to watch real objects (rather than shadows) being paraded before them.
For the proto-fascist Plato, the rulers must tell the people the noble lie, though he omits to tell us what is noble about lying, or whether such lying behaviour conforms to the Form for either nobility or lying as laid down as a template by whichever god or godlet member of the Greek pantheon was templateur-in-chief.
Plato leaves us wondering on this point,
but Kronos, was the leader and the youngest
of the first generation of Titans - perhaps,
in between biting off the heads of his children
and eating them he had a hand in the formulation
of the Forms, specially when he was imprisoned
in Tartaros for so long. What better pastime
for a transcendentalist Titanic old
lag could there have been than sitting dreaming
up perfect forms for spinning-wheels, saucepans,
or the bowls of freshly-harvested thistles
and stinging nettles which the Spartans preferred
for wiping their posteriors, rather than
using grass for their lavations.
Those militaristic, austere Helenes favoured the manly virtues of toughness and a disregard for bodily comfort. It was an ablutionary Spartan custom which, according to wikipedia, led to frequent, heartfelt cries of Oi moi! Aoi Lacedaemonai!

"The undermost limits of earth and sea, where Iapetos and Kronos seated have no shining of the sun god Hyperion to delight them nor winds’ delight, but Tartaros stands deeply about them."
Homer, Iliad 8. 479 ff (trans. Lattimore) (Greek epic C8th B.C.)
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So according to Homer Kronos certainly had
plenty of time on his hands,
at least
until Metis eventually gave him
an emetic
to force him to disgorge the
children, and
Zeus cut Kronos' stomach open
after he had
attacked his elder relative Ouranos
with
a sickle, by cutting off his
genitals, castrating
him and casting the severed member
into the
sea. Perhaps it failed to measure
up to Kronos'
and Plato's strict designer
principles of
the perfect form of penile
beau idéal?
Of course Plato's crackpot idea of Forms and the benefits of lying and the mythic
savagery of Greek religion is so bizarre
it is tempting to amuse oneself with ribald
tongue-in-cheek speculation - such an ontological
idiot (as with Heidegger) provides
an easy target for the satirist, for who
knows what was going on in his muddle-headed metaphysicalist
mind?
In the same way that the "inveterate
liar" Heidegger (as characterised
by
his teenage student girlfriend
Hannah Arendt)
cannot be trusted in anything
he writes,
so too Plato's overt endorsement
of lying
must also make us suspicious
of every aspect
of his behaviour. Accordingly
we must be
suspect regarding his motives
for constructing
the cock and bull story of Forms,
which may
well have had some connection
with maintaining
and reinforcing the division
of the population
into different sections - manipulative
rulers,
auxiliaries, farmers and
plebeians
etc.
The noble lie is a religious myth told to the people to
motivate them to do what is good
and right.
For aristocrats like Plato the
lower orders
doing what is good and right obviously corresponds to doing what is good and right for the the aristocratic
rulers, and auxiliaries.
After all, these perfect rulers owed their putative perfection not to education, but to the Forms of gold put into their souls by God.
Just as Hitler later decreed, Plato
also suggested that people be taught the
myth that different classes have different
metals in their bloodstream, and therefore
should not intermarry - for such metaphysicalist
miscegenation would obviously corrupt Kronos'
carefully crafted Forms.
But enough of that... back to our prisoners
Plato, Socrates and Heidegger as they lie
chained to a bench being forced to watch
real objects paraded before them.
Now and again a burning brand from the fire
would is applied to their testicles just
to remind them that it is real objects they
see before them and the flickering flames
of the burning logs also exist and are
not merely shadows of their conceptual fantasies of reificational
"Forms" and 'Universals"
and other hypostatised exemplars, or the good- ideas of the gods, arrived at after some titanic struggle of the
giants in a gigantomachia, then slyly
and secretly shelved in some superhuman supermarket
of 'Forms' in the sky.
The jailors turned prisoners' own heads
would be clamped in position as per Plato's
personal instructions to the torturers, but
instead of the shadows being projected on
the wall in FRONT of the transcendentalist
trio, a fire would be lit on the floor beneath
it. REAL objects would be paraded in front
of it - between them and the fire, so that
the flames would cast shadows of the real
objects on the wall BEHIND them instead of
the front.
The twist comes when Plato, Socrates and
the unspeakable Nazi wretch Heidegger are
released from their chains and the troilistic
trio of transcendentalist turnip-heads are
shown the shadows on the wall and told that
these are the actual realities and the objects
they had been looking at all those years
were just the fantastical shadows.