Hamas are creating their own caves (Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images)
Some meditations on the human condition blaze with truth even after millennia. And perhaps none more so than Plato’s Cave. Plato assumes what was self-evident to both the simple and the wise from the beginning of civilisation until just yesterday: that reality is given, not humanly constructed, and that education is the process whereby we learn to participate in it. Human beings, he teaches, are by nature capable of ascending to the warm light of truth. Yet the vast majority languish in subterranean dungeons administered by sophisticates who despise the simple and think themselves wise, but are merely half-educated.
The Cave illuminates the peculiar bleakness of our post-Covid, post-October 7 existence. It reflects, as in a distant mirror, a society disordered and divided by ideologically charged, algorithmically enhanced insanity. And it anticipates the simulacrum of education that predominates in our schools and universities today, which has left whole generations incapable of distinguishing truth and goodness from evil and falsehood.
Plato imagines people chained to the bottom of a cavern with their backs to the opening. These prisoners are aware of little more than a play of shifting shadows on the rocky wall below, punctuated by occasional utterances. They don’t know that the shadow-play — the common societal story in which they have been immersed from birth — is a human fabrication, produced by hidden puppeteers manipulating figurines of animals and human beings in front of a fire that burns above and behind them. People watching a silent film in the earliest days of cinema allegedly took fright as a train rushed toward them on the screen. The prisoners are similarly unable to achieve any critical distance from the semblances projected on the cave wall, which they take to be the whole of reality.
The ignorance and isolation of this captive audience can hardly be overstated. Chained by their necks so that they cannot turn their heads, the prisoners have never seen a human face. They have no direct acquaintance with their neighbours, of whose very existence as individual human beings they are unaware. Whatever knowledge they may have of others is mediated by the shadows, from which words and sounds, echoing off the wall, seem to come.
This comprehensive mediation is just what the puppet-masters, separated from the prisoners by the low wall they hide behind, intend. These few, an oligarchic elite, compete for status, wealth and power — goods conferred only with the necessary but uncomprehending consent of the people, who must be kept in the dark so as not to rise up against their masters. This rigged game is won by ideological manipulation. All the categories through which the imprisoned multitude make sense of their experience must be ready-made; all that they take into their souls must be pre-digested. These categories are as flat, indefinite, and insubstantial as shadows, fitting images of the empty abstractions that today pass for serious ideas in the halls of power, the academy, and the media.
Today, we live in a postmodern Cave, which differs from earlier ones in important ways. In past Caves, the shadows at least affirmed a shared civic identity. In Sparta, they showed lean warriors nobly facing or shamefully fleeing danger, and cowards suffering extreme public shame. Today’s puppeteers also use fear and shame to maximum effect, but the shadow-play is predominantly critical — designed not to encourage like-mindedness among citizens, but to debunk past ideals and promote division and discord. For many Americans, not least those with university degrees, thinking about matters of common concern now involves little more than slapping labels such as “racist”, “sexist”, “classist”, “colonisers”, and “liberators” onto those who pass before them. These categories, in which relevant distinctions are eclipsed and individuals (to say nothing of whole peoples) are swallowed whole, have been worn out by many decades of use. In recent months, they have furnished the smoked lenses through which many who have no historical knowledge of Israel or Jews see the murders, gang-rapes, and mutilations of October 7, and perversely regard them as justifiable resistance against what they take to be Jewish tyranny.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeReally interesting piece. The Magisterial structure of Social Justice Theology really does operate like a tightly controlled Prison. It’s definitely a form of thought control and mental programming nudging people into compliance and conformity.
But it also instructs people what to disrupt and who to crush. In the Cave Allegory, the prisoners aren’t asked to serve as change agents. They’re simply isolated to process the world through the Lens of their programmers.
And maybe that’s the goal for some but I think most High Priests of Social Justice really think the ends justify the means and they’re liberating people…even if that liberation requires oppression itself. CS Lewis said that a Tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims might be the most oppressive. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep but those who torment us for our own good will do so without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience
Since Plato’s Cave, the underground puppet-show has consisted of organised religion(s) and latterly a Marxist/relativist combo that itself claims to be ‘liberating’ in a way that might epitomise the term “sophistry”.
