If there is a human fall, it is our fall from nature; our infatuation with knowledge, the this and that of our own constructions, and our concomitant turning away from life, or nature, or so called God's creation — ENOAH

Mankind falls from a nature where there is no better or worse, no truth or falsity, no right or wrong, no morality and no ethics.

Mankind is a part of nature not separate to it. Mankind was created by nature, and is an expression of nature.

When mankind attempts to separate itself from nature, it attempts to differentiate itself from a nature that is non-judgemental by introducing concepts of judgment, of right and wrong, truth and falsity, better or worse, morality and ethics.

These judgements it then projects onto the world around it, projecting its own beliefs onto a world absent of them.

Mankind perceives truth and falsity in nature because of its attempt to differentiate itself from nature through the invention of judgements such as truth and falsity. These judgements it then projects onto a world absent of them.

@Wayfarer

If the misery of our poor be not caused by nature, but by our social institutions, then great is our sin. — Charles Darwin

You know what Plato's cave allegory might be really talking about, at the end of the day? Maybe it's talking about the time, before the Paleolithic (before cavemen) when men and women were not human.

I, too, see it that way.

ou know what Plato's cave allegory might be really talking about, at the end of the day? Maybe it's talking about the time, before the Paleolithic (before cavemen) when men and women were not human. — Arcane Sandwich

or, before they were historical humans.

or, before they were historical humans. — ENOAH

Yep, that's a possibility.

The word "natural" is not made meaningless because it has more than one meaning. — RussellA

But its meaning is to differentiate the natural from the artificial, as per the examples given above. If you extend the meaning of ‘natural’ to encompass ‘the artificial’ then it looses its meaning.

Besides, what does it mean to say that h.sapiens is ‘part of nature’? Why is that meaningful or important?

Maybe it's talking about the time, before the Paleolithic (before cavemen) when men and women were not human. — Arcane Sandwich

:rofl:

Isn’t it about our lack of insight? The absence of wisdom? Not seeing what is real? That’s how I’ve always interpreted it. I don’t think the ancient Greeks had much grasp of palaeontology.

:rofl:

Isn’t it about our lack of insight? The absence of wisdom? Not seeing what is real? That’s how I’ve always interpreted it. I don’t think the ancient Greeks had much grasp of palaeontology. — Wayfarer

And you care about the interpretations of academic philosophers since when, exactly? Academia itself is just an institution, a human construct, if you will. Plato himself invented it. Caves existed before Plato. And the ancient Greeks did in fact discover Mammoth bones: they mistakenly took the hole for the trunk as one large, central eye: they thought they were cyclops bones.

It's a dilemma, Wayfarer: given the choice, would you rather live in a cave, or out in the Sun? I'd rather live in a cave. But that's to Plato's point: by living in a cave, instead of under the Sun, our insight diminishes, to the point that it becomes lacking. Our wisdom also diminishes, to the point in which it becomes absent. We forget what is real, since we are making cave paintings instead of hunting, we're making funny shadows with our hands and the cave fire, pretending that they're the shadows of different animals, like birds and rabbits. So, what's the remedy to all that? To step outside the cave, literally, and get some good old, fresh air, from the great outdoors, under the Sun.

Hermeneutics, right? Interpretation of ancient texts. The allegory of the cave being on of the foundational texts of Western culture and being about the nature of knowledge and philosophical insight (noesis). Plato’s cave was never about actual cave-dwellers, or actual caves.

Plato’s cave was never about actual cave-dwellers, or actual caves. — Wayfarer

Are you sure?

It's philosophy 101, right? That section of the Republic is plainly allegorical, with the Sun representing the knowledge of the Good, towards which all should aspire. The 'ascent' from the 'Cave' is 'painful', and should the one who has ascended return to the cave and try and explain to the cave-dwellers the magnificence of the outside world, they'll want to kill him. The mainstream interpretation is that the cave represents the world of sensory experience, the ascent to the Sun represents the insight into the forms or intelligible principles which are only discernable to the 'eye of reason'. It is followed by the 'allegory of the divided line' which describes the levels of knowledge, from (mere) belief or opinion, through mathematical knowledge (dianoia) and then noesis (higher knowledge.)

