The metaphor strikes back

Metaphors are sneaky little buggers. True, they might help you get your point across more clearly and vividly and are particularly suited to become part of intellectual world history - few people are unaware that capital lives a "vampire like" existence, that religion is the "opium of the people", that capitalism encloses us in an "iron casing" etc. Of course there are those instances of metaphors gone terribly wrong, like the one about the "base" and "superstructure" which has caused terrible misunderstandings, but there is another way metaphors can, like Frankenstein's "monster", develop a life of their own and take vengeance on their creator. One such unruly metaphor is Plato's cave. Plato meant to illustrate his theory of the double realms (ideas and phenomena), but ended up showing that his theory is logically inconsistent. The main problem of his conceptualization is (as Aristotle showed in his Metaphysics) that it does not show how these two fundamentally distinct realms, the realm of ideas and the realm of phenomena, can have anything in common, how ideas can spawn phenomena as their imperfect images. Even before Aristotle answered that they can not, at least if we understand them as independent spheres, Plato's cave showed the flaws of such conceptualization. In the story Plato describes people in a cave, chained so they can move neither their bodies nor their heads. Behind these people there is a fire and in front of the fire figures are carried to and fro. The imprisoned know nothing of this, but see only shadows of objects being thrown on a wall in the cave. Since they can not see the origins of the shadows, they mistake them for the figures themselves. Ah! but you will notice that all of a sudden we are confronted not with two - as Plato would have us believe - but with three spheres: that of shadows (phenomena), that of figures (ideas) and that of light. The latter has no equivalent in Plato's philosophy, indeed even Aristotle's solution to the problem of incommensurability does not solve it with recourse to the mysterious third element. The metaphor of the cave was centuries before its time, a true prophesy of things to come: it was only Kant who discovered that the subject is the source of light that is joining phenomena and nuomena.