From April 25, 2020--A short Review and Link to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat"
The opening two sentences of Edgar Allan Poe's " The Black Cat".
<< FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. >>
How many writers can express something so complex and universal with such an economy of words? This idea he alludes to, that the most important knowledge is not obtained through the senses, rather is already inate in the mind, comes from Plato.
If there is anything we can be sure of in these times, it's that we are often prisoners to sense perception, the mere appearance of things, and miss what is essential because we are tricked by those who are skilled at the art of Illusion, meaning magic. When someone comes along and pulls a Bird out of your ear, you believe that it happened because it looked that way. We know that it didn't, but because we can't explain the trick, we accept it as true in far too many instances.
What happens when our government, our churches, opinion makers, and media, have adopted the method of "sleight of hand" in presenting reality to us? Are we aware we are being tricked? Do we buy in, and accept things as they appear? Do we question what we see and hear, and challenge prevailing opinion? Do we have the intellectual and moral depth to scientifically prove what is true, and what is not?
Humanist writers such as Poe used metaphor and shocking, horrific, even perverse irony to provoke us to challenge our own preconceived notions, fixed opinions, and belief in sense certainty. He was preoccupied with creating a national English language culture in America which would strengthen our internalized sense of identity, independence and freedom, enabling thinking people to discover new ideas, rather than being prisoners of the mere appearance of things. This is why he dwelled upon phenomena which we would consider "supernatural", but was in fact metaphysical.
He was also polemicizing on behalf of a principle of "Natural Law," what is called often in modern times "Karma". We simplify the concept with that word, but it is close. Basically, the Neo-Platonists start with the idea of knowledge being inate in the mind, even before we are born, and that learning is the process of recovering memory. Augustine and others in that tradition continued to promote this view. What followed from that was Plato's view that the definition of Justice is that it's a principle "which is it's own reward".
Why did he believe this?
Why did he believe this?
He believed that the Universe and the human mind were governed by the same principles, and that the Universe was lawful, beautiful, and harmonically ordered, in the same way as musical intervals or geometry figures.
(The Neo-Platonists reject the concept of "Tabula Rasa" the idea that we are born with our minds a "blank slate" that is written upon by experience. They also do not agree that experience alone IS knowledge, the counter view of the empiricist philosophers that Poe was fighting)
Therefore, when the affairs of mankind, or behaviors of individuals enter into conflict with that harmonic ordering principle , in which the "good" and the "creative" should function symbiotically with justice in our society, but sometimes doesn't, the Universe itself would exact a harsh penalty from those perpetrators. Hence, those who defy the principle of Natural Law based on this idea that Justice is doing "the good", are acting to destroy themselves ultimately, as well as others.
The counter argument today, parallels the arguments of Thrasymachus in Plato's Dialogue, The Republic. He, being a sophist, argued that Justice itself is "the will of the stronger", and that the persons who attain power in society are exacting Justice when they "reward their friends, and punish their enemies." There is no lawfulness or principle of truth embedded in the Universe, they say, therefore everything is arbitrary, and subject to the momentary capricious whims of whoever are the strongest, in control of opinion, stage managing events, holding power at that moment.
Plato, through the voice of Socrates, using the method of questioning known as the "Socratic Dialogue" destroys the arguments of Thrasymachus the apologist for dictatorship, and the other Sophists of his circle.
What Poe is doing with his short stories is using the method of Plato, the Socratic Dialogue, to show people that they may not know what they think they know. He is representing the discovery by Socrates that knowledge itself, is actually not the accumulation of facts and information through experience, but the discovery of "what we don't know". By showing how his character's empirical beliefs, those things they see and hear etc, come into conflict with that which they inately know, and watching how they either prevail or self-destruct, it forces a crisis in the reader, to question their own assumptions of what is true, and confronts us with those elements of perversity in our own souls which block up our creative minds, and negate our own goodness, keeping us locked in the prison of our moment to moment feeling states.
That, more or less, is what Poe is doing. He's not just about giving us a few cheap thrills through some Gothic Horror Memes.
Ok? Enjoy, give yourself a present, read this short story. It is short.
