Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Plato's Cave
Plato argues that most of us are like prisoners in a cave who are bound in such a way that we can only see shadows of objects projected on a wall. Not only can we not see the objects that cast the shadows, we cannot even see the objects outside of the cave. A more modern analogy might have the prisoner's watching a movie or perhaps "plugged in" to a virtual reality program. What is Plato claiming about the ordinary person? What is our epistemic state? Do we have any hope in escaping? And most importantly, is Plato correct? In short, what is your interpretation of Plato's allegory of the cave and is the allegory the correct way to view the human quest for knowledge?
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The allegory of the cave has many layers with interpretations can go into an infinite depth. But, the most basic interpretation starts with the prisoners who represent every day, average people. Their restricted visions of the shadows, only enable a limited sense of what life is. This is because they are only using their senses to gain perception of their surroundings. They need the evidence given by their senses to back up their life in order to make sure what they are experiencing is true. When a prisoner is able to become freed and can approach the source of the light, his current understanding of life becomes skewed. Nearing the fire, the truth of the past becomes apprehensible. When the prisoner returns to the position behind the wall, he can no longer view his fake life the way he used to. Unsatisfied with his current state of reality, the prisoner is able to escape and view the sun. The sun represents what reality truly is: the forms accessible from the mind. He no longer needs to rely on his senses for guidance. The forms enable one to not need evidence, for one does not need proof if there is no doubt. This is represented by the prisoner escaping and being able to envelope in the sun’s rays. At first, it is overwhelming because the truth of what reality really is appears unstable, for mentality and physicality are on two different realms. He cannot let go of using his senses in order to view what is really there. Once he gains trust and “allows his eyes to adjust”, the person is able to view the forms thus becoming a philosopher. Plato is demonstrating that it is a philosopher’s job to “go back” to the everyday people (the prisoners) to try to teach them the knowledge he has obtained. Plato is claiming that the ordinary person is not experiencing reality for what it is because their perception is that reality is anything that can be proved by the senses: something you can touch, smell, taste, and hear and so on, “The kinds of things which tend to the body are less true and less real than the kinds of things which tend to the mind” (585d). Humanity’s peak epistemic state is when a human is able to experience a reality that cannot be obtained by using the senses. In his example, the only choice an ordinary human has of escaping is by having guidance by one who has already reached the epistemic state, a philosopher. Plato is saying that the only way for humans to grasp the true concept of reality is in the presence of a philosopher. Plato is correct that the majority of people will just continue to go through life as long as there is stability and proof of security, “They [will] never travel any further towards the true heights: they’ve never looked up there, let alone gone there” (586a). When someone is able to take a leap and come back better than before, it enables others to approach the idea of a change relatively easier than before.
ReplyDeleteIn one of Plato's most famous allegories, the Ring of Gyges, he discusses a group of disabled prisoners "who are no different from us" (Plato 241). In this allegory, Plato claims that the ordinary person is a prisoner in the cave, one who can only see fake shadows casted on the wall and one who doesn't inspect their reality any further. The ones who are capable of escaping the cave, most likely representing philosophers, soon learn of the painful but rewarding process of discovering the truth. To clarify, the 'pain' inflicted on the escaped prisoners in this scenario is on their eyes, "overwhelmed by the sun's beams" (Plato 242). In addition to this clarification, the 'rewarding' aspect of finding the truth is realizing the truth unlike the others, as he would then "feel happy about his own altered circumstances, and [feel] sorry for them" (Plato 243). Overall, in this allegory, Plato is stating that our epistemic states are ones in which we are slaves to falsehoods - or in other words, although we may think that we know everything from just our sight, in reality we truly know nothing. Plato then goes on to say that this will be the case until we are able to reach the "intelligible realm" (Plato 244). However, Plato is rather vague upon discussing exactly how to get to this realm like the escaped prisoners did in the allegory. In fact, he also states that "only God knows if [the intelligible realm] is actually true" (Plato 244). So, is Plato correct? I will make the claim that this allegory does shed some light (no pun intended) on what we actually know (which is nothing) and on the difficulties of finding the actual truth. Yet, I'm hesitant to say that I agree with him 100% on his ideas of successfully finding the truth (or reaching the 'intelligible realm' as he puts it). Specifically, I don't believe that anyone will ever have the chance to find 'the truth'. For example, if Plato is making the claim that reaching the intelligible realm is possible, who's to say that the 'intelligible realm' that one finds is actually the real 'intelligible realm'? In the allegory for instance, if the prisoners were wrong about the shadows in the cave, it is just as possible for the artefacts on the outside of the cave to be another big illusion (which the escaped prisoners have yet to figure out).
