Has anyone read this essay by Plato? I personally love it and find that it surronds the world I live in. I am making this thread so people can give their insight and opinions on this essay.

No one has read Allegory of the Cave? ......Bum Deal

I'm sure absolutely everyone here has read it. There's absolutely no way to avoid reading it if you read philosophy.

What I was always conscious of when reading it is the ego of Plato(/Socrates - depending on who actually thought it up). "Nearly everyone on earth can only see the shadows....but I and those who think like me have seen the light!

Then the whole shitty pseudo-matrix question pops up: how do you know you haven't just entered a bigger cave??

It's a fun little metaphor, and it's very standard. What I mean is, even if Plato had never written this, I'm pretty sure at least half the educated people in the world have considered this possibility.

So your saying some people who have read this and think they have seen the light or just fooled again by seeing another shadow.

Basically. It's just substituting one ego for another.

Person A: "I know what is true!"
Person B: "I once thought Person A was right, but now I've seen the light.......and only I know what is true!"
Person C: "I once thought....."

Perhaps I'm my being a teenager is what jades my view here, but the vast majority of the people I know seem to think they know everything about the world and how to fix it.

I'll give you an example. I have one aquiantance who would (and has) clearly state 'I am ignorant of some things and I'm sure everything I believe isn't right'. Yet at the same time her actions do not reflect this at all. She is the complete protestor, fighter for her beliefs type. She will argue to the death anything she doesn't agree with. And on top of that, it's more than obvious that on any issue she deems important, she has the holier-than-thou mentality. It's that "Okay, well I just happen to care about the world/people....." arguement.

And that is 100% the "I have seen the light....." thing.

Everybody thinks they've seen the light. It amazes me there are so many lights.

It's a bit deeper than that.

Plato claimed no more than what all non-dual philosophers claim, that we live in a phenomenal world that is made out of shadows. All science and philosphy confirms this as a fact. There are two schools of thought about what it actually means.

One school says it is impossible to see out of the cave, one school says it is. Most 'Western-style' thinkers conclude that we cannot see out, and adopt 'mysterianism', pragmatism, relativism and so on. This view holds that we cannot ever hold any certain truth, cannot ever know ultimate reality.

However all non-dual practices, (Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita etc,) agree with Plato that it is possible to see out, and that it is possible to know that what you are seeing out there is true.

You can take your pick from these two views, but you can't deny that we live in a world of shadows. As someone suggested above, all people who think about it reach the same conclusion.

Plato wasn't a genius for just reaching that conclusion. It was because he saw what it meant. He came up with a very good metaphor, an enclosed cave with a single mysteriously hidden entrance, and wrote about it well. There are many other metaphors, although my brains gone and I can only think of the Jewel Net of Indra at the moment.

Buddhist characterise the cave, (which is not a backdrop but is constructed out of the shadows, it is the shadows) as the world of confusion. In mathematical terms what lies outside of this cave is the meta-system, the place where undecidable questions get answered and the truth can be known.

Perhaps Plato was arrogant in claiming he knew what lay outside the cave, but I'm pretty sure he was just telling it like it was, as best he could. He's one among thousands over many centuries who have tried to do the same, all of whom found it's impossible to do properly, since what is there is indescribable ex hypothesis.

However it not impossible to go and look at it, with a bit of practice.


Canute :m:

Thanks Canute!

feel free to post..........really:bugeye:

I like the analogy that the phenomenal world is like being in a cave only seeing the shadows. The shadows would be the reflection of the idea in it's perfect form, so to see the truth behind something we must imagine how it would be in it's perfect form (in what the philosophers called the 'idea world').

I also like the idea that our bodies are shadows of our soul, just as our shadow is of our body.

I agree with Tyler that it's wrong to think you know it all, it's allways another step otherwize you are on the wrong track.

The trouble is that for Plato et al it is our thinking, our brain if you like, that creates the cave. In other words our thoughts, (concepts, perceptions, language etc.) are the problem. (They are considered 'dual' and thus not fundamental to ultimate reality, which is non-dual).

This is what makes it so hard to see beyond the cave and why, as Plato suggested, few people manage it. One has to use a whole different method of seeing.

This problem has long beset Western philosophy, forever ensnared as it is in undecidable questions and paradox, unable to prove anything for certain about reality as opposed to appearances.

