Plato, in his famous tenth book of theRepublic, ends his long magnum opus on justice with a story that has left most philosophers beguiled by its deeper meaning. The “Myth of Er” is a tale that begins in utter horror and brutal devastation as Er is presumed dead—one of many fallen soldiers who lost their lives during a great battle. The body of Er is carried back home by his surviving comrades and, in typical fashion, is set atop a funeral pyre as a part of his last rites. Just as the torch is about to set the...

The legacy of Ernst Cassirer has been forgotten by much of the academy today. As a result, we have lost sight of the carefully devised architectonic he developed regarding the functioning and relevance of symbolic forms in the constituting, cohering sense of our symbolic worlds. To understand such a richly woven philosophic argument, one must follow Cassirer along his own trajectory of intellectual thought and engage with his unique relationship to thinkers in the tradition of German Idealism.

This chapter carefully follows the ways in which Cassirer reworked the schema and idea of synthetic judgment in the work of Immanuel...

Some might claim that despite the deep commitment to pluralism inherent within the philosophy of symbolic forms devised by Cassirer, we are still given an understanding of the human condition rooted in concepts birthed from Western philosophy. Denotation of the mythic human condition from within such a hegemonic framework, despite its progressive intentions, conceptually reduces the actual realities of people that exist in symbolic forms so seemingly different from our symbolic world. However, one needs to remember that Cassirer followed the writings and research of various anthropologists who were foremost and progressive given their time of study, and such research...

We have seen how the power of symbolic forms gives rise to our very understanding of the world, whether in myth or language. But what happens when the societies we live in attempt to monolithically obliterate the richness, diversity, and complexity of a world enhanced by a plurality of symbolic forms? Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno proffer a careful examination in which enlightenment has been bled of its progressive aspirations and mistakenly rendered into a myth perpetuating global domination and deception. Herbert Marcuse, similarly, develops a critique that takes note of the ways in which life in the advanced industrial...

If we cannot repair the fractured ethical world brought on by the more insidious components of modernity through a reconstructive science, then what sort of meaningful ethical restoration could be found in a respect for the plurality of symbolic forms for a world fraught with the widespread devastation of colonialism and capitalism? This chapter begins by revealing the ways in which the colonial legacy was parasitically infected with a white consciousness that established itself through a symbolic form of antiblack racism. Here, we turn to the work of Steve Biko to relate the ways in which white consciousness not only...

More than 350 years of unfree black labor continues to haunt the new South Africa. The neoliberal capitalism that has emerged as dominant is indeed a part of the lineage of such a history, but now it changes and expands the reach of struggle against global antiblack racism. The work of South African economist Sampie Terreblanche is evoked throughout this chapter to carefully trace the major historical developments of racialized capital in South Africa and its dire political, economic, and ideological effects. What is shown is that the combined history of South Africa is indeed a history ofblack unfree...

In drawing this book to a close we will defend the necessity of revolution, which has been undermined, in part, by poststructuralist critiques charging that revolution comes to us within an inevitably totalizing discourse. To speak of revolution always returns us to our previous discussion of the historicist project in post-colonies where the question of the nation-state and socialist transformation cannot be avoided. Throughout this book we have defended the need for a strong poeticist project to accompany the transformation of ourselves and our envisioning of the world alongside our relations with other people.

Indeed, the fear of revolution is...