Plato's Wii cave

[imomus]

There is a madman in my living room, and the madman is me.



He stands in the middle of the room, and from his actions it seems clear that he believes he is playing tennis. He lunges and lobs, waving a stubby white racket handle in actions vaguely suggestive of "forehand smashes" and "backhand chips". He curses when he "loses a point". His whole attention is focused on the wall in front of him. He tells me his Mii -- a sort of alter ego resembling a younger, more fresh-featured version of himself -- has attained over 1800 points.

I have mixed feelings about this madman and his Mii tulpa. I am glad that he seems more animated than before. Before the delusion that he is playing tennis seized him, he was inclined to sit slumped in his chair, paying attention to something called "the web", which moves much more slowly than the Wii window, and hardly involves the body at all. On the other hand, his switch from the web window to the Wii window is clearly the transition from one illusion to another.

For all his modern technology, I believe my friend the madman is living in the cave Plato described more than two thousand years ago in his philosophical dialogue The Republic. Here, let Orson Welles guide you through Plato's parable:

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Now, I've always had problems with Plato, and especially his metaphor of the cave. I mistrust the metaphysical impulse which leads philosophers and religious people to tell us there is a realm which is utterly real but absent and hidden. This formula -- "the real is elsewhere" -- is, in fact, exactly what worries me about the madman in my living room. Whether he's on the web or the Wii, I worry that he's elsewhere and not here. At least, though, the Wii involves his body.

It's not that "elsewhere" is a lie. There are real games of tennis, and the Israeli state is systematically killing poor people in Gaza. These events flood into the madman's living room via the web and the Wii. They have a reality, a force, an immediacy he does not doubt for a moment. He is not mad or deluded, merely given to metaphor and metonymy. For him, the part can stand for the whole. One or two (or two hundred) news stories can stand for "everything that is happening in the world at the moment". One sport can stand for them all, and a few gestures with a motion-sensitive controller can become participation in a sport. No doubt if he were able to lash around, Wii controller in hand, and watch his Mii smash the Israeli security barrier to the ground with a digital sledgehammer, he would do it, and feel somewhat better. And he would be happy to read, on the web, that eight and a half million networked Miis felled a representation of the illegal wall around Israel, and that the symbolic protest had led the real Israeli government to reconsider their actions.

I think my problem with Plato is that his metaphor is so dismissive of one of the two worlds he shows us. The world inside the cave is illusion, the world outside it is reality. It's too insulting, too reductive, too lopsided -- as unjust as the power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians. If Plato had said that both were real, and that one world was represented in the other, and that this representation was an important business conducted via metaphor and metonymy, I'd be much happier with his image of the cave. Then we'd be closer to the situation Kafka described: "We're each looking out at the world through a tiny peephole. Since this is the case, we should at least try to keep the peephole clean."

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Why am I not surprised that you support Hamas? You're exactly the type of simpering bleeding-heart nincompoop who falls for their theatrics. They are a gang, pillaging from their own people, murdering their political opponents in broad daylight and ruining their country's infrastructure. Even the arab word has woken up to their sham government (http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090104/OPINION/361845413/1080/NONE), but still idiot leftists like you support them. I hope your neighbors lob rockets at your house for a year and see if you manage the same restraint as Israel.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I hope nothing of the sort. I hope that you have a great 2009!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If neighbours one hundred times poorer than me -- neighbours I had, moreover, hemmed into a tiny compound and forced to live in appalling and inhumane conditions -- lobbed rockets at my house, I would call the police. I would not take it into my own hands to slaughter my neighbours in a proportion of one hundred to one, thereby building up more murderous resentment in them. It is in Israel's best interests to stop this pointless murder now. Hamas is the democratically-elected government of the Palestinians because the Israelis act this way. They are trying to do as much damage as possible before Obama takes power, but they are only hurting themselves. If you wish them to continue this murder, you want them to go on hurting themselves. If you want them to continue, you are no friend of Israel's.

[(Anonymous)]

All lies!! I am the true anonymous and I hope to get a wii for my birthday...

[(Anonymous)]

Your "victim of circumstances" logic is patently ridiculous - are the Palestinians not capable of free will? Is the only logical response to oppression aggression? Look to Tibet and the Dalai Lama for the answer to that one.

No one can argue that Israel is faultless, but most of the misery suffered by the people of Gaza has been at the hands of Hamas. Please read the article I linked to and open your eyes: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090104/OPINION/361845413/1080/NONE

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, the Dalai Lama has done such a marvellous job liberating his people that they recently rioted against the Chinese (and were violently suppressed). The Dalai Lama's "engagement" with China and renouncing of the objective of independence has been incredibly effective, hasn't it? The Tibetans are now a minority in their own capital.

