Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 10:48:51 -0400
From: Hobey Ford <hobeyone-AT-gmail.com>
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] =?iso-8859-2?q?Plato=B1s_Allegory_of_the_Cave?=


I am glad to hear your thoughts for that is a perspective I hadn't
considered. Many of the videos I watched seem to put a negative slant
on the allegory.  They take the literal approach (as I did)....chained
head forward in a cave watching propoganda, taking the shadows for
reality. One of the videos compares it to "The Matrix" and it can be
taken that way.. humanity caught  like a moth to the flame of
materialism, literal approach to religion, consumerism, the video
screen, losing touch with reality....

So the man who is able to exit the cave and see the real world outside
, does so through intellect.  The cave is our physical reality and the
shadows are reflections of the Gods or as Jung might say the
archetypes which are no less real for being shadows, but is by seeing
through them that we can perseive what they represent: the gods.

I am not sure I have this right but don't the Indonesian's call all
the arts Wayang and isn't  the word a reference to the shadow screen
itself, a window into the spiritual world... that which  cannot be
perceived in everyday reality.. the gods.

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:13 AM, malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com> wrote:
> At 9:28 AM -0400 5/13/09, Hobey Ford wrote:
>
>>I was curious about Platos Cave Allegory which I am embarrassed to say
>>I had never heard of before reading a reference to it in a book. With
>>all the threads about Greek shadow puppetry I decided to look into it.
>> =A0I finally had to stop myself for it was starting to drive me a little
>>crazy. =A0Then I realized that this must be the first time the media,
>>Plato in this case, uses puppetry as a negative metaphor (allegory).
>>But perhaps it was the seed of this idea as puppets as a metaphor =A0for
>>deception and the first suggestion of the evil "puppet master"
>
> But it seems to me that in Plato it was anything but negative.
> There, the "puppets" and the "puppeteers" represent a transcendent
> world of True Being, accessible to us only through the supreme
> exercise of the intellect - the world of The Ideals, the only truly
> existent entities, such as the Good, the True, the Beautiful, etc.,
> with which we are only familiar through the "shadows" they cast into
> our world. =A0The very opposite of negative or evil. =A0Worthy of being
> included in the Welcome Manifesto.;-)
>
>
> -m
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