This is a very useful article in identifying how our current mainstream dogma works, and pointing towards how we might move towards what Plato termed the Good.
This needs to be done on an individual level.
I’d describe it as a lifelong attempt to prevent oneself from falling into the Cave. Is it possible to try to live as free as humanly possible, from all dogmas? To attempt this requires first of all a very deep dive into oneself to examine what it is that motivates us, in all our interactions with the world and our fellow human beings. Then, to maintain a constant vigilance. It’s not pleasant, it’s not comfortable, it requires us to come to terms with the basic animal from which we’ve grown and achieved consciousness; but once that initial examination has been made, there can be no going back – and that’s what’s truly liberating.
The dogmas people adhere to are designed precisely to deter people from reaching this state. A further question then is: how much do societies require us to be maintained in this state in order to function? We see examples of societies which remain adherents to strict religious dogmas and cited as bring “strong”. But are they? They look riven with just as much division as the ‘liberal democracies now appear to be.
I remain optimistic, but that’s only based on my own personal experience. It’s possible that the advent of the internet allows us to start the process of self-examination, but for the first time as a collective experience. What we’re witnessing may be the initial stages of that process; the ‘growing-pains’ as it were. Of course i could be wrong, but there appears to be glimmers of a recognition of that journey. This article is one such glimmer.
In 1940’s Scotland, I was thoroughly brainwashed in God, King and Country: by the 1980’s, I had ‘looked round’. “… how much do societies require us to be maintained in this state in order to function?” I can only now conclude that, without these, we appear to be stuffed.
Since Plato’s Cave, the underground puppet-show has consisted of organised religion(s) and latterly a Marxist/relativist combo that itself claims to be ‘liberating’ in a way that might epitomise the term “sophistry”.
For about two millennia we have seen how religion has kept people from committing total atrocities.
For nearly a hundred years we have seen how atheism and “believe in science” help people fall into total atrocity
Your first sentence is meant to invoke laughter I trust?
Certainly made me laugh.
Deuteronomy 20:16-17: “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: “But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:”
Well done. You’ve been well schooled in atheist dogma, enough to know where to find that passage and one or two others like it.
Now read the rest of the Bible.
Hilarious. Here is a direct quotation, which you just ignore or dismiss as irrelevant. Is it a valid part of the Bible, or not? Why (if this is so) do other parts of the Bible contradict this passage? How do we know which ones to accept and which not?
The only dogmatic person here is you, almost by definition if you “believe in the Bible”, which we have known for 150 years is a historical farrago, written and re written over hundreds of years.
I fear that isn’t quite honest of you
You must know, having read the Old Testament through (unless you have merely plucked that passage out of obscurity to aid your polemic) that the sins of the the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites are described in Leviticus as being ‘at full measure’. Utter depravity, therefore.
You must also have read that inhabitants of Canaan are described as being severally and jointly – individually – utterly corrupt, murderous, incestuous, sadistic and vicious to the weakest and most helpless in society up to and including ritual child sacrifice. Corrupt to the very last man, woman and child. In the most direct way and in the present tense.
Now, if you accept the charge of Deuteronomy as being historically grounded in its most literal sense then it’s only right that you accept Leviticus in the same way, no?
But as I imagine you disbelieve the latter and consider it a ‘Bronze age fable’. then your use and misuse of the example of the former is, I’m afraid, simply disingenuous.
Brilliant riposte.
It was really not a “brilliant riposte”! It didn’t begin to answer in clear plain English any of the obvious moral questions about accepting the Bible as an ethical guide.
It is amazing how similar “progressive” and religious ideology and dogma actually are. Although since “woke” historically is dependent on deep rooted western Christian concepts, it isn’t so surprising. We are having a taste of what the late Classical world experienced, as the self righteous, violent, intolerant, and fanatical 4th century Christians suborned all they held to be good and true, including most art and philosophy.
