Back to index

4:9

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

Platonism is the first exhaustively formulated totalism, and it exercises a powerful escapist pull by stressing a stable, symmetrical and thoroughly regulated alternative to the obviously defective and imperfect life that we live in the everyday. The rising aristocracy thus obtains a brilliantly designed free gift – which it then in turn can pretend to bestow on the cheated and cowed peasants and slaves in feudalist society – namely eternal life, the paradisiacal world where a reward for patiently endured poverty and toil awaits the one who has submitted without complaint to every whim and order of those in power. Plato allows himself to be seduced by mathematics’ promises of symmetrical perfection and eternal validity. And if mathematics is perfect and eternal, in the sphere of mathematics existence must also be perfect and remain perfect forever. The consequence is that if existence in the mathematical sphere is already perfect, it no longer has any reason to allow itself to be changed. A change in something that is characterised by perfection can of course only lead in one direction, namely to a deterioration, in the form of imperfection. Since time requires change in order to exist – duration is change stacked on top of change – this must mean that time is an illusion.