Avoiding Plato’s Cave

Recognising Peirce’s Modes of Being

Jun 13, 2025

“Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's a bit colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful”...

— Plato

If Western Civilisation is to overcome its retreat back into Plato’s Cave which is being accelerated by:

the endemic embracement of Marxist ideology and the Primacy of Man;
Modernism and Post-Modernism’s almost universal adoption of Nominalism and Nietzschean Perspectivism;
a pervasive modern form of Gnosticism;
Cartesianism Dualism and Primacy of Human Consciousness;
a Knowledge Society that increasingly separates abstraction and embodiment; and
the increasing adoption of Semiotic Sign Machines such as Computers and Large Language Models,

it will urgently need to recognise:

the “picture” ( i.e. the semiotic sign) is not the “pipe”- Rene Magritte;
Peirce’s ( America’s Aristotle) Triadic modes of Being (i.e. Phenomenological Categories) and Triadic nature of Human consciousness;
the role of Geometric Metaphysical Unity ( i.e. Aristotle ( Ontological), Kant (Epistemological) and Peirce ( Phenomenological) or Being, Knowing and Meaning) to ensure a Sense of Coherence;
the Triadic nature of Reason ( i.e. Aristotle (Deduction), Bacon ( Induction) and Peirce ( Abduction)); and
the Triadic of Being ( i.e. Rosmini - Real Being, Ideal Being and Moral Being).

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The alternative is what 20th - 21st Century Philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the Simulacra (as illustrated in the above picture).

A man-made artificial World where Reality is enforced - a Marxist social construct and power-directed system of thought - mediated via abstracted semiotic signs - a pure simulation - that no longer has any relation to Being, the Natural World and the Creator ( i.e. the Necessary Being of God).