Thank you for your response, I’m sorry you fond my style obtuse.
Simply put, I propose that the original poster was presenting a curated dilemma. He chooses to accept literally one portion of the Old Testament, the invocation to utterly destroy the Canaanites etc. while discounting another portion, their utter depravity. all while he, in point of fact, accepts neither ‘story’ as true and considers the entire Old Testament a fairy tale.
I don’t find that convinving hermeneutic.
The Bible is a collection of histories, records, songs, parables, laws, wisdom, prophecies and abstracted human longings. It is not a simple witness statement. For my part I have ceased to find the prosecutorial method a convincing way of unfolding its potential meaning and worth.
I also once shared the ‘Gibbonian’ view of Christian violence and intolerance in the 4th century. That is until I took the time to read Gibbon again more closely. He is explicit in showing that fanaticism, violence and intolerence know no creed, except power. Which is why they manifest themselves in ‘all religions and none’. It was Sulla after all, not Constantine, who sacked Athens and destroyed the Academy of Plato.
Do you believe that all depraved people should be killed? And what of the young children who were not yet depraved but whom God still commanded be killed.
I cannot help but quesion the good faith and consistency of your line of enquiry. We must agree terms of engagement, at least, before we enter into a transaction of this sort.
Do you believe that the ‘God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac’ commanded that they be killed?
If not then there is no contention between us. The question at issue becomes one of Biblical inerrancy, not Theodicy.
It’s true, I am an atheist. My point is that I don’t believe religion has prevented mankind from committing “total atrocities.” In some instances it has encouraged atrocities.
I think the difference between us is that you see ‘religion’ as a sociological and historical phenomenon whereas I see it as a spiritual one. The gulf between those two conceptions is not insignificant, Until that dissonance is acknowledged we will remain at crossed purposes and or conversation will not bear fruit
That is the point I was trying to bring to attention.
This is a faux sophisticated swerving of a rather obvious moral questioning about taking “the Bible” as our ethical guide. The Bible is firstly full of righteous cruelty, but also riddled with glaring contradictions. Secondly, the belief in a monotheistic God did not in practice produce a society of sweetness and light, as history tragically shows. Replacing one dogma with another is not the way forward
The Jews considered their enemies entirely depraved and without redemption and hence were justified in slaughtering them? Their account prevailed because they won the war. Oh, their God told them to do this, so they actually don’t even accept the unpleasant moral necessity of killing all (and not just defeating) their enemies. This is entirely consistent with the later behaviour of the Assyrians, except that they are baddies because they defeated the Jews
This is a rather long established human story. “What a surprise” you might ironically say! It is true that long Jewish history later helped develop a much more sophisticated and less brutal moral understanding, but this was an evolutionary process driven both by external events and internal contemplation. God had nothing to do with it, although the concept of God may have done (which is arguable).
As a Christian I hold far greater store in the New Testament. The old Testament is in fact only a pointer to the great things to come.
I understand your sentiment, but the Hebrew Bible is not “only a pointer”. It is the scripture of which Jesus said: “…till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.”
This is just motivated and not neutral reasoning. Religion was entirely compatible with, and the cause of enormous violence and atrocities. The 30 Year’s War killed far more people than the two world wars on a per capita and rivaled them even on an absolute basis despite a far smaller population at that time. Then we have the constant pogroms against Jews, heretics, Cathars etc. It is well known that the First Crusaders who sacked Jerusalem in 1099, killed every Muslim, Jew and even Orthodox Christian they could find. Please….don’t come up with the lame argument that the people concerned were not really Christians, or acting on other motives (they may also have been, but the Pope for example has blessed their violence)
To ignore or downplay this history shows some chutzpah of the highest degree! Steven Pinker demonstrates with masses of evidence that modern times are very far from being the most violent in history.
Ok, then what is the “Good” that you are striving to keep your eye on the ball of? Is there an objective “Good” that can be discovered naturally by humans (as the author, Plato and Aristotle in a different way proposed)?
Peaceful societies, shorn of the illusions from which they’ve emerged.