In case there is any doubt that that we do live in world of shadows, a world of appearances rather than fundamental substances, the proof lies in the in principle unprovability of idealism. (Although, to be fair, some dismiss this as an epistemilogical quirk, rather than a significant piece of knowledge).

ItalianIntellectual:

I have two things to say about Plato's Cave.

1) When Plato talked about exiting the cave, so I understand, he was talking about recognizing the world of forms, which for him really was the truth. This was all about Plato believing that a person's soul had already known perfection and was capable of recognizing it... if you don't believe this then yeah, Plato's Cave is kind of a poor allegory for the way you view the world, I agree. Not personally being a believer in absolute truth I am inclined to forgive Plato on this count, but that doesn't mean I believe him.
To see a short account of Plato's concept of absolute truth, read Meno. Plato's concept of knowledge is actually pretty alien.

2) Do not underestimate the fact that Plato's works, altogether, are a kind of love letter to Socrates. Plato's assertion that "if ya try to tell other people about the outside world then they'll kill ya" is a pretty transparent criticism of the Athenians' trial and execution of Socrates. When you read all of Plato's stuff it's actually kind of sad... like a collection of stories that he wanted to tell the old guy, but never got a chance to. It's not in any way childish, and Plato was a smart guy, but his works were not made entirely to confer knowledge.

Plato, like all of us philosophers, was trying to reconcile his thirst for necessaritiy in this sea of arbitrarities which we all find ourselves emersed in. Even the necessarities which stem from our world's fixed arbitrarities (e.g. of fixed arbitrarities: the laws of physics, as opposed to variable arbitrarities, e.g: a society's laws or its cultural taboos; e.g. of necessarities which stem from fixed arbitrarities: {ironically} a society's laws or its cultural taboos) are as arbitrary as those fixed causes.
All of earnest metaphysics has been the search for unarbitrary necessarity aka the essence of existence. Arbitrary necessarities satisfy nothing. Plato thought he found it with his Forms and symbolized it as the world outside the cave.
Descartes tried to satisfy the same urge with the Cogito.
All the rationalists did it with a priori knowledge, which was supposed to hold true in any conceivable universe, not just this arbitrary one. To learn about the arbitrarities of this our particular universe, one need simply open their eyes and become an empiricist. Empiricists equate to people who are too caught up with the shadows on the cave wall, too muddled up with arbitraities to be able to decipher any necessarities from them.

To live lucidly, we must do something akin to dreaming lucidly; we must wake up while still in the dream. When we become conscious of the fact that we are dreaming in a lucid dream, it is because the logical discriminator in our heads (left brain) is not fully disabled so when something irrational happens in the dream, it picks up on it and you conclude,"oh shit, I'm dreaming right now"
Likewise, to live lucidly, we must free ourselves from the constaints of our variable arbitraities and, in a different sense, from our fixed ones, too. This is equivalent to exiting the cave. If death is waking up from this dream, then we will slap our palms against our foreheads (figuratively speaking, of course) and exclaim,"Daaaamn, how could I have unconsciously taken so many completely arbitrary and therefore non-essential things for granted?!!"

I obviously don't know for sure what this essential metaphysical knowledge is but I think it must have alot to do with contrast and comparison (in that order) giving rise to context in a dialectic triad, plus a whole lot of Boolean logic.

Originally posted by BigBlueHead
[B]ItalianIntellectual:

I have two things to say about Plato's Cave.

1) When Plato talked about exiting the cave, so I understand, he was talking about recognizing the world of forms, which for him really was the truth. This was all about Plato believing that a person's soul had already known perfection and was capable of recognizing it... if you don't believe this then yeah, Plato's Cave is kind of a poor allegory for the way you view the world, I agree.
I don't see it this way. Plato saw the limits of our reasoning and realised that we could not use it to see beyond appearances, beyond the shadows. Kant, Popper, Goedel, Penrose etc have all agreed. Even Hawkings seems to agree, given his essay 'The End of Physics' (I've got a link somewhere but can't find it).

Originally posted by CTEBO
I obviously don't know for sure what this essential metaphysical knowledge is but I think it must have alot to do with contrast and comparison (in that order) giving rise to context in a dialectic triad, plus a whole lot of Boolean logic. [/B]
I agree with most of what you said in your post, but can you expand on what you meant by this bit.

I am not sure if he was calling the shadow or the thing causing the shadow a book.