Why on earth do some people attempt to describe the complexities of neurological processes employing the inadequate language of a primitive culture from over two-thousand years ago? To me it is like attempting to conduct a serious heart by-pass operation using stone knives and sutures made from twisted horsehair to stitch the tissues together, or jockeying an indricotherium in the Grand National at Aintree.

Such use of inappropriate language may well prove to others with a similar obsession for the *linguistic rough-trade* that you possess an intellectual or esoteric knowledge of the linguistically lavatorial, but is the abandonment of any vestiges of reality-contactedness worth the admiration of those similarly trammeled in such semantic redundancies and corresponding propositional paraphilias?

     OK, primitive Greek culture bequeathed a lot to us, but that is no big deal, for it was the only culture around at that time that happened to have reached such a stage of development. It was NOT because the ancient Greeks were racially brighter (or in Heideggerian terms *more German-like*) than anybody else who was around at the time - they inherited a lot from other cultures anyway - but because of extraneous topographical and economic circumstances combined with a well organised system of slavery which freed the oppressors to sit around and think.

     They were in a sense the Japanese of their day, bringing together the cultural elements of other antecedent and contemporary civilisations and packaging them as
*marketable* concepts. That is NOT to say they weren't innovative, but so were the cultures of the Indus River valley, Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere in faraway South America. In other words they were special - but the reasons for their uniqueness is explainable, and there is no need to worship them as gods and mimic their language in the hope that its use will magically endow one with a special understanding.

Nor is there, as was the case with Heidegger, any sense in believing that marching up and down in leather briefs, leading a bunch of students to his hut for weekend Nazi indoctrination sessions and blowing conch-shells, displaying an Indian fertility sign as a symbol of *the collectivity* and adopting Greek ideas, Greek aesthetic ideals in art and architecture going to endow one with some magic philosophical puissance.

Of course Heidegger was selective in his choice of the obfuscationary language   that he plagarised from the Greeks. Clearly Platonic lying was an acceptable practice as Heidegger and his pal Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, leader of the NSDAP's propaganda machine demonstrated.  But the Greek custom of homosexuality was avoided.
Unlike Heidegger's sexual liasons with his  teenage female students which some say lost him the rectorship, homosexuality could get you a pink triangle and a spell in one of Heidegger's *factory farms* for sub-humans. Accepting the proto-fascism of the Platonic *republican* subjugation of other peoples to slavery was also fine and dandy for the pint-sized nazi thinker, as the slave-labourers of Poland and Russia would later confirm.

As is well known Hannah Arendt accused Heidegger of being *an inveterate liar,* but maybe The philosopher of Nazism was merely taking Plato's advice in The Republic literally that lying was OK? The rulers, Plato said, must tell the people of the city the (oxymoronic) *noble lie” - that the categories of rulers, auxiliaries, farmers, etc. was not due to circumstances within the people's control, upbringing, or education, but because of God's intervention.(414d-415c - see also 389b-c; 382c) The slaves were the most deprived bunch of people. They had no power or status and not even the right to have a family and possess property. By the 5th century BC, the slaves constituted about one-third of the sum inhabitants in a number of city-states. Four social classes on the basis of wealth existed in Athens. Plato was a member of the small aristocrat class and (like the propaganda minister Josef Goebells in Nazi Germany) was pushing a policy of lying to the overwhelming majority (judged at constituting five sixths of the total citizenry [1] ) of the Athenian population. WHAT WAS *NOBLE* ABOUT THAT?

    For the near-midget, cravenly cowardardly, swastika-waving Heidegger to pose as a modern representative of the Olympians of ancient Hellas was utterly risible. To believe, as Heidegger did,  that seig-heiling Hitler was going to change a nation of pot-bellied, beer-swilling sauerkraut gobblers into the modern representatives of  his idealised paragons of the *clean-limbed* sophisticated Greeks of the *incipience* was madness - a madness which was indeed evidenced by his  deliberate *self-concealment* when he scuttled to a nearby mental institution on the approach of the non-Greek barbarian Allies bearing arms and not gifts.

     Philosophers need to decide whether to continue employing all these defamed  Platonic semantic redundancies like aletheia etc., in contexts for which they were never developed, or to use the more modern forms developed to allow more clarity of thought and communication.

     *Truth* can never be concealed or unconcealed because you cannot hide or reveal that which does not exist. What exists are human liars like Plato and Heidegger - not the reification *truth. * You may encounter liars and you may encounter truthful folk, but never *truth.* You will confront completely different interpretations of correctly thought out and accepted versions of the *truth* wherever you go. From one person or group to another, from one country or religion to another - indeed from one personal changing mood to another.

     The *truth* you believe, that a certain good friend, politician, work-mate, colleague or sexual partner is steadfastly on your side and would never bear you any ill-will is shattered when you discover another *truth* - that they have been betraying you behind your back for years. *Truth* is an ABSOLUTE communicated by an abstraction. Any discovery of untruthfulness therefore negates the whole semantic possibility of *truth.*

     The acceptance of ONE lie as being truthful kills the possibility of *Truth* stone dead. You realise that absolutist truth is a myth, how is one to judge if what aletheia is claimed to *unconceal* is the real McCoy - or just another bundle of Platonic or Heideggerian  lies?


     Lethe - [léthé ] for the Greeks literally means *concealment.* This is such a kooky idea. Although it has a resonance in CERTAIN neurological conditions/circumstances, where we deal with traumatic experiences by blocking or concealing them - in the majority of instances, there is no deliberate concealment, but simply an inability to remember and recall the information required. The Greek word for *truth* is a-lethe-ia meaning *un-forgetfulness" or *un-concealment" is more in keeping with the act of remembering rather than apodeictic revelation. In keeping with the primitive penchant for personification such nonsense was reified in the form of a new godlet. Indeed how COULD it BE a revelation if what it *revealed* was something we already knew?

     Thus such words are redundant and unfit for the purpose of any intelligent philosophical discussion, particularly ontological determination.

     Even Old Norse or some other Germanic tongue would be better fitted to communicate the subtleties of philosophical discussion rather than the crudities of ancient Greek wherein the etymology of its abstractions are to be found in such fairytales as - which river one chose to drink from. For the primitive Greeks, drinking from the River Lethe ("forgetfulness" or "oblivion") caused complete forgetfulness, whilst those who drank from the River Mnemosyne [also personified as a buxom wench] would remember everything and attain omniscience.

If they knew this then why the hell didn't they organise chains of slaves with buckets to fetch the magic Mnemosyne-water to Athens? Archimedes who was noted for his work in hydrostatics could have put his screw to use in facilitating the rapid extraction of Mnemosyne-water for ongoing bucket transportation to Athens.

     They could have bottled Mnemosyne's urine and flooded the Mediterranean market with the stuff. It would have made life much easier for old guys like me, who have a great difficulty remembering all the kids' birthdays, never mind the name of the deputy president of the United States.

I must try to cut down on that Mersey-water it's the colour of gnat's water- but it goes so well with my Irish Whiskey.

Reference:
Fuks. Alexander. Social Conflict in Ancient Greece. p.7 Plato's Republic and Social Question. The Magnus Press. 1984. E.J. Brill, Leiden. The Hebrew University, Jerusalem.