ReplyDeleteWhile Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is perhaps one of the most famous philosophical thought experiments of all time, it is also incredibly subjective, as it is able to take on a variety of different meanings based on one’s point of view. In its simplest explanation, the cave represents the journey to true knowledge by portraying one prisoner’s escape of the false world they are being held in. At first, he is chained to the walls of the cave, seeing nothing “except the shadows cast by the fire [behind them] onto the cave wall directly opposite them” (Plato 515a). But eventually, he is set free, able to turn back and “look towards the firelight,” only to be sent into sensory overload by this new brightness he is being subjected to (515c). Eventually, he escapes the cave and sees another, even more intense sight, the sun, which causes him “pain and distress,” but he eventually is able to make out the figures in the real world, reaching a new stage in his knowledge (516a).
ReplyDeleteThis symbolic (and literal) climb represents in its most basic form the stages of knowledge, from false belief to true understanding. But to me, the Cave represents a more frightening view of the world, one which is incredibly haunting if considered true. Considering the state of mind of the prisoners chained to the wall, we can easily draw the conclusion that they have no idea at this point that the lives they lead are not truly reality. They live in a world of false beliefs, but also a world of denial, not willing to accept anything other than the world they’ve known all their life: The Cave. Plato argues that if one returns to the cave, after having been been made aware of the truth and after seeing the real reality, they would be welcomed with violence, and the prisoners would say that “he’d come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn’t even worth trying to go up there” (517a).
Drawing the comparison between this and our human experience, there have been hundreds upon hundreds of experiences in which one person has warned the masses that change must be made, only to go ignored and unheard, drowned out by the desire of blissful ignorance. Obviously we can look back and see how wrong we were about various things such as slavery and civil disparities, but what is terrifying to me is what happens when we subject ourselves today to the Cave. What if we are chained to a cave wall, stuck in the world we are so used to, and unaware that there is something beyond us? Are we so incredibly wrong that we don’t even know it? Is there a way to be freed? And how would we know if we were, as we have never seen the likes of any outward reality?
Plato’s answer is as frightening as the question: We can be freed, but it won’t be easy. One person can try to make the change, but there’s no promise that he or she will succeed. All we can do, as potential prisoners to our contemporary caves, is keep an open mind and be willing to hear out those who have seen the other side, and to be ready to accept our freedom from our Cave.
Plato’s allegory of the cave is an intriguing solution to the human epistemic state. Claiming that all that we know is an illusion, the first part of the line that is mentioned just a few paragraphs back, generates the claim that few, if any, of us would even progress to the second part of the line in just knowing the real world around us. And according to the allegory if the escaped people are able to reach the entrance and adjust to the world with the sun they have approached the third part of the line and can also begin to figure out the forth. And yet this knowledge is worthless to any other person in the cave since they cannot interpret what the escapee talks about since it is so advanced. But a question that is raised is whether or not we even can escape? In the example the chains are spontaneously broken. How can this happen in the real world, though? How is this one individual determined and how does his chain break? If this can’t be determined, then we can say that all of humanity is chained in the cave and we will never be able to escape. This means that all we think we know is merely and illusion and is our interpretation of everything from a single perspective, or multiple fake ones. But then does this mean that the cave itself is an illusion as well? Then it cannot be correct and as such Plato’s idea of the cave is false. And then the cyclical pattern begins with no end in sight. So let us see if the cave is correct or if it is wrong. Both answers are interesting. If it is correct then we get infinity, and if it is wrong we are back at square one, effectively zero. Since neither of these options are all that great, I’ll take the more interesting choice of infinity and as such Plato’s interpretation of humans searching for knowledge is correct.