[(Anonymous)]

So...? The point was not about effectiveness. Sometimes your side wins, sometimes it loses. Israel was won all 7 wars instigated by Palestinians and, at this point in history, they deserve to be recognized as a country. Instead Hama urges their people to continue to sacrifice themselves in vain. The point is that you have a choice and are responsible for your actions. Don't forget the Hama motto is "we love death as much as you love life". How can anyone sympathize with these muderers?

!!!

[(Anonymous)]

I have a projector too!! Got it for Christmas/Hannukah/New Year's/Anticipated Birthday. That was the justification, at least. And guess what I was doing last night? Playing Mario Tennis on my N64 with it and two 17-year-old girls (twins -- don't ask), as well as a gay couple, one of which much vexed the other by nearly constantly touching me in increasingly erogenous zones.

Kafka is just Kafka. Useless to compare him to another -- as well try to compare shoes to Light. I like Kafka.

And, in true Nietzschean form, the problem with me is not that Plato views that one world is better than another -- it's actually what you first mentioned. It's the fact that he views them as two seperate worlds at all. As if the after-life or the World of Ideas had any existence outside of the world of our experience. This is, I've come to believe, a harmful credence *in and of itself*. Forget deciding which one's better, you shouldn't even be escaping to another world in the first place... or so the story goes. I apologise beforehand to all Christians reading this for any annoyance caused.

Yours agnostically,
David Leon

Realism

[(Anonymous)]

I study International Relations at Uni. Which is fun. You get to be constantly cynical about the workings of the world; the fancy name for the school of thought that encapsulates this is "Realism" (aptly chosen, eh?). It basically holds that nations act solely for their security interests. Not for ideas, nor ideals, nor even economic development of their peoples.
Let's take that to be true. Let's be Henry Kissinger for a bit.

It is not in the security interests of Israel to foster a climate of hatred against it.

Traditional realists wouldn't pay much attention to words such as "climate", "atmosphere", "the people" and the like. But even the most hardcore, Waltz-ian neo-realist nowadays has to at least allude to this line of reasoning. Israel might indeed eliminate some of the command structure of Hamas. It will, however, as Momus said, just confirm the conditions through which the movement arose in the first place. Don't give Hamas the moral victory of having their claims that Israel is a belligerent state hostile to the Palestinian people confirmed -- that will only help their cause. I really don't find this line of reasoning too hard to grasp.

Basically, pedantry aside, speaking *purely* in pro-Israeli, anti-Islamic militant terms, it is to the advantage to the state of Israel that it foster cooperation with and improve the security of its neighbouring states and the Palestinian territories. No Left-Right distinctions here.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yesterday I saw an exhibition of the work of Arthur Szyk (http://szyk.org/szykonline/america.html), a Jewish artist who escaped from Europe to America and made many satirical images of the Nazis for the covers of American magazines. One of these, a Jewish magazine called ANSWER, had the motto "Never again the ghetto!" That is indeed the answer, but it has to apply to ghettos made by Jews as well as ghettos made for Jews.

Szyk believed in America -- "I have found the home I have always searched for," he wrote in 1950. "Here I can speak of what my soul feels. There is no other place on earth that gives one the freedom, liberty, and justice that America does." Unfortunately, America did not believe in him. The following year he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Four months later he died of heart failure. Liberty, like the ghetto, is not the sole preserve of one people.

Settler's Wii

[(Anonymous)]

Bash the Muslim in the cage (100 points)! Aid workers (50 points)! And anyone with a camera (20 points)!

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

Oh no ...Wii
Its truly the end of the world.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Ehm, isn't that exactly what Plato said? After all, the ideals are ideal, but their manifestations are reality. Though one is a reflection of the other, the only way to know the ideals is to look at their manifestations in reality, which is what one was supposed to do through developing in the way outlined in the Symposium. Not exactly through metaphor, rather through a scientific approach where a series of incidents stands for the underlying law, as well as a higher spiritual awareness, which does kind of seem like metaphor, especially as acted out on the sexual body.

I guess you could argue translations, though, if that's what you want to do. My Greek is rusty, and it's ages since I translated Plato.

Re: Realism

[(Anonymous)]

You are clearly a child who does not remember the previous seven wars. Hamas is not some 'movement' that spung up recently. It is just a new name for the same thugs who have been around for the last 60 years. If you think they will stop once Israel starts playing nice, you have been drinking too much academic kool-aid. Beyond your empty game-theories, there are stark cultural realities on the ground.

