Plato knew that meaning and being are interconnected in all sorts of ways. Meaning is something that is in some sense or senses. Being is something that is known in some sense or senses. They are knotted together somehow. And since each is plural, meaning always implicating meanings, and being always implicating beings, their knot, or knots, is that much more complicated.

Plato’s gigantomachia peri tes ousias¹ presents a battle over reality or ontology (peri tes ousias) that is equally a battle over knowing or epistemology. The gods, champions of the ideas (‘existing in the heights of the unknown’), and the giants, champions of matter (‘what can be touched by the hand’), are rival ontological forces, but they are also rival epistemologies. They manifest different realities by taking them in fundamentally different ways. The world is taken as an extension of knowledge (in the case of the gods) or knowledge is taken as an extension of the world (in the case of the giants).  

The childish philosopher differs from both by taking their contesting takings together. But the gods and the giants taken together are essentially different from the gods and giants who contest against each other in mortal combat.

Plato’s allegory of the cave presents the same complications in a different manner. The genesis of knowledge is presented as an escape from the constraining categories of an accepted reality (here that of chained prisoners in a strange underground cave) to that of another reality, that of the ‘outside’ world above the cave. Knowledge (of very different sorts) and reality (of very different sorts) are bound together, both inside and outside the cave, just as they are in the gigantomachia.

Both the gigantomachia and the allegory of the cave may be expressed in terms of spectrums:² 

gods — philosopher — giants
ideas — ideas and matter together — matter
outside — outside and inside together — inside
above — above and below together — below

Plato surely conceived these philosophical tales together. The ‘earth-bound’ giants are denizens of the underworld like the prisoners in the cave. The gods live in the ‘heights of the unknown’ like the outside world above the cave in the allegory, The childish philosopher takes the realities of the gods and the giants as belonging together; the prisoner who escapes from the cave to learn of the ‘outside’ world comes to know the reality of both. To emphasize the point, Plato has the freed prisoner return to the cave in order to present the two realities together in another way.  

What distinguishes all the exclusive extremes is insistence on fundamental singularity; what distinguishes the inclusive median (medium) of their dynamic combination is insistence on fundamental plurality. But the latter is no mere sum of the former. It is an equally original position with unique characteristics not found in the varieties of exclusive possibilities.

McLuhan had many ways of describing this gigantic contest of origins over singularity and plurality.³ But his standard designation became that of exclusivity and inclusivity.⁴ Singular ontologies (“omega points”) express or extend themselves in dualisms in which the relation or medium between the two is intransitive and inherently unstable: the two poles of their dualisms are ultimately ‘exclusive’ of one another and would reduce to One if other forces did not prevent this. In fundamental contrast, plural ontologies express or extend themselves in dualisms in which the relation or medium between the two is transitive and ultimately stable (although dynamically so): the two are ultimately ‘inclusive’ of one another, while never reducing to One.

Here, too, a spectrum may be drawn:

exclusive — inclusive — exclusive

Exclusivity comes in two flavors like the gods and the giants, ideas and matter, above and below, outside and inside. Which of the two is ultimately favored (flavored) depends upon the relation or medium between them. So also with the difference between exclusivity and inclusivity which again hangs (but in a different way which future posts will specify) on their relation or medium. All are binary, but differ in their media. ‘Binary’ is always binaries and their varying medium — media — is the message.

Just as Plato sets out the gigantomachia as an ontological battle over ‘true reality’ (τὴν ἀληθινὴν οὐσίαν, Sophist 246b), so McLuhan asserts that his media are “metaphysical”:

my approach to media is metaphysical rather than sociological or dialectical (…) I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. (McLuhan to J. G. Keogh, July 6, 1972, Letters 412)

Now Neil Turok follows Einstein in describing James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) as the founder of modern physics:

Maxwell’s breakthrough opened the door to twentieth-century physics: to relativity, quantum theory, and particle physics, our most  fundamental descriptions of reality. (46)⁵ 

But Turok does not see, as presumably physicists collectively do not see, that Maxwell in describing “our most  fundamental descriptions of reality” was a practicing metaphysician:

Maxwell (…) had not only predicted the speed of light, he had explained light’s nature. Simply by piecing together known facts and insisting on mathematical consistency, he had revealed one of the most basic properties of the universe. (45-46)

As Plato saw millennia ago, the signature of such metaphysics is dynamic original complexity unfolding in non-chronological time, expressible in terms of a spectrum.