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Plato’s cave analogy, the ordinary person is living in a state of false reality. Everything they believe is only a portion of the truth. The cave is sheltering them from experiencing truth and goodness. For example, Plato also compares the sun to innate goodness and wisdom. The sun is outside the cave, and the light of the sun, which enlightens those who are touched by it with wisdom and goodness is not touching the people in the cave. Instead, they have an artificial goodness, a false sun, which is the fire. This artificial wisdom cannot grant them a full knowledge of the things that they are seeing, which is why they only see the shadows and are left to make up the rest. This is a big problem for mankind because it means that many ordinary people only have a part of the truth of the world, and so are not experiencing the world to their full epistemic potential. However, since they don’t know this, they think that their reality is the whole reality, and they stop searching for the rest of the truth. This is the difference between a philosopher and anyone else, is that only the philosopher will have the wisdom required to realize that they don’t know everything, and that they need to always be searching for more truth. Unfortunately, until the non-philosophers learn to accept the deeper parts of life and really embrace the wisdom and truth at the same level as a philosopher, they cannot progress or gain any more pleasure in life. This is the only way to escape from “the cave.” One must never treat any one thing as the whole truth without any flaws. Everything, even the most sure things in life, must be questioned, challenged, and proved past the counterarguments. Without this, we revert to blind acceptance, which is the same place that we started, chained to a wall and looking at shadows of our potential. Plato is most certainly on the right track. His argument effectively draws attention to the worsening human condition, and it can be used to help us get back on the track of learning and gaining wisdom.
ReplyDeleteSince the previous commenters have already described the words of Plato's allegory of the cave and due to the fact that the reader(s) is/are quite familiar with the story, I will spare him/them from my own retelling and turn immediately to my interpretation of the tale.
ReplyDeletePlato is claiming that most people—and thus the average, ordinary person—live out their lives in a metaphysical cave of falsehoods and illusions. All that they know stems from their peers (who have no more actual knowledge than they do) and from the ideas given to them by those who are more powerful than they are. These more-powerful figures may be interpreted to be the government, the Media, big business or any other similarly-ubiquitous organization. The only way for one to escape from this intellectual cave is to think "outside the box": to think so far beyond the ideas that are "spoon-fed" into one's head that the artificial reality is seen to be incompatible with what is actually true and thus collapses unto itself in the mind of that single person.
Naturally, crossing the barrier between falsehood and understanding is a very problematic endeavor, especially the first time it is done. While in Plato's story the lucky prisoner just somehow manages to get free, almost as if by accident, there are no physical shackles on anyone's mind. In the story, the shackles present an obvious barrier between the prisoners and freedom. The prisoners know that they are not free to move; what they do not know is that they are being deprived of truth and knowledge as well as of movement. In the real world, the most effective barrier between ignorance and knowledge is the ignorance itself: most people are simply not aware that there is more to know about the world (according to Plato). This has little to do with educational barriers: most do know, for example, that spending more years in college will grant them more factual knowledge. The crucial point is that people are unaware that this extra education would provide them with a different understanding of the workings of the world on a deeper level than that of factual knowledge. As a famous variant of Donald Rumsfeld quote states, "we don’t know what we don’t know". Therefore, before breaking out of the "cave", it is first necessary to realize that one is inside a cave. Furthermore, it is necessary to conceive of the type of knowledge that is found outside before even beginning to attempt to get there. A person might not consciously realize that they are thinking in the direction of something outside the cave when they have a sudden revelation, but a thought process of some sort does need to be going on for this to happen. No discovery of something completely intangible was ever made completely by accident. This is precisely the point that makes the initial exit from the cave so problematic: if the cave is properly designed, those who are inside will have absolutely no contact with any ideas that oppose their worldview. Thus, they will have no basis upon which to think outside the cave, and will keep living inside, thinking that they experience all there is to the world.
