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OUT OF THE CAVE
Plato's image of the cave on whose wall are cast the shadows we mistake for real is a popular one today. There is a heady promise in various intellectual fields of escape from the conditions of knowledge. With this promise an impossible kind of freedom is being proposed, freedom from necessity of any kind. It is preached particularly in artistic and literary circles. These are the people who have shouldered the clergy's old responsibility to care for the symbols of society. They should know that the cave is the body social mediated by the image of the other body. To emerge free from its constraints would be as feasible for the artist as for a linguistic philosopher to give up the constraints of language. Indeed the illusion ...
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