None of this makes much sense to us moderns, because being committed to materialism and empiricism, we're essentially cave-dwellers ;-)

It's philosophy 101, right? That section of the Republic is plainly allegorical, with the Sun representing the knowledge of the Good, towards which all should aspire. The 'ascent' from the 'Cave' is 'painful', and should the one who has ascended return to the cave and try and explain to the cave-dwellers the magnificence of the outside world, they'll want to kill him. The mainstream interpretation is that the cave represents the world of sensory experience, the ascent to the Sun represents the insight into the forms or intelligible principles which are only discernable to the 'eye of reason'. It is followed by the 'allegory of the divided line' which describes the levels of knowledge, from (mere) belief or opinion, through mathematical knowledge (dianoia) and then noesis (higher knowledge.) — Wayfarer

Why would Plato need an allegory to say that? He could have just said it plainly, instead of resorting to poetic language. And even if he did indeed need an allegory to say that, why is he talking about a cave, specifically? He could have talked about a basement, or a dungeon, for example. Caves are natural, basements are not. So, why does he have a preference for natural subterranean prisons, instead of artificial subterranean prisons?

None of this makes much sense to us moderns, because being committed to materialism and empiricism, we're essentially cave-dwellers ;-) — Wayfarer

I think it's fair to say that I'm respectful of your idealism and spiritualism. Wouldn't you agree?

Why would Plato need an allegory to say that? — Arcane Sandwich

Because nobody gets it. Symbolic language is being used to convey profound and difficult insights.

I think it's fair to say that I'm respectful of your idealism and spiritualism. Wouldn't you agree? — Arcane Sandwich

Generally you’re a very courteous poster, yes. (Although I would gently distance myself from the word ‘spiritualism’, it always reminds me of Victorian seances with table-rapping and ectoplasm. Philosophical idealism is another thing.)

If it's so difficult, why do we teach that to students in their first university year? I don't think it's complicated at all. No one does. Have you ever come across someone who didn't understand it? I haven't. Think about it.

:up:

Have you ever come across someone who didn't understand it? I haven't. Think about it. — Arcane Sandwich

Nothing you've said in the brief exchange we've had about 'the allegory of the Cave' would indicate that you interpret it accurately :brow:

Nothing you've said in the brief exchange we've had about 'the allegory of the Cave' would indicate that you interpret it accurately :brow: — Wayfarer

I feel like I've earned the right to have my own interpretation of it, after years of teaching the standard, mainstream interpretations of it.

Give me an example of what you would describe as a mainstream intepretation? You came in with this:

Maybe it's talking about the time, before the Paleolithic (before cavemen) when men and women were not human. — Arcane Sandwich

which I for one have never encountered elsewhere.

Give me an example of what you would describe as a mainstream intepretation? — Wayfarer

The book El Sol, la Línea y la Caverna (The Sun, The Line, and The Cave), by Conrado Eggers Lan. This book represents the standard, mainstream interpretation of the allegory of the cave, in Argentina. We use it in Ancient Philosophy, which is a semester course (4 months) in the first year of the Licenciatura en Filosofía and the Profesorado en Filosofía. There are other books, and other scholars, and other interpreters, of course. But that book would be the main one, I would say.

You came in with this:

Maybe it's talking about the time, before the Paleolithic (before cavemen) when men and women were not human. — Arcane Sandwich


which I for one have never encountered elsewhere. — Wayfarer

Well, like I said, I think I've earned the right to have my own, unorthodox, and unique interpretation of the allegory of the cave.

