Term Paper on "Worlds of Phaedo and the Occult"

Term Paper 10 pages (4337 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Worlds of Phaedo and the Occult we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell. The Socrates of Plato, Phaedrus what is purification but... The release of the soul from the chains of the body?" The Socrates of Plato, Phaedo (Free Dictionary)

The central thesis of this paper is the meaning of the Platonic concepts of the forms and particulars as they relate to an understanding of the occult. The difference between the Forms and Particulars, it will be argued, is equivalent to the difference between the unknown and the known or the strange and the familiar. The occult will be viewed as the knowledge of the unknown. This view of the forms and particulars will be applied using Freudian and Jungian theoretical perspectives and will be applied to an analysis of Christabel by Coleridge, the Blair Witch Project, and the Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe.

Platonic forms and particulars

In his philosophy Plato distinguishes between the world of reality and the world of illusion. The world of reality and timeless truth is that of the forms. The word of illusion refers to the world of particulars and everyday experience. We exist during our lifetimes in this world of the senses or the world of particulars. For Plato and Socrates, death is the escape from the imprisonment of the world of particulars which is the reason why Socrates in the Phaedo states that he welcomes death. He believes that the soul will continue after death and the knowledge that he seeks as a philosopher will be encountered in the death state.

This distinction or dualism between the spiritual forms of reality and the particulars of the sensible world was a crucial development in modern thought and philosophy. It has also been one of the foundations of the study of the occult. The term occult, as will be discussed, is essentially the study of the unseen world or worlds. In essence, the theory of forms can be expressed as the real word which exists above or transcendent to the world of ordinary sense experience. The world of forms is that world which is "subject neither to generation nor to decay." (Wisest is he who knows he knows not) in Plato's view mankind is trapped in this word of sense experience and cannot see the true reality.".. 'we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell.' The Socrates of Plato, Phaedrus." (Free Dictionary)

Furthermore the forms of reality inform or underpin the world of life and the senses. The Platonic forms are the non-sensible and the unseen which are the very sources of the visible and familiar world. One of the most accessible descriptions of the relationship between the forms and the particulars is in the famous cave allegory. In this allegory all humanity lives in a cave with the forms or ideal reality outside the cave. Living in the cave humanity is aware only of the shadows of the forms as they continually reflect themselves on the cave walls. We therefore never see the true nature of ourselves or reality but only reflections or fleeting glimpses of the truth.

In the perceptual world the particular objects we see around us bear only a dim resemblance to the more ultimately real forms of Plato's intelligible world: it is as if we are seeing shadows of cut-out shapes on the walls of a cave, which are mere representations of the reality outside the cave, illuminated by the sun. (WordiQ)

This relates to the distinction made in the Republic between "to horaton (the visible realm) and to noeton (the intelligible realm)." (Rezendes, P.) in the Phaedo Plato describes life as a cycle of opposites which are in a cycle of recurrence. On this basis he states that it logically follows that life and death are intertwined in the cycle of opposites and that life follows from death just as death follows at the end of life.

Plato argues by analogy, death must come from life and life from death. (Phaedo 71c-d) That is, people who are dead are just people who were alive but then experienced the transition we call dying, and people who are alive are just people who were among the dead but then experienced the transition we call being born. This suggests a perpetual recycling of human souls from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead and back. (Plato: Immortality and the Forms)

1.1. The occult

One of the central points in the Phaedo and in many other works by Plato is that the forms are essentially unknown, or a mystery.

When one who is fresh from the mystery, and saw much of the vision, behold a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god. (Christian Churches of God)

The forms are also unknowable if we use the ordinary methods of knowledge provided by sense experience. Understanding the forms therefore requires occult or specialized knowledge. This in turn leads to an understanding of the word occult in relation to the forms. Occult or occultism comes from the Latin occulere which means to hide. The word refers to secret or hidden knowledge. (Croxon, R. The Piatkus Dictionary) Being strange to our normal senses forms can only be apprehended and known therefore through occult knowledge. In other words, the occult refers to the unknown forms and foundations of reality; and a study of the occult is a study of the invisible or hidden world.

Another important aspect is that while knowledge of the forms is hidden it can be known or discovered. "The nous in man is able to penetrate into the region of noumena, the true source of wisdom." (Wisest is he who knows he knows not)

Plato also believed that in knowledge of oneself was a prerequisite for understanding the true nature of reality. This view relates to the Jungian analysis of the unconscious that will form part of this study. He also believed that, in order to know the Truth about all things, man must start by knowing himself. He taught that self-knowledge is based upon the conviction that man is an immortal entity, a soul which is a spark of the Universal World-Soul. This soul, he said, is entombed in a body, and evolves through the process of Reincarnation. In the Republic Plato makes much of the distinction between to horaton (the visible realm) and to noeton (the intelligible realm). (Rezendes, P.)

3. Critical Perspective

The critical perspective that will form the foundation of the following analysis is the view that the forms relate to the unknown or mysterious as opposed to the familiar. These opposites relate to the differences between the forms and particulars as discussed in the section above.

Sigmund Fried, the mentor of Karl Jung, developed his theory of the Uncanny in a paper written in 1919, which strongly supports the view of the Platonic forms as the mysterious and the unknown. Freud defines the "uncanny" in terms of the German word unheimlich, which means simultaneously "homely" or familiar, and strange. In other words, for Freud the uncanny is both part of the ordinary world and the unseen world.

The 'uncanny' or unheimlich is described by Freud as an especial kind of fear. It refers to 'everything that ought to have remained secret and which has not come to light'. In a Homeless Concept Shapes of the Uncanny in Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture, Anneleen Masschelein outlines the problematic issues surrounding the concept of the uncanny. Freud's paper was written in response to a paper by German psychologist Ernst Jentsch (1906). Jentch's paper hypothesized that "the essential factor responsible for the production of uncanny feelings is intellectual uncertainty, those doubts and confusions that are liable to arise when we come across something completely unfamiliar in a foreign ("alien") environment." (Masschelein: A homeless concept) Freud proceeded to develop the concept of the uncanny by using the secondary and contradictory meanings of the term, which are "concealed; "kept from sight," and "withheld from others." He suggests an alternative to the idea of the uncanny as a reaction to only the unknown by suggesting that "the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression." Or as he puts it a little later on, "[T]he unheimlich is what was once Heimlich - "familiar"; the prefix 'un' is the token of repression."(ibid)

The concepts of the alien and strange form the centre of the Uncanny and relate to this study as an expression of the strange and unfamiliar. Jung also extends the theoretical framework with the idea of the archetypal unconscious which can also be related to the unseen and strange. The archetypes and the symbols… READ MORE

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