Turok notes in passing how Maxwell “showed that Saturn’s rings were composed of particles, a theory confirmed by the Voyager flybys of the 1980s.” (36) But in a book cited frequently by Turok, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life Of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahon (2003), this demonstration is described more fully:

The Adams’ Prize was a biennial competition; the Saturn problem had been set [as its subject] in 1855 [when Maxwell was 24] and entries had to be in by December 1857. The problem was fearsomely difficult. It had defeated many mathematical astronomers; even the great Pierre Simon Laplace, author of the standard work La mécanique céleste, could not get far with it. Perhaps the examiners had set the problem more in hope than expectation. They asked under what conditions (if any) the rings would be stable if they were (1) solid, (2) fluid or (3) composed of many separate pieces of matter. (74)

Maxwell’s winning solution was published as ‘On the Stability of the Motion of Saturn’s Rings’ in 1858. While the rings of Saturn are not themselves “basic properties of the universe”, their structure as dis-covered by Maxwell is an expression of that ‘both together’ or ‘inclusivity’ of Plato and McLuhan which is “one of the most basic properties of the universe.” In fact, Maxwell’s demonstration of the nature of Saturn’s rings is a foreshadowing of his shortly later specification of the ‘field’ which is another name for that ‘both together’ or ‘inclusivity’ of the metaphysical tradition.   

Maxwell’s solution to the Saturn’s rings problem considered the spectrum of 

solid — separate pieces of matter — fluid

As has long been described by metaphysicians, the extremes of the spectrum follow an identical logic that divides into two ‘exclusive’ flavors. Meanwhile, the middle position combines the extremes but in a way that fundamentally transforms them. In Maxwell’s solution to the rings of Saturn problem, ‘solid’ becomes fragments and fluid becomes the network of relations of those fragments with each other, with Saturn and with universal structural forces like gravity, the interaction of all of which enables the stability of the motion of Saturn’s rings. Maxwell’s slightly earlier 1855 paper ‘On Faraday’s Lines of Force’ had began his reconsideration of ‘fluidity’ which would culminate in his formulation of the ‘field’ in the 1860s.

Mahon describes Maxwell’s Saturn’s rings finding as follows:

In an astonishing sequence of calculations, using mathematical methods which had been known for years but in unheard-of combinations, [Maxwell] showed that a solid ring could not be stable (…) [But] could fluid rings be stable? This depended on how internal wave motions behaved (…) [Maxwell] used the methods of Fourier to analyse the various types of waves that could occur, and showed that fluid rings would inevitably break up into separate blobs [like the solid hypothesis in this respect].
He had thus shown, by elimination, that although the rings appear to us as continuous they must consist of many separate bodies orbiting independently. (The Man Who Changed Everything, 74-75)

But “independently” of course does not mean ‘without relation to forces like gravity’ and to other forces which, like gravity, are operative throughout the universe and give structure to it.  

At the same same time Maxwell was continuing his research on colour:

There were two aspects of the physical world that [Maxwell] particularly wanted to explore. Neither was well understood. One was [Faraday’s] electricity and magnetism (…) The other was the process of vision, in particular the way we see colours (…) No-one had yet managed to explain how colour vision worked.
Isaac Newton had shown in the seventeenth century that sunlight, which we see as white, was an even mixture of all the colours in the solar spectrum, which range from red to violet, as displayed in a rainbow. Some colours, for example brown, do not appear in the spectrum but Newton reasoned that they must all be mixtures of pure spectral colours. The problem was to find the rules governing the mixing process— how much of which spectral colours had to be mixed together to give a particular non-spectral colour? (The Man Who Changed Everything, 49-50)

Maxwell experimented in a series of ways (like observing papers printed with primary colours fixed in varying percentages on a spinning top) to understand the working of colour perception. 

As shown by Newton, “light’s nature” as “one of the most basic properties of the universe” (45-46) is explicitly a spectrum. And that spectrum has the traditional three ‘primary’ components, in this case with red and violet at the extremes and green in the middle. But with light the mean of the spectrum is not that intermediary green, but is instead its entire sum as white. The qualitatively different nature of the midpoint, insisted upon by Plato and McLuhan, is superlatively expressed here.

  red — green — violet
|
white

 Simultaneously, Maxwell was considering the relations of electricity and magnetism and here again, a spectrum with an essentially different midpoint proved crucial:

But wait: a changing electric field can now create a changing magnetic field which, by Faradays law, can create a changing electric field. So electric and magnetic fields can create one another, without any electric charges or currents or magnets being present. When Maxwell analyzed his equations carefully, he found that magnetic and electric fields can travel across space together, like an undulating pattern moving across the grass in a meadow. This electromagnetic wave was just the kind of effect Faraday had been anticipating. (45)

electric — electromagnetic — magnetic

As with Saturn’s rings and colours, Maxwell was thinking through a tripartite spectrum whose sum and action — the field — was the essential prior ground, not the derivative secondary figure arising from supposedly “definite properties at each point in space and at every moment of time”.⁶

Near the close of his book, Turok himself exercises the same fundamental form:

All the indications are that the universe is at its simplest at the smallest and largest scales: the Planck length and the Hubble length. It may be no coincidence that the size of a living cell is the geometric mean of these two fundamental lengths. This is the scale of life, the realm we inhabit, and it is the scale of maximum complexity in the universe. (256)⁷

Planck length — scale of life — Hubble length

It may be submitted that, just as Plato and many others have unsuccessfully tried to communicate, knowing more about such forms may be critical to an investigation of the physical universe and beyond (‘meta’). This could be thought of as “understanding media”.