I take the view that humanity isn’t ‘old’ but still very young, hence my description of what we’re witnessing as “growing pains”.
Does this peaceful society know the difference between good and evil? What keeps them peaceful? Hobbes/Locke or Rousseau’s reliance on self-preservation and magically forgoing idiosyncratic desires ? The threat of violence?
Sad that you lumped all “organized religion” into one category and assigned it as the “Cave” category. How extraordinarily obtuse. You really think that every attempt by mankind to explore the origins of Justice, Purpose, Destiny, Love, Truth… are just one big fake?
Humans are spiritual creatures, and therefore prone to being manipulated by those with an agenda. Elites use organised religion to control the societies they seek to preside over; or use it as an excuse to conquer other societies. Failing to acknowledge that is more than obtuse, it’s disingenuous.
That’s why i ask for individuals to undergo their own journey rather than rely on organised religious dogma to do the work for them.
You write very lucidly on spiritual matters. Indeed, much of what you say mirrors what I have read and believe to be true of the Gospels.
If you will permit me the Liberty:
Humans are spiritual creatures (Romans 1 19-20)
and therefore prone to being manipulated by those with an agenda.(Matthew 7:15–20)
Elites use organised religion to control the societies they seek to preside over; or use it as an excuse to conquer other societies. (2 Peter 3:16)
Failing to acknowledge that is more than obtuse, it’s disingenuous. (1 John 1:8)
That’s why i ask for individuals to undergo their own journey rather than rely on organised religious dogma to do the work for them. (Matthew 7: 7-8)
Amen.
“Our disordered society thrives on dogma”
And when Trump gets re-elected?
A lot of the Left are going to watch as their Dogma gets run over by Karma.
I suspect there are many people who are willing to overlook Trump’s personal failings for the sake of disrupting the cozy cartel of the Elite.
I suspect that there are also many people who are deranged at the thought of their cozy compliance in sucking up to the Elite being disturbed.
There are many who look at like with Trump and life after him. It’s not hard to spot the differences, though at least 40% of our electorate and perhaps more will pretend that those differences do not exist or that they don’t matter.
There is a problem with this analogy. It is all too easy for crackpot cultists to declare themselves to be the enlightened ones who have seen the truth and consequently have a mission to awaken mankind and free us from our delusions. Cult leaders have always found the Plato’s cave story useful.
Anyway, isn’t that exactly how the Woke (that’ll be the awakened ones) like to see themselves? They have been “enlightened” by learned professors and such to believe that accepted history and tradition are just manipulative bunk perpetuated by a ruling elite who must be brought down if there is to be any justice in the world.
I think that’s the whole point of the article and the author’s analogy, no?
NO! The author’s analogy?! It belongs to Plato.
The author following Plato says that the prisoners would be afraid of their rescuer and would prefer the comfort of the illusions provided. I was saying that it is all too easy for someone to take on the role of rescuer for their own controlling purposes. Simple, no?
No, the woke are watching the shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s Cave in this analogy. But also other partisan political groups are doing the same in separate caves, and maybe everyone on the internet is in a similar thrall
I don’t think the puppet masters are the “learned professors” who know accepted history and tradition. The ones who know are outside the cave. The puppets, (who don’t know) are what, in my experience, have been called “experts” and have been manipulated for “the good of its victims.” (as TBone points out CS Lewis said is exercised without end and is the most oppressive).
Yes, that’s the most common misinterpretation of Plato’s allegory, but try not to take it out on Plato. Of course anyone can declare their ideas to be the ‘light of truth’ and that they perceive the truth when others don’t. Pretty much any idea can be twisted to selfish or nefarious purposes. The mistake they make is that they read the ‘light’ as being a metaphor for ‘truth’. It isn’t. That’s understandably common in the modern world which purports to enshrine ‘objective’ truth. The author sort of gets at it when he says the light is The Good, not the truth, but that’s too dense for most non-philosophers. The light is actually not a static thing or a set of ideas, it’s a stand in for the process that produces wisdom, that process being the Socratic method that runs through basically all Plato’s work. It’s a process of continuous doubt, reflection, and questioning to cultivate wisdom. The light is found by asking questions, and then questioning the answers to those questions. It’s not something that can be defined in any objective way or known with any certainty. That people misuse Plato is hardly useful. To have their ideas misused and abused by opportunists and politicians is the doom of philosophers. If a man shoots his wife, do you blame the gun?