They are anti-semetic to the core, they will stop at nothing to kill every last Jew, and most importantly, they only understand power and weakness. When Israel does not retaliate, instead of being thankful for peace, they increase their attacks to take advantage of percieved weakness. Look at the last 6 decades. After every lull in violence, every improvement in humanitarian conditions, they only come back stronger. It's a hard medicine to swallow for optimists, but the reality is they will never change unless they are made to suffer.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a good thing you're here to simplify the situaton and tell me how to be a friend to Jews.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

You may not be playing tennis, but you're using a real device to communicate real information between two real points in the real world in order to modify the state of another real world device.

When you use a remote control to turn on a TV set and watch the news, you're not merely imagining that you have entered a room in which a man with an exhaustive knowledge of the day's events is giving a lecture on such; you are receiving information that has traveled from some distant point in this world to a point much nearer to the one you occupy.

The dichotomy between the real and the virtual is a false one.

[charleston.livejournal.com]

Well said.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Why am I not surprised that you support Hamas?

"Supporting the Hamas" is such an ambiguous phrase, I must confess -- I'm doubtful whether imomus would want to call for the utter annihilation of the state of Israel in favour of a radical Islamic state of Palestine; and he does not strike me as the sort of person who quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with quite the same enthusiasm as Hamas's charter does.

Let's "be thankful for Israeli peace"

[(Anonymous)]

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Beautifully said, Nick. It looks like no matter what we do, the right keeps insisting on its Power of the Will approach to everything, then attributing all the viciousness to anyone who would stand in the way of what is nakedly another property grab.
The right's already gone through everybody's wallets over here, and flung shit at every attempt to stop them. Dumbasses just can't seem to get enough of being fleeced.

[harveyjames.livejournal.com]

Next you should review Super Mario Galaxy!

Re: Realism

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Did you learn nothing from the Lebanon conflict? Israel only strengthened Hezbollah with its "they only understand power" tactics. It is now in the process of strengthening support for Hamas.

Platonic Realm

[jessepep.livejournal.com]

I have a mathematician friend who is often talking about the Platonic Realm, which is where fractals live, and all other unchanging things. Things like the number 2.4 live there too, they don't exist in any real sense in our physical world. It's apparently a pretty beautiful place. I do a fair bit of meditation called Vipassana, and from my understanding of it, I'm beginning to think that buddha's nirvana is the platonic realm, where nothing arises and nothing passes, and it can only be experienced, descriptions beyond that are pointless. When you think about it, most of the things we consider don't exist (a perfect right-angle, a friendship, a soul) there is no atomic (ie indissectable) thing that represents any of those. I get a sense that perhaps Plato was onto something quite profound.

... so I don't mind the guy :)

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Now, I've always had problems with Plato

Me too. He owes me ten bucks and he avoids me at parties.
I feel almost guilty about being flip and sidestepping the crux of your post but...

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Re: Platonic Realm

[(Anonymous)]

Plato was onto something quite profound. He is Plato. All Western philosophy consists of footnotes on Plato, says a little guy named Alfred North Whitehead. All true.

He is, however, wrong. Wagner's mythologising of German national greatness is most profound. It is, however, very, very dangerous.

So is the world of Ideas. Karl Popper argued that Idealism, or the school of thought which holds that ideas are what is truly true in the world, and have a definite and absolute existence [think Hegel], is more the cause of Nazism than nationalism. The mere hubris that comes along with believing that Ideas exist in pure form somewhere, and that we can *apprehend* them (to experience is to apprehend an object) leads to self-assurance of the sort that entails thoughts such as
"You know what? My country needs me and only me to be its ruler, by divine ordinance."
or
"I don't like Jews. I shall take this prejudice and apply it into the world."

That's one problem with Platonic Idealism. I'm not so hot on it -- Godwin's Law.

Another is that it is boring. Ideas are constructed, not apprehended from a perfect preexistence. Screw that. I wanna invent shit. Erm... if you want a name-drop... guess it'll have to be Deleuze.

A third is that it is escapism. Name-drop = Nietzsche. Wanting to experience a perfect world, instead of trying to enjoy the one we have, is no good. We should be playing Wii instead. Which is fun. I want a Wii.
I think this is pretty convincing as regards Platonic Idealism. Nietzsche was kinda callous towards Nirvana for my tastes, though. The absence of thought gets a lot of points in my point-assigning book, out of pure lusting after the experience myself. If you get it, keep it.

Aristotle rocks,
David Leon