Plato and Baudrillard Essay

The central argument of Plato’s Republic is that the just life is preferable to the unjust one. Socrates argues this point against his friends, who put up various objections to the thesis. The principal objection concerns appearances; because it is apparent to all that the unjust dissimulator reaps the fruits of the world, while the just and virtuous person, who refuses to compromise with the world, suffers poverty, rejection and general hardship. The argument of Socrates proceeds along the lines that appearances are liable to deceive. In Book 7 the argument has strayed into epistemology. Here again the argument of Socrates is that material knowledge is deceptive. In order to make this point he gives us a vivid and extended analogy of the cave-dwellers. The dwellers of this cave are sitting facing the wall of the cave, and their heads are constricted so that they must always be gazing at the wall, not being able to turn their heads at all. Behind them there is a fire, and between the fire and the dwellers a road. There are bearers who carry objects and walk along the road. The shadows of the objects, as well as those of the bearers, fall on the cave wall, and this is what the dwellers see, and is the sum of their visual knowledge. Plato is arguing that in the phenomenal world our knowledge is constrained. That we cannot reach the essence of things, and that our knowledge must be content with the hazy shadows of things. Because such knowledge is so incomplete, it is liable to produce error in our judgment of things. But Plato is not promoting skepticism. He extends the analogy to suggest that we may come to know the essence of things, but this is only after we have been released from the bondage of material existence. He goes on to consider the condition of the cave-dwellers once they have been released from their constraints. They see the objects with their profusion of detail, and the clarity overwhelms them, so that they refuse to accept the objects themselves as real, and instead insist that the shadows on the wall were more real. In the next stage of their enlightenment they are guided to outside the cave, and then they see things with the greatest clarity of all, and this by the light of the sun. Eventually they come to the understanding that all light originates in the sun. The suggestion that Plato makes is that there is indeed clarity of knowledge, and that it lies beyond the realm of the material and of appearance. The possibility itself is the saving grace of man. The preserve of wisdom is the shelter that man seeks as he stumbles through the morass of error. The Allegory of the Cave is highly pertinent to how Jean Baudrillard pictures modern society. In his essay â€Å"Simulations and Simulacra† he contends that modern society has lost all referential links to reality, and has supplanted reality with an artificial construct, which he terms â€Å"hyperreality†.   In terms of Plato’s allegory, the shadows on the wall become the starting points on which to construct a comprehensive reality. In Baudrillard’s general epistemology, all knowledge necessarily deals with the signification of things, and never with the essence of the things themselves. These units of knowledge are â€Å"signs†. A sign has no meaning in itself, but derives all meaning through its reference to all other signs. Therefore it has â€Å"self-referential† meaning only. True and total meaning can only emerge when the references have been taken to all other possible signs. But the finite capacity of man precludes this possibility, even though he always strives for total meaning, in order to overcome his limitation. He constructs simulacra, i.e. models that combine the signs in logical formulations, and meant to represent reality by similitude. But this is a doomed endeavor. The message of Baudrillard is no different from that of Plato. The shadows on the cave walls are merely signs of the real presences. Yet the cave dwellers are forced to build all reality from these shadows, and commit error if they try to limit reality to the shadows. The stress of Baudrillard is not on the possibility of true understanding, which nevertheless is tacit in his philosophy. He is more intent on pointing out that modern society has fallen into grave error by â€Å"the cartographer’s mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory† (Baudrillard 170). The result in Western societies has been a â€Å"precession of simulacra† (Ibid 169). The original project, as taking place in the Age of Enlightenment, is the construction of simulacra, which he likens to maps which are meant to be co-extensive with reality, because atomic level detail is strived for.    The next stage is second-order simulacra, where the original simulacra tend to be copied, instead of taking reality as the first reference point. But the plight of modern society is even more serious than this, for here we have arrived at third order simulacra. This is when the signs are employed in order to simulate reality, so that all reference to the original is severed, and now it is â€Å"the map that precedes the territory† (Ibid). Because it is so Baudrillard claims that reality has been effaced for the dwellers of modern society, and has been replaced by â€Å"hyperreality†. In this completely simulated existence there is no room for advance any more, but only a meaningless spinning around of fads and fashions, or â€Å"the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference† (Ibid 170). It is natural that Baudrillard emphasizes the plight of modern society. In Plato we find the seduction of material knowledge, and the consequences are to be imagined. Baudrillard is confronting the consequence face to face, because material knowledge has transpired as a social norm. This is why Plato is more concerned with telling us the possibility of true knowledge, whereas Baudrillard gives us a physiology of the false, because he sees it extant before him. Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Translated by Jacques Mourrain. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001.