There are things we can touch and perceive, or perceive with technology. Some things cannot be touched but can be easily perceived, such as the charming young lassies above. Or mental life: ideas, emotions, etc. And spiritual life.
For some reason, it's Greek Week at Maggie's and, while looking for something else, I found this bit somewhere at Wiki:
Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.
Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure.
It is certain that many are indifferent to the invisible world - practical, earth-bound types who are happily without the muses' gift - or burden - of reflecting on the "higher realities" and the hidden realities which seem to try to connect the human heart with the cosmic. The meta-physical or trancendent realm of thought and experience which many of us seek to grasp and hold. More:
The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.
Indeed we are all Greeks - especially those of us who are Christians (the Greek Paul thoroughly Greekified the Christ Cult, thus translating it into a world religion). "Psyche," the soul, was a combination of the psych-ological (mental) and the spiritual/divine aspects of reality as we experience it, until academics in modern times separated psychology out as a topic of study in the Aristotelian slicing-and-dicing way. Being sober sorts, they did not want to call Psychologists "soul students," nor did Psychiatrists want to call themselves "soul physicians." So they put it in Greek, same as most of the other -ologists and -iatrists.
Photo on top of a few untouchable Muses borrowed from Egotastic.
Image below: Bust of Socrates, Louvre