Excellent article that justifies my subscription.
“the simulacrum of education … which has left whole generations incapable of distinguishing truth and goodness from evil and falsehood.”
Even worse, it has left them convinced there isn’t even an objective difference between the two.
This article, from what I can decipher at least, makes some interesting, if somewhat obvious, points. I despair however of the tendency for many writers to insert at least one or two words or terms that require one to resort to Dr Google. There is no need for this and in truth it demeans the article’s purpose. As Wittgenstein observed: “All that can be said can be said clearly.”
What does clear mean? Subtle differences in the meaning of words make for better clarity.
ref the ‘but are merely half-educated’ comment in the first paragraph. My grandmother used to talk about ‘Intellectual Idiots – educated well beyond their intelligence’. She was right then – and even more right now!
Step right up, step right up, spin the wheel and pick the truth. There is no truth in politics. There is truth in the physical world but in civics there is only an agreed upon way to order society. We are polarized because we can’t agree anymore and worse, we can’t disagree civilly anymore and debate ideas in good faith.
In a free society there is always a back and forth between how much freedom we should have. Maximum freedom in America in the 19th and 20th centuries led to Jim Crow and dare I say it the oppression of minorities. So, in the sixties we passed civil rights laws and progress toward equality began. The pace was slow and steady, but we were organically becoming more equal. Yet there are many who are impatient with the pace of change, and they employ emotional blackmail to speed things up. This has eroded a merit-based society and has led to a quota-based society where people are given opportunities they have not earned.
We are now stuck in a Manichean contest of wills, one side must win, and one side must lose, one side is good and one, one side is evil, one side is true, and one side is false. There are no rules in the game we are playing, just a cutthroat, scorched earth war. There is no honest debate and no compromise.
There is no truth in politics. Both sides have to win.
As much as I hate to say it, it was always bound to come to this, given time. Nihilism is the logical endpoint of the materialist deterministic philosophies that emerged at the end of the enlightenment. When there is no higher power, no ideal, no spiritual component, everything becomes self-referential, and ultimately meaningless. I’ll leave that discussion aside because I think the answers to many of our modern problems lie in the philosophies of Plato and other rationalists. The allegory of the cave is a good place to start, but it is not a case for education as we understand it. Most modern thinkers miss the point entirely. This author does better, but he still can’t quite let go of traditional notions of empirical truth.
Plato was not arguing for something like an objective truth to be taught by the wise to the ignorant. He did not think this way. Plato wrote his philosophies as dialogues, usually between some proxy for himself and his teacher Socrates. The student asks questions and Socrates generally responds not with answers, but with more questions, hence the so-called Socratic method of teaching. It is from Plato that we learn the story of how the oracle of Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man because only Socrates understood his own ignorance, he knew that he knew nothing. Socrates was Plato’s ideal, the embodiment of wisdom. Socrates himself wrote nothing, and famously declared he knew nothing. Socrates spent his entire life searching for wisdom, but never found it, never wrote it down as a set of precepts to be obeyed. The light of the sun the freed prisoner encounters is a metaphor for wisdom, but wisdom is not a provable, knowable, certain truth, but rather it is a process, the search for truth which is without any endpoint. It is a metaphor for self-reflection, self-understanding, self-doubt, and a continuous process of examining oneself and one’s thoughts. The prisoner is terrified of the light and must be dragged into it, not because it is simply a different reality than he has known, but because self-examination, self-doubt, admitting one’s own ignorance, is painful. The comfort of the reality we have known is easy. The acceptance of our own limitations, the knowledge of how small our perceptions really were and probably still are, that’s hard. Plato encourages us not to be like the prisoners, to be held captive by our own experiences and perceptions, to regard with contempt the man who contradicts them and tries to expand their thinking.
