The ancient source Cameron reaches for in Dialogue 11 to describe the media "eating each other." Plato's gigantomachia — the gigantic battle that is "the meaning of being" — sets the gods of the sky against the titans of the earth, each trying to reduce the other to nothing, with a third member, the child, who sees that both are necessary even to have the battle. Cameron reads McLuhan's 1940s "ancient quarrel" as a revitalization of this threefold image, which Bob maps onto Shem, Shaun, and Issy.
Across the dialogues
Supplies the gigantomachia — the threefold battle behind the media eating each other
Plato names the dynamic of history the gigantomachia — the gigantic battle that is the meaning of being.
"Plato says that the dynamic of history is what he called the gigantomachia."
The two giants — sky-gods and earth-titans — each try to reduce the other to nothing, to eat the other.
"the gods in the sky versus the titans of the earth, those two are trying to reduce each other to nothing"
The third member is the child, who sees that both antagonists are necessary even to have the battle — the integrated that cannot stand apart from the unintegrated.
"the third member of this peculiar battle is the child. And what the child sees is that both are necessary even in order to have the battle."
Named the exemplary "great mind" — with Aristotle, the classical depth of questioning Cameron holds up as the way into understanding oneself, against the triviality of the present
Plato heads Cameron's roster of the "great minds" — the method he recommends for understanding oneself is to submit to a great thinker read deeply, Plato and Aristotle first among them, against a present that treats the ultimate questions trivially.
"one of the best ways to do it is to select any of the great thinkers, so Plato, Aristotle."
Enlisted for the plural real — the Sophist's already-plural ontology gives Cameron the classical warrant for the battle of archives
Cameron takes Plato's Sophist as authority that ontology "is already plural" — different senses of the real, hence different ways to archive — the classical ground for the battle of archives.
"Plato's Sophist, he says that ontology, that is to say reality, is already plural."
His reception rather than his doctrine becomes the point — the ideas-as-abstractions reading is named a Western habit, and the session's stem cell is defined against it
The misreading is dated to his own contemporaries and traced forward — which is why "platonic" survives as a synonym for bloodless, and why an originary structure sounds abstract before it is explained.
"everybody thought that the ideas were things that were sort of sitting up in the air and that Plato was trying to reduce the complexity of the world to these abstract ideas."
Connections
Plato's gigantomachia — sky-gods versus earth-titans, with the child who sees both as necessary — is Cameron's ancient figure for the figure/ground battle.
Cameron reads McLuhan's 1940s "ancient quarrel" as a revitalization of Plato's threefold image.
Bob casts Augustine's "third term" as the soul that resolved the antinomies the phonetic alphabet opened in Greek (Hellenic) thought after Plato.