With fake-news making headlines we start to realize we might have been duped all along. We rather believe what we see and hear on the news than the taste of our morning toast. Intimacy is suspect, the ancient thinkers must have thought, when they deemed the senses of smell, touch and taste merely bodily senses and inferior to the ‘higher’ intellectual senses of sight and sound. It is these latter senses that supposable tell us the truth about the world. If you want to have real knowledge the Greeks believed you can trust your sight and ears much better than your smell, touch or taste. Of course, it must have been bewildering for them to fathom how the object of perception reaches the organ of sense, especially when it becomes intimate. Of what in the touch of a feather gives a tickling sensation, or how biting into a lemon gives a sour reaction. At least with smell one could remote oneself and imagine some imperceptible vapor penetrating the noose. On the other hand, with sight and sound there seems to be no evident direct contact and everything seems to forego at a (much safer) distance. That distance was believed to be a good thing. And that preconception has more or less remained ever since.  

Seeing and hearing seem to be rather harmless and don’t demand a physical intervention. Unlike touching or tasting there doesn’t happen something direct and immediate ‘in’ or to one’s body. You can close your eyes and stop seeing, but with touching and tasting it’s the same as what the lyrics of a Bobby Bland song tell us, “when you have a heart ache there ain’t nothin’ you can do.”  With touching and tasting there is an immediate sensation of pleasure or pain. And where there is pleasure, there is the chance of overindulgence. Which explains why the Church Fathers of medieval times had no desire to undo the hierarchy of the senses that they inherited from Antiquity. But the distance connected to the sense of seeing and hearing was not only preferred from a moral perspective. The biggest impact was on our conception of knowledge. For the distance allowed a crucial reversal. Rather than focus on the perceiving body it endorsed attention to shift to the source of the perception that lay outside of the body. And in this reversal, sight and hearing suddenly appeared as untainted sources of insights of a serene ‘objective’ world out there. And unlike touch or taste, sight and sound allowed for the conception to take hold that one could talk about the same things, abstract from them and make them into universal truths. You and I can stand and count the sheep in the sheep’s pen and easily agree on their number, or even their color, shape or size. It is less easy to find common ground on the taste of mutton. The specific insights of touch and taste pertain to a here and now, which is specific and fleeting. Hardly a good basis to found knowledge of external world on, the ancients must have thought. So, no wonder that they distinguished between the ‘bodily’ and ‘intellectual’ senses.   

Whenever a hierarchy is established one should be on one’s guard. For where there is a hierarchy there is a distinction that precedes it. Where distinctions are introduced, the world changes and not always for the good. In this case the distinction comes out the ingenious mind of Plato, the founding father of Western thought. You could say that philosophers like Plato are just like any other creative geniuses. They create stuff. Just as you can watch a movie, look at a painting, listen to a composition, or taste a dish, so is it with what a philosopher concocts. They create something you can think with. You could call it a concept. Something concrete but intangible. Without it much wouldn’t make sense. A lot of these concepts are already living inside of you. They get installed on your hard disk as a sort of operating system through which you understand and make sense of everything that happens. These concepts are like an umbrella to take refuge under from the infinite bombardment of sensual experiences life unleashes upon you every minute.  

The concept that Plato created was the Idea. To him Ideas are the true things. All we see around us are impersonations of these true things. They are appearances that reflect another realm where the Ideas reside. An Idea is the conception of a thing as it is. It can’t be anything else than what it is. It is thus perfectly content within itself; and as such something pure, eternal and unchangeable. And since it can’t be something else than itself it resides in its own world, the world of pure ideas. Plato would for example say that only justice is just, it can’t be anything else than that. One can do just acts, but these are cases that share in different degrees a more general principle, the idea of justice. Plato didn’t just invent this concept out of the blue. If we follow the interpretation of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) than we could say that this concept is motivated by a burning question in Plato’s time that arose with the birth of democracy: that of distinguishing a true claimant from an imposture. Because with the birth of democracy a whole new situation arose in the Greek city where functionaries where no longer appointed by a despot, but citizens could get elected for offices through allotment. A whole milieu of rivalry took hold of the Greek civilization, from gymnastics, Olympic games to legal procedures. So, democracy meant the formation of a society of equals it also meant the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them, the contests between claimants in every sphere, in love, the games, tribunals, the judiciaries, politics, and even in thought.  What Plato thus sought to do with the invention of the Platonic idea was to select among pretenders.

The Idea turned out to be a poisonous gift. For the Idea to be able to point out the rightful claimant it needs to provide a solid foundation for this judgement. But this solid foundation comes at a price. It namely has to split the world in two, in a here and now and a beyond, and has to devise a hierarchical order between them. In other words, that which does the judging can’t be of the same nature of that which is being judged. It is the same with a game of soccer. It doesn’t work if the referee is a player of the opposing team. Rather the referee is neither part of home team nor of visitor’s side and it furthermore needs to transcend both teams in order to have hierarchical relation of power with them. (Why would it otherwise matter if you got a red card?) With conceiving the Idea as something that it is only itself, Plato thus singlehandedly conceived of a new realm beyond our world that is filled only with pure, eternal and unchangeable Ideas. These Ideas are the bench mark for all claims. And the relation between the two takes shape in the form of participation (metechein). The first question is then, what does it found? What in other words participates in this Idea? The concept that Plato creates is that of something that is only itself. So, what participates in the Idea is first and foremost the Idea itself. Everything else participates only in a secondary sense and in lesser degrees. This is where the split in two world takes effect and the possibility to create hierarchies. The idea thus appears as something that can be shared, but never in its pure form, always in a derivative way. The Idea always possess the quality first hand, but for all the claims it must assess if they possess the quality in next best or second degree, or third degree, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh …. All depending on the nature of their participation in the Idea.

To divide the senses into a hierarchy of higher intellectual senses and lower bodily senses rests upon Plato’s Idea and its split of the world in two. Everything depends on how much one partakes in the Idea, while never being able to fully partake. Sight and sound are believed to partake in a much larger degree than touch and taste does and thus the former is deemed higher than the latter. And that distinction has spread like a virus and infected our conception in the world. Suddenly those arts and professions that where more engaged with the intellectual senses where deemed higher than those which were more concerned with the bodily senses. It proved to be a basis for gender inequality as it was believed that only men had access to the higher intellectual senses and thus had the exclusive access to knowledge while women and children were degraded to only possessing the lower senses and consequently being confined to those occupations that involve are bodily and thus mainly around the house. We are still living through the effects of Plato’s invention and the transcendence he introduced into our world of thought. It was Friederich Nietzsche, the philosopher with the hammer, that most virulently has started to chisel away the dominance of Plato’s Idea and making a reversal of Platonism possible that restores an equality among the senses and an immanent conception of Ideas that doesn’t split the world in two. Such a project is unfolding in what might be called a philosophy of difference. Here difference is not seen as the opposite to Plato’s monolithic conception of the Idea as an identity where A = A, but rather as an internal difference to identity itself and as such the driver of a process of differentiation that establishes identities. But these immanent Ideas are not like Plato’s pure, eternal and unchangeable but rather mobile, temporal and multiple. It will be an immense challenge to undo Plato’s two world perspective and think only from the perspective of one world, where the Ideas are no longer put out side reach or as something that can be shared in degrees. It will be counterintuitive at times. It will upset some and effect many. It will have neither a model nor a copy, but will unveil the world in all its multiplicity with no sense being privileged over another.