Everyone has a proper philosophical experience in coming to recognize, as we all must, the distinction between appearance and reality. Most move on from this recognition at an early age, keeping this philosophical insight as a mere heuristic to help sort out confusions, one of many tools one invariably acquires. But for some, they become arrested before this discovery, the particular discordant swell of the epiphany, and spend an inordinate amount of time plumbing the depths of the drama suggested by the de-realizing mood of this common childhood experience. Plato was one such person, and at the inception of philosophy it was this drama that occupied him wherever he turned his attention.
For Plato, appearance was not a mere distortion or optical effect, but a formidable combatant. Appearance is not what is produced when one is off-kilter and looking out from an odd perspective, a temporary fit of dizziness one can correct with a sobering draught, but rather an active force that entrenched itself in all domains. Plato’s metaphysics of appearance has largely been discarded and forgotten, but what has remained is his method of suspicion. Whatever your metaphysics, the common theme is the world has gone awry. The wrong thing dominates. The imposters sit on the throne. On this point antagonists are in agreement, and Plato and Nietzsche are siblings. Something is out of joint, and the wrong forces dominate. What differs is the characterisation, or dramatisation Deleuze would say, of the forces or ideas intuited by the suspicious eye. The problem remains the same under transformations of its terms, relations, and metrics.
Something is out of joint. Something has gone terribly wrong. True, this is an incredibly general and abstract refrain, and thus there is no surprise that one can see it uniting diverse thinkers, perhaps all of them, and us who like to think of ourselves as thinkers. All the same, its generality reveals something: it perhaps is not a premise to be established as much as a name for a particular method. A method, which, when captured statically can’t help but appear as an abstract premise: something is out of joint. In truth, this static formulation of a method can be re-immersed into the dynamism of thought and in that liquid substrate reveals its productivity, returning to its status of unsettling feeling or intuition that struck us as children. Aristotle even had a name for premises like this, that were not be taken as stated, but as provocations towards which one develops statements: problems. One is a child and one notes that there is a difference between appearance and reality and tosses this insight onto the ever expanding pile of things to be figured out. For some, though, this ‘problem’ is the juiciest of all, and they never end in their shuffling around the adaptations and re-adaptations, the formulations and reformulations, of its heavy drama, wandering the earth with one out-turned eye, seeing everywhere a dominant and a minor, always out of joint, never in a proper proportion.