better to be the poor servant of a poor master

Imagine a cave. Inside this cave there are prisoners. These prisoners are chained by their limbs and cannot move. They cannot move their heads, and therefore can only look forward. Their heads face the wall of the cave. Now imagine on the opposite side of this cave there is a fire burning. Imagine that in between this fire and the wall where the prisoners are looking is a raised walkway. People, things, animals would walk over this walkway, and their shadows would be projected on the wall. The prisoners, therefore, would never see the object, but only its shadow. They would give names to these shadows, and the prisoner that knew the most names and that would be able to predict what would come next would be the king. The sounds, too, would be attached to the various shadows that the prisoners saw. This would be their reality, only seeing the shadow of the object and never the object itself.

Now imagine one day a prisoner is able to escape from the cave into the world of light. At first he would be blinded by its source, and would not want to comprehend the real world around him. He would be much more comfortable returning to the cave, back to the reality he thought he had. But, after a while, he would assimilate. He would understand the source of the light, the beauty of the truth, and he would be happy. He would see the stars and the sun, and know from where every shadow was born.

Now imagine that this prisoner, who no longer is such, returns to the cave. His friends would not recognize his shadow since they had never seen it. He would tell his old friends about the shadows, the real objects behind them, and the source of how they are formed. His fellow prisoners, however, would not want to hear this, as it would take them from the known and accepted reality. They have had this reality their entire lives. It is the only one they know and understand.

Having seen the world of light, the freeman would have a hard time adjusting back to the darkness and recognizing all of the shadows. He would not be called intelligent nor efficient, and the more he tried to convince the other prisoners about the farce of their realities the more they would want him killed. But this would not make the world of the light any less real.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave the prisoners represent humankind. The cave is the only knowledge and reality that they know, and the freedman is the philosopher. He understands that there is another world, that the fixed and governed one does not hold the great truth. It will be difficult for him to return to the cave and function in the prisoners’ society once he has seen the light, as they would not be willing to liberate themselves from what they considered true. The philosopher, for the betterment of humankind, should understand both the world inside the cave as well as the one outside.

Truth, according to Plato, was not something that could be taught directly. Guides could help, but the ultimate understanding would have to be the result of the individual liberating him or herself from the cave. This “transference” of knowledge did not exist to him, and was rather a trap than a conscious effort toward truth. That is to say that the memorization of facts does not constitute knowledge, and that truth does not lie in these facts. Truth, rather, is in the form of ideas, ideas that continually change and that can be altered or manipulated to change. The only way to find and understand this truth, says Plato, is through dialogue:

“Now I would like to discuss this concept of truth, what it is, what it can be, if it has to be, and why this must be true. How we use this truth and how we manipulate it are of great importance. Truth, to me, is the purest form of thought, and in some circumstances the purest form of purity. Purity, to my understanding is as close one can get to nothing. The concept of nothing, in this sense, would not be the void of all things, nor would it mean emptiness, and as with all definitions would neither be an end nor a beginning, but rather the source for it all, just as the sun is the source for all shadows, even when it is night.”
“But night, by definition, is the time of day without the sun, a time of rest, and the process therefore will begin the following day, right?”
“In the respect of secularization, yes. If we wanted to divide up the universe into subjects we would first have to define the universe as being a hub of subjects. These subjects we would have to develop further, giving them knowledge and importance. In this case the knowledge and importance are fully dependent on ourselves, and not of the universe, because we have now made it ours. The concept might have been able and might still be able to be understood without language, but we would never be able to say it, to speak it, to hear it. We need to know, to understand, and so we give things names. At the exact moment that an unknown becomes a known, it goes into the past. It does this by being understood, by making a connection with the past, as no fact can be created from nothing, nor can the universe, our understanding of it.”
“Although this might make sense, I have a hard time differentiating what I think is real and what actually is real. Are they one in the same?”
“Exactly. Our realities are built around what we see as true, as unchanging, as real. But this reality is always in flux, always changing, and the ideas that we do not want to let go of, that we cannot let change, become our downfall. We, fortunately or unfortunately, believe most of what we see, and if we do not we must create a knowledge for it, in order to understand and move on to the next. We compile all this information and call it “knowledge” or “intelligence,” concepts that we create and therefore have power over. We manipulate both in order to exact our own wills, and the main tool for this is education.”
“Education, in this sense, would be more of the strict memorization and processing of information created by humankind rather than the purest path towards truth? If this were so, what would learning be? Can we do anything that does not have to concern language? Can we exist? Can we even discuss truth?”
“To discuss truth would be to assume that it existed, which would be to assume that an idea of it located itself in someone’s mind. This would therefore be true, and the assumption would be correct if we accepted our assumptions as genuine. Existence, I still have yet to find, cannot exist without language. The concept that we put in to words is the way that we understand it, just like the shadows on the cave. Whether or not we realize what the subjects of the objects are will be difficult to ever know.”
“Will we know when we have left the cave?”
“We will know when things have changed, when we do not accept ideas that we might have accepted, when we use our minds to distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas, and only when we return to the cave of darkness will we fully be aware of our transformation.”
“So we must understand both the light and the dark in order to be sure we are on the right path for truth?”
“Yes, this duality and understanding of the balance apparent is needed to understand. Understanding one concept without its contradiction will only end in bloodshed, in the misuse of information, and in the controlling of truth, of language, and of knowledge. Education, in this sense, would be mistaken for all three. Instead it should be this guide that helps us follow the path of truth, rather than be the one that deters us, kidnapping our own thoughts and turning them into a circle that never ends. Questions like the ones you have asked will never be able to be answered fully, as the ideas will continue to change. They do not keep us on the path of truth, but rather deter our own thoughts, keeping ourselves busy. To answer these would however be a practice of the way in which to leave the cave, but to never return would be just as useless.
“I cannot follow your thoughts, as I continue to question myself, my reality, and my truth.”
“And that is where you are wrong, as with the independence of the individual comes the fraternity of humankind, one concept that we break into pieces, further continuing the farce of knowledge and of education, ensuring ourselves that the only thing we must do is understand, and we do that with knowledge and education. Do you see how the circle will never end?”
“I do, but what not is life if not a circle? And once it concludes it is over, but how can there be an end if there is no beginning?”

At this point the listener has realized why as people we must have a beginning and an end, for it might be the only way to conceptualize the concepts of the universe. One of these, time, has been created therefore by us, broken down and manipulated in order to squeeze as much knowledge and information as possible from it. Life, another product of the universe, has the same characteristics.

It is not as important to answer questions as it is to ask them. For in asking we understand the answers: those that cannot be put in to words.

Are we once again prisoners in the cave?

-Anthony

P.S.: I wrote this for my final mythology paper, focusing on truth in plato's allegory of the cave, and wanted to share it with all of you. The old text (written about 380 B.C.) can be found on the internet (http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html) or in book 7 of The Republic. Ciao!