Well, sure, now that you've provided that background. :up:

If anything made by a human is a natural object, then everything is a natural object. We usually differentiate between natural and human-made. Humans make things that would not exist if not for humans. In Incomplete Nature, Terrence Deacon writes:

This exemplifies only one among billions of unprecedented and inconceivably large improbabilities associated with the presence of our species. We could just as easily have made the same point by describing a modern technological artifact, like the computer that I type on to write these sentences. This device was fashioned from materials gathered from all parts of the globe, each made unnaturally pure, and combined with other precisely purified and shaped materials in just the right way so that it could control the flow of electrons from region to region within its vast maze of metallic channels. No non-cognitive spontaneous physical process anywhere in the universe could have produced such a vastly improbable combination of materials, much less millions of nearly identical replicas in just a few short years of one another. These sorts of commonplace human examples typify the radical discontinuity separating the physics of the spontaneously probable from the deviant probabilities that organisms and minds introduce into the world. — Terrence Deacon

In Demon in the Machine, Paul Davies writes:

When the solar system formed, a small fraction of its initial chemical inventory included the element plutonium. Because the longest-lived isotope of plutonium has a half-life of about 81 million years, virtually all the primordial plutonium has now decayed. But in 1940 plutonium reappeared on Earth as a result of experiments in nuclear physics; there are now estimated to be a thousand tonnes of it. Without life, the sudden rise of terrestrial plutonium would be utterly inexplicable. There is no plausible non-living pathway from a 4.5-billion-year-old dead planet to one with deposits of plutonium. — Paul Davies

But does that make human-made things unnatural? Wouldn't that makes humans unnatural? Nothing in the universe can be unnatural. Intelligence, consciousness, teleology... All are natural. All are natural parts of the universe.

Still, there's value in differentiating natural and human-made.

You wanna know who has the most unorthodox interpretation of Plato, in my opinion? Iain Hamilton Grant, in his book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling.

True, Grant was associated with Speculative Realism in the past. He is, after all, one of its "Founding Fathers", if you will, together with Meillassoux, Harman, and Brassier (and perhaps one might add Toscano as well, since he moderated their discussion). But Grant then distanced himself from Speculative Realism, and no longer identifies as a realist. He was always an idealist, through and through. His specific brand of idealism is in large part indebted to Schelling.

Philosophies of Nature After Schelling is one hell of a trip. It's an extremely technical book, it assumes, on the part of the reader, prior knowledge of Schelling, Plato, Deleuze, and Badiou. But it's definitely worth studying.

Grant claims (among other things) that there are no "two worlds" in Plato, or "two realms", or however you want to call the classical Platonic division between the world of sensible things and the world of Ideas. Grant doesn't deny that there's a difference, what he suggests is that Plato should be interpreted as a proponent of a "Physics of the All". In this sense, he is a precursor to Schelling's Naturphilosophie.

I think it's something that you might be interested in reading, despite your aversion to Speculative Realism. Just forget about the "Speculative Realism" label for a moment, and picture that Iain Hamilton Grant is an idealist (which he actually is, he even identifies as such).

I don’t think the ancient Greeks had much grasp of palaeontology. — Wayfarer

If I might chime in. My general agreement with the picture of Plato's allegory referring to prehistoric humans isn't to say he meant "cavemen." It's to say--whether wittingly or un--Plato was addressing an intuition he had (I speculate, from Socrates) that humans approach things already and inevitably "clouded" by the concepts history has constructed. While Plato then took a turn towards more history with his idea that reason is the path back to Truth; both his allegory, and the fact that he was already disciple of Socrates, suggests that his intuition was that the Truth lies in being (human-) unfettered by history, and hence, the 'animal' in its natural state of being.

Again, I don't dismiss history, nor reason. I'm not saying Plato's intuition was a return to nature. Just that the shadow paintings--constructions and projections--are not the locus of Truth, no matter how appealing or functional.

The truth is not knowing, but being. And what is being without knowing? Human [as] Nature.

Plato was addressing an intuition he had (I speculate, from Socrates) that humans approach things already and inevitably "clouded" by the concepts history has constructed. — ENOAH

Plato was many things, but post-modern was not one of them.

Thanks I’ll look into that book. Have you run across Matt Segal? He’s written some interesting material about Schelling.

Nope, never heard of him. Thanks for the reference, I'll check out his work.

