the cave and tries to describe what he saw on the outside, fellow prisoners, accustomed to the darkness of their chamber, will not believe him, and might even try to kill him. As if soothsaying his own death in Athens prison, Socrates invites us to compare the first, visible world, to the cavern, the light of the physical sun to the fire, the reflections of which we see on the screen of shadows, and the upper world outside to the intellectual region of the highest good discovered by the soul.3
Besides the dialectic of visible and invisible suns, there is another novelty introduced by Plato in these fragments, which I find extremely important. Namely, for Socrates, the sun is not an adorable thing out there in the sky. Instead of treating it as an external object, he suggests that there are solar elements within humans themselves – like the eye and sight for the physical sun, and knowledge and reason for the spiritual one. Without being identical to the sun, a human eye bears resemblance to it. We can look at this object and see it because in certain aspects we are akin to it. The sun and the eye communicate as if they are looking into each other through the layers of things encompassed by light, and the one reflects the other. A dark pupil in the center of the human eye is surrounded by a colored iris. If we try to look at the sun during the day, we can see that it, too, has a kind of pupil, which is dark, and a bright “iris” that glances from behind it. Just like the human eye, the eye of god has therefore a kind of blind spot at its very center. It is as if the sensual sun was that dark pupil that obscured from us the divine radiance of the iris of truth.
The doubling of the sun in Plato’s Republic is tricky: it turns out that we cannot see the true sun, which is the highest good, because it is shielded from us by its representative in the sensual world. We are therefore not only endowed with vision by the sun that we see, but coincidently blinded by it. The greatness of Socrates is that behind the visible sun he discerns the invisible, and praises both. As Marsilio Ficino comments in his Book of the Sun (1494):
When he was in military service Socrates often used to stand in amazement watching the rising Sun, motionless, his eyes fixed like a statue, to greet the return of the heavenly body. The Platonists, influenced by these and similar signs, would perhaps say that Socrates, inspired since boyhood by a Phoeboean daemon, was accustomed to venerate the Sun above all, and for the same reason was judged by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of all the Greeks. I will omit at present a discussion about whether the daemon of Socrates was particularly a genius or an angel – but I certainly would dare to affirm that Socrates in his state of ecstasy had admired not just the visible Sun, but its other, hidden aspect.4
In Ficino’s interpretation, the sun adored by Socrates not only duplicates, but triplicates: it embodies the idea of the Christian trinity fantastically interlaced with Neoplatonism, Hermetic tradition, astrology, and renaissance magic. Taking as a starting point Plato’s comparison of god and the sun, he makes subsequent parallels: on a downward spiral, god dispenses goodness and love, just as the sun dispenses light and warmth. Note that all these things can be understood as different kinds of energy, which both the god and the physical sun generously distribute around the world. Ficino insists on the hierarchical relation between the god and the physical sun: one shouldn’t worship the sun as the author of all things because it is in fact only a shadow of the God who is the fundamental creator. Yes, the sun shines brightly, but the light it spreads, according to Ficino, is not even fully its own. The sunlight as such, according to its basic settings, is obscure, as are other celestial bodies that emit their own natural light, which is not that bright. The excessive shine that radiates from the sun is, according to Ficino, a gift that it receives from god: “Indeed the Sun offers that innate light which is somewhat obscure, then immediately another light most evident to the eyes like a visible image of divine intelligence and infinite goodness.”5
A tendency to portray the two suns as God and his material substitute is further developed by another renaissance thinker and perhaps the most famous writer of the solar utopian tradition, Tommaso Campanella, who, in The City of the Sun (1602), describes the religion and the rites of the residents of the ideal state:
The sun and the stars they, so to speak, regard as the living representatives and signs of God, as the temples and holy living altars, and they honor but do not worship them. Beyond all other things they venerate the sun, but they consider no created thing worthy the adoration of worship … They contemplate and know God under the image of the Sun, and they call it the sign of God, His face and living image, by means of which light, heat, life, and the making of all things good and bad proceed. Therefore they have built an altar like to the sun in shape, and the priests praise God in the sun and in the stars, as it were His altars, and in the heavens, His temple as it were; and they pray to good angels, who are, so to speak, the intercessors living in the stars, their strong abodes. For God long since set signs of their beauty in heaven, and of His glory in the sun.6
By the end of the book Campanella goes as far as claiming that the sensual sun, whose light Ficino called “obscure,” is actually not even good, as God is, but malevolent, for it “strives to burn up the Earth,” whereas “God guides the battle to great issues.”7 This implies that the ultra-rational organization of the city (which today reads as overregulation and total control) must reckon with the brutality and explosiveness of the sun, rather than seeking inspiration from its goodness.
Now let me scroll up: in Nick Land’s book The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), dedicated to Georges Bataille, the two suns are not visible and invisible, or sensual and spiritual, but simply black and white:
A white sun is congealed from patches of light, floating ephemerally at the edge of blindness. This is the illuminating sun, giving what we can keep, the sun whose outpourings are acquired by the body as nutrition, and by the eye as (assimilable) sensation. Plato’s sun is of this kind; a distilled sun, a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth, and goodness. Throughout the cold months, when nature seems to wither and retreat, one awaits the return of this sun in its full radiance. The bounty of the autumn seems to pay homage to it, as the ancients also did.8
Against this tradition, the author points to another sun, “the deeper one, dark and contagious.”9 What Plato’s main character, Socrates, disregards, according to Land, is the accursed, destructive aspect of the black sun. This aspect was stressed by Bataille, who sketched his own theory of the two suns in the 1930s. Thus, in his short essay “Rotten Sun” (1930), he distinguishes between a sublime sun of mind, on the one hand, and a “rotten” sun of madness and unheard-of violence on the other. The first sun, “confused with the notion of the noon,” exists as an abstract object “from the human point of view,” whereas the second points to ancient bloody cults and rituals of sacrifice. Bataille recalls the myth of Icarus that “clearly splits the sun in two – the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.”10
Note that between the two suns of Plato, Ficino, and Campanella, on the one hand, and Bataille, on the other, there is a long tradition of praising the black sun in alchemic and occult doctrines. I daresay that this tradition is not so disconnected from Plato’s solar metaphysics, dismissed by Land, but rather historically derives from it – through Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and other esoteric influences from antiquity, Renaissance culture, and Romanticism. Bataille adopted the symbol of the black sun from Christian mystics before it was appropriated by neo-Nazism, modern paganism, and other contemporary esoteric movements.11 While Land’s interpretation comes later, and his own philosophy of the Dark Enlightenment can be interpreted as part of these recent developments, the tendency of portraying Bataille as an oracle of reaction, dressed in black, is wrong, and must be opposed by another vision of Platonism, which does not coincide with Land’s caricatural image of praising exclusively the “distilled” white sun.
Taking off the table the modern desire to rebel against ancient philosophical authorities and the allergy to hierarchizing categories – like the highest good – I invite you to focus on the dialectical aspect of Plato’s thought, which might just happen to stay not that far from the dark side of the sun as addressed by Bataille. Think of