Being & Technology: Plato, Shakespeare and America's Fate

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]To be or not to be, the ultimate Platonic question.

[00:00:06]To be has primacy over to have. What you have is a second order problem.

[00:00:14]Plato confronts this question in addressing the painters, the artists, and he says that we have these painters who produce a mechanically engineered replica of sensory reality. Already sensory reality is alienated from things themselves. They take us at a further remove from reality by inviting us to embrace an imitation, a mechanical imitation of sensory experience.

[00:00:50]Now, uh Plato's um well, shall we call it a critique of the painters uh was uh fully generally embraced by ancient classical society.

[00:01:05]Um which praised the sacred as irreducible.

[00:01:13]Not so in the modern world. In the modern world, we embrace the alienation. And so, the imitation of the sensory, we enter into what a philosopher called a second cave.

[00:01:30]Today, >> [sighs] >> the problem of being has been all but obscured on the quest for having more powerful machines that can produce, that can construct a new world in which the question of being is utterly effaced.

[00:01:53]We fall into the oblivion of being.

[00:01:58]When it comes to AI, we're in competition with China. So, what do we do?

[00:02:05]Should we get rid of the guns, the big machines, the AI? They're going to take over. Well, again, the question is not that of having or not having, but of how we can preserve our being.

[00:02:19]And a fair model, a provisional at the at any rate, is given by Israel, which, as a technological state, still holds on to its spiritual core represented by the Orthodoxy. Now, this may not work very well in Israel, but the point in its essence is valid.

[00:02:43]An America without an elite of beings, of people who represent and cultivate being, is no better than any technocratic China.