I'm more of a Hegelian than a Schellingian. Hegel is easier to understand. Schelling is just a scholastic nightmare.

Besides, what does it mean to say that h.sapiens is ‘part of nature’? Why is that meaningful or important? — Wayfarer

Whether mankind is a part of nature or separate to it has important consequences, specifically in whether mankind's relationship with nature is open to judgement or not.

Nature is non-judgemental. Nature includes all the laws, elements and phenomena of the physical world, including life. If the wind blows down a tree, this is neither good nor bad. An apple is neither better nor worse than an orange. A whale is not good and a scorpion is not bad. A lake is not true and a mountain is not false. Nature is outside any judgment.

On the one hand, if mankind is a part of nature, and not separate to nature, then any act of mankind is no more than another act of nature, no more than any other expression of nature, and is therefore entirely natural. As acts of nature are non-judgemental, then any act of mankind, being a part of nature and not separate to it, are also outside being judged. As nature blowing down a tree is outside any judgement of right or wrong, mankind cutting down a tree must also be outside any judgement of being right or wrong. It seems clear that mankind is an intrinsic part of nature and not separate to it, being totally dependent on nature for its existence, and having evolved as a part of nature over a period of at least 3 billion years.

On the other hand, if mankind is not a part of nature, and is separate to it, then mankind's relationship with nature is open to being judged, and mankind's cutting down a tree is open to be judged wrong. The question is, if mankind is separate to nature, and not part of nature, then for what reason does mankind have any responsibility towards nature.

If mankind is a part of nature, then no act of mankind within nature is open to judgement. However, if mankind is separate to nature, for what reason does mankind have a responsibility to nature, and if mankind does have a responsibility, then its relationship with nature may be open to judgement.

We cannot not be part of nature. However, we have qualities that, to our knowledge, no other part of nature has. I don't think it's out of line to judge us. Especially since some of those qualities are what gives us the concept of judgement. We, alone, can judge. And we do, and always will. In how many species does the male kill offspring that are not his own? I have no problem passing judgement on a human male that goes around killing babies.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

If mankind is a part of nature, then no act of mankind within nature is open to judgement. However, if mankind is separate to nature, for what reason does mankind have a responsibility to nature, and if mankind does have a responsibility, then its relationship with nature may be open to judgement. — RussellA

You will recall the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden. In the story, the tree from which it is forbidden to eat is the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. Doesn’t that signify in mythological form the origin of man’s sense of separateness from nature? The Genesis myth of the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ can be understood as an allegory for the moment when humans become aware of themselves as separate beings—self-reflective, capable of judgment, and alienated from the purely instinctual existence of other creatures. In this sense, moral awareness is the marker of separation from nature, because nature itself (in the strict sense) does not operate in moral categories.

Of course we understand, in a way that our Biblical forbears did not, the physical story of human evolution as it unfolded across millions of years. But it is not hard to imagine the gradual dawning of self-awareness and the sense of 'me and mine' - and, with it, intentional planning and activity - as developing in tandem with that. Stone tool use - the first manufactured artifacts we have records of - preceded the arrival of h.sapiens . With the advent of ownership, comes that sense of separateness which is deeply rooted in the human condition.

If humans are part of nature, all actions (including moral judgments) are merely ‘natural’ and thus beyond value judgments. But the act of judgment itself—the ability to step back and reflect—is precisely what separates us from nature in a fundamental sense. If we were only ‘another force of nature,’ then deforestation, pollution, and even nuclear war could be seen just as expressions of natural causality. Yet, we experience them as ethical dilemmas precisely because we do not see ourselves as merely ‘forces of nature.’ Even the insurance industry recognises the distinction between acts of nature and those of humans.

So to attempt to say that there is no difference between man and nature, or that human acts are simply natural acts, is really an attempt to dodge or hide from the reality of the human condition. That's what I was getting at when I said that the tendency to idolise nature and the environment in modern culture really amounts to a kind of faux religiosity. 'We have to get back to the Garden', sang Joni Mitchell. But the way is blocked by 'angels with flaming swords'.