For context, Plato did ultimately believe there was a higher level of truth, his theory of forms. It existed, but was not accessible by any common physical process, if it was accessible at all. Forms were higher levels of truth that man could perceive indirectly but never directly access. The real endpoint of Plato’s philosophy was humility, open-mindedness, and a willingness to engage with new ideas that contradicted ones established reality. I trust I don’t have to explain how little these values are emphasized in the modern world. The modern world tends to place observations as facts and science as truth, but these are ultimately human constructs. The shared civic identity the author mentions was, to a significant extent, a product of information control. ‘Truth’ was decided by elders, priests, judges, scholars, oracles, etc. and then distributed down to the individuals through institutions under the control of authority. This continued to be the case even into the modern age of television and radio. As fast as these technologies were, they were still controlled by gatekeepers who could maintain at least an illusion of harmony. The Internet shattered that illusion of shared civic identity beyond repair. I sympathize with the author’s lamentations for a bygone era, but just as for the prisoner who experiences the light of the sun, there is no way to go back to the easy days of delighting and debating the shadows that danced upon the walls. Once the light has been seen, it cannot be unseen. We cannot go back to where we were.
The chaos of information and competing paradigms set loose by the Internet has two possible solutions. The first, most obvious one, is for the powerful few to regain control, hence the efforts to regulate ‘misinformation’ on the Internet through pressure on private companies and new laws. The efforts by technocrats to gradually replace democratic governments with rule by bureaucrats and experts can be interpreted the same way. This can work in places like China that were already conditioned to accept a level of authoritarian rule by their history but I’m not sure it can last indefinitely. It probably won’t work at all in the west after more than a century of free speech rights. It’s pretty plainly not working, as the globalist oligarchs pushing progressive orthodoxy have generated a profound counterculture resistance before they established control, and now far too many people have seen the efforts of elites for what they are.
That leaves us with the second path, the harder path. If we cannot go back, we must go forward. This is an unprecedented time in human history. It’s possible future historians will regard the Internet as being as profound a discovery as the steam engine, the wheel, or agriculture in changing how human civilization functions. What is needed is a shift in attitude from the bottom up, attitudes toward what constitutes ‘truth’. Plato’s philosophies are a good start, and we should not just appreciate what he wrote but how he wrote it. His writing is mostly a series of questions in response to questions, with answers being implied or absent entirely. In a society that is too quick to demand answers, we should learn to appreciate the questions. In order to accept one another’s radically conflicting viewpoints, we must first accept our own fallibility, our own limitations. We must ask our own questions, of ourselves and the world around us, to begin the process of self-doubt and self-reflection embraced by Plato. We must understand that any objective ‘truth’ we accept is a choice we make, not necessarily a reflection of reality. This goes for the lowest peasant to the most educated elites. Once we understand our truth is a ‘choice’, a reflection of our individual circumstances as much as any objective reality, we can have more humility and accept those who disagree in much the same we accept those who disagree on more mundane things that have always been regarded as choices, such as whether dogs are better than cats or vice versa. Once we begin as Socrates did, from a point of humility, a point of ignorance, can we begin to think in a different way and ask questions instead of trying to force one another to accept one or another set of answers.
Nicely said.
As a matter of fact, it’s critical that your point be emphasized. Plato’s Cave does not distinguish between THOSE WHO KNOW THE TRUTH (and stand outside the cave in the full light of sun)…and THOSE WHO ARE IMPRISONED, watching shadows. If that were the case any civilization would only need to find the Truth Knowers and plead with them to tell all the rest of us what to do.
The Absolute Reality outside the Cave is unknowable….and the best we can ever do is guess & grasp at forms, & shapes, & rumors, and bring to such efforts a constant skepticism mixed liberally with humility and self-doubt.
“We are all prisoners in Plato’s cave”.
Well of course we are. We always have been; nor will that change — not in any kind of real or significant way.
