We live Platonic lives.
Urban life, the exaggerated social contact shapes the urban man or woman: remote characters, polis pride, the 'cosmopolitan' person that turns the wheel towards a common goal. Routines that define success, lunch meetings, monthly paychecks.
But we also develop subjective lives.
Apartments that exist as a chip of the whole block; interior design.. what's inside? : a continual process of self-identification, self-definition.
The culture of subjectivity ironically models the urban person towards a generic definition; we live platonic lives that exhibit, in its highest form, highest subjectivity.
A paradox?
Socrates asked: "Do you think, then, that someone would be any less good a painter if he painted a model of what the most beautiful human being would be like, and rendered everything in the picture perfectly well, but could not demonstrate that such a man could not exist?"
Glaucon, being the good Platonic interlocutor, answered in the negative.
We would answer that yes! the painter would be less good not because he could not demonstrate that such a man could exist; indeed, we cherish and seek comfort with this fact. The painter would be less good simply because that his model of what the most beautiful human being would be like would have to be subjective and personal.
And the most beautiful form, being infinitely subjective, would be a multiplicious chameleon, adapting radically both internally and externally to the observer. It exists as an unstable fixed philosophical form, like a quantum flux, demanding to be changed and shaped by every observation.
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