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!

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.