To be mortal, flawed, sinful, and prone to error our bindings are perpetual, inherent, inescapable.. We may be made in God’s image but we are not God, and even the most enlightened among us, at any time, in any age, can see but through a glass darkly.
The allegory itself is more layered and complex than it first appears…and seemingly distinguishes only 3 categories of participants: those chained…those pacing, behind the wall, holding their ‘puppetry objects’…and those few lucky or privileged enough to escape. In reality there are rooms upon rooms upon rooms within this same cave …and everyone is essentially bound — one way or another.
We may lie there in the first room, watching the shadow play, guessing THAT as the reality in which we exist. But equally those pacing, holding their symbols and signs are also bound, watching (on yet a preceding wall) their own shadow play (we might assume it’s a minimally more ‘sophisticated’ play) and from their understanding of THOSE shadows proceed to sketch their own interpretations of same to share with us, the unenlightened, on the floor of the first cave.
And moving further back, deeper into the cavern, we find yet another shadow play, cast by yet more prisoners (bound differently) who march and move their puppets to enlighten those in the 2nd cave who are — this third tier — convinced that THEY know, most truly, the Reality without.
As this process, these plays, these marching puppeteers move through time, the shadows and their casting become steadily, ever more particularized, more abstruse, more custom fit. As we escape from the first cave and the initial bindings, we move ineluctably to the next, and bind ourselves yet again to a fresher/newer dogma — seeing more truly (or so we believe) than when we were chained at the beginning.
We put away what we now believe were childish things.
Maybe, in some cases, we actually do. Maybe.
What we witness from every vantage is a constant churning. Each moving to their own, preferred cave, seemingly more enlightened than before (why else would we have moved there) and each critiqued by the Other (in their own cave) who are convinced that really THEY are the more knowledgeable…seeing more clearly now…. now that they are WOKE…or awakened from being WOKE…now that they are Conservative…or NeoCon…or Socialist…or Christian…or Muslim….or Green…or Democrat or Republican or Libertarian or Cynic or or or or.
What is critical — in every room — is our willingness to test our understanding against the fact that OUTSIDE the Cave (even if we never get there) there is A singular absolute reality … and we are either closer to grasping it…or not. Do we approach Truth or do we move further away?
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
“And so we beat on, boats against the current…”
A very nice exegesis of Plato’s classic analogy and a point well-made. So very sad that the western canon has been rejected by academia. It used to be that young scholars, having been thoroughly acquainted with “classical” thought, could in their rebellious youth take fancy to avant guard ideas only to later, with more maturity and experience of life, return to more the more conservative and classic concepts they had once learned. Today, our “young scholars” receive no exposure to cogent classical conservative ideas and thus have nothing to return to.
I often wonder why people think so differently and how they arrive their conclusions. They are as honest about their sincerely held views and even talking to them is never going to change their minds. How does this happen. My brother and I are poles apart, yet we were brought up by the same parents, schooled at the same schools. Was it University that changed us or inner reflection?
A very good question and one that reflects both reason and an open mind. For me I’ve come to suspect that human expression is always a mixture of the rational and the emotional, and often the latter is merely cloaking itself in the former. I think siblings coming from the same environment and “thinking” so differently may have its roots in the dynamic of one sibling’s innate compulsion to establish themselves as an entity distinct from the other. Sometimes that results in one staking out different philosophical territory from the other somewhat arbitrarily and not always with rancor. That phenomenon exists to an even greater degree between generations; liberalism in all of history owes a big part of its existence to the emotionally-based process of children establishing identities distinct from their parents. The rationality of the belief is not the issue; the fact of it being different from mom’s and dad’s is what drives it, once again more emotion than logic. Beyond that, people tend to mold their philosophy to the contours of their individual emotional experiences more often than the other way round; so it matters less that two people were exposed to identical objective curricula than to the very unique and particular emotional circumstances associated with the exposure. Among my acquaintances are many whom I have come to know derive the greater part of their personal philosophy from a single individual with whom they had a particular connection: teacher, friend, lover, mentor or even enemy.