Today is August 31st, and so this will be the final edition of Eponymy in August for the year. I hope to leave off with something inspiring, so today’s Eponymy in August is Plato’s Cave.
Plato was an Athenian philosopher in the fourth century BCE, and a pivotal figure in the development of Western philosophy. He was mentored by Socrates, and derived much of his philosophical views and style from Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. Plato founded the first institute of higher learning in Europe, the Academy in Athens, which lasted almost 300 years (until a sacking of Athens in 86 BCE) and counted Aristotle among its membership.
Plato is additionally one of the luckiest philosophers of the ancient world, since his entire body of work has survived until the present day. The Republic, Plato’s best known work, truly covers Life, the Universe, and Everything, as it was understood by the Athenians. In a later chapter, [Plato speaking through the character of] Socrates asks Plato’s older brother Glaucon to imagine a cave where the inhabitants are chained to the wall, and have always been so, with their eyes fixed on a far wall. The wall displays shadows cast by objects carried by passers-by in the cave behind the prisoners, beyond which a dim fire casts the only light. The cave is dark other than this firelight, and so the faint shadows cast and the words uttered by the passersby carrying the shadow-casting objects are all the inhabitants know of the world. Nothing else is known to exist, and so the shadows become the truth of the prisoners as they hear the words of others and relate them only to these projections.
Socrates then introduces a perturbation where one of the prisoners in the cave is freed, and can turn away from the shadows on the wall to see the fire. Though the person can now see real things instead of shadows, the brightness of the fire is overwhelming to someone who has never seen so much light. It is blinding and painful. Worse, the person who has only seen shadows could not recognize shapes as being true things, and would not believe it if told that those things were real and the shadows not. Bewildered and frightened, the freed person would run back to the dark side of the wall again where only shadows lie, and take comfort in the perception of understanding again.
If that person were then forcibly dragged from the cave and to the surface in full daylight (and prevented from returning immediately), never having seen the Sun before, the effect would be even more pronounced. The pain is excruciating initially, but as the person adjusts his eyes, he can see shadows of the upper world, then reflections in water including that of his own self, and finally the shape and color of all things illuminated by the sun.
As an aside, this story is alluded to in the scene in The Matrix after Neo is first removed from the Matrix. While Neo received microsurgeries to build up his atrophied muscles (since he’s never physically moved until that time), he asks, “Why do my eyes hurt?” Morpheus replies to him, “You’ve never used them before.” For some reason this one slice of the movie resonated with me strongly, even though it would be ten years before I read The Republic and connected the cinematic expression to its root.
Once the former prisoner has come to understand objects and concepts through full illumination rather than shadows, it becomes nigh impossible to return to the cave and carry on as before with the other prisoners who have not left, since eyes adjusted to the sun will not well see the shadows of a dim fire. The prisoners will erroneously consider the escapee to be blinded, even though the escapee now has seen more of the world as it is than any of them. Though they may use the same language, their shared context is small to nonexistent. To make a judgment call, though it may not always be the popular thing to do and may eradicate shared understanding, one should always seek to fully understand things as they are, rather than constraining oneself to the limited and illusory understanding that comes from only the shadows of things.
I’ll finish with a direct translation of Plato’s words (again speaking as Socrates), instead of my own interpretation:
“This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.”