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ReplyDeleteAssuming that the cave is designed so that no outside information can get in, the only way to come out of it is to observe inconsistencies within its framework (just like the main characters of perhaps the two most-famous movies on this topic, The Matrix and The Truman Show, did). The more intricate and planned-out the cave is, the harder it is to observe its flaws from within it, and the greater intellectual ability one is required to have to do so. Therefore, sharper-minded people have a greater chance of realizing that they are in a cave and subsequently escaping from it. Plato, conveniently for himself, draws the line of intellectual ability between philosophers and everyone else, thereby claiming that those in his own profession are the only ones who may hope to come out of the cave. Leading up to this point I see no flaw in his reasoning; this point itself, however, leads to a rather unpleasant conclusion that Plato himself seems to have brushed under the rug inside a larger cave, omitting it from his Republic.
The conclusion is quite simple, and yet reasonably profound and important. It is this: if philosophers have the intellect to come out of the cave described by Plato and see the truth-bearing sun (242), how can they tell that the sun is not just another fire, but bigger, brighter and up in the sky instead of on the ground? They cannot. Plato assumes that there is only one cave, and one universal truth, and that by crossing a single boundary one may see all that the world has to offer. Just as the generalizations made by Plato's Socrates in his arguments seem overconfident and often inaccurate to modern readers, his idea of a single cave also seems presumptuous. It appears far more likely that there is a long series of metaphysical caves, each more complex than the previous, and that people who have groundbreaking revelations merely move up by perhaps a single level in the journey to understanding any sort of universal Truth, assuming that there even is one (this particular ambiguity is outside the scope of this post, fortunately for the reader). It is simply preposterous to suggest that a single person or group of people could be able to, independently from the outside world, arrive at any sort of correct understanding of the workings of the entire universe. It is only slightly less-preposterous to suggest that the human species acting together can theoretically arrive at such an understanding, far into the future. Rather than trying to escape from The Cave, a better approach would be to figure out how many caves one has already broken out of through the combined effort of all of humanity, and, assuming that there is an exceedingly large number of ever-more-complex caves enclosing one's existence, to put all of one's effort into slowly moving up the ladder of knowledge while hoping that one's distant descendants may eventually arrive at its top.
In my opinion, Plato’s allegory of the cave symbolizes human knowledge and the effects it has on someone when they have been enlightened. To an ordinary person, the reality that one lives in is the deepest that you could ever go. In addition, unless knowledge is forced upon someone, there is no possible way to understand a reality without experiencing it firsthand. For example the people in the allegory in the cave who are chained and forced to look upon the shadows have no desires to break free from their imprisonment for it is all they have known and will go on to live happily in their circumstances. However for the one who has been enlightened and dragged out of the cave into sunlight, going back and watching the shadows would be impossible. This example draws out a conclusion about the human’s quest for knowledge. First, regarding the people watching the shadows, there is no hope that they could be enlightened without being forcibly dragged out into the light of the sun. This is because it would be impossible to go from believing in one reality to fabricating a completely new one. Even if this was possible, and an outsider told them of the reality, I believe that the chained people wouldn’t be accepting enough to change their beliefs as shown by the shunning of the freedman in the allegory. This metaphor accurately represents the human race as well. Say for example that we did in fact live in a reality was as fake as the cave and the real reality was as grandiose as walking out into the sun for the first time. Although we may be able to make advancements in the knowledge of our own reality, our search for ‘reality’ is as fruitless the cave dwellers attempt at imagining the sun. We will be unable to fabricate a new reality without being able to experience it. For this reason, I believe that Plato’s allegory of the cave is the correct way to view the human quest for knowledge, portraying it as impossible to discover on our own.
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ReplyDeleteI talked about my theory in class. The idea that the people within the cave "are like us" gives me the idea of a comparison in the 21st century. The parts within the cave can be made to compare the political structure of the American government. To start off, the people within the cave show a variety of social classes. First, the people who are chained and forced to stare at shadows are people who are influenced by the upper class or other controlling powers. They are forced to accept what is there because they do not know anything else and have no knowledge of what else to believe. There is also a chance that these people who are chained to the wall willingly accept this knowledge. They are scared of what else may be out there and are happy to be fed information no matter truth or false. These "prisoners" rather be simple than overwhelmed. Secondly, the people who are displaying the shadows onto the wall are the people of the upper class who willingly manipulate the middle and lower class. They understand the deception of the shadows and knowingly influence the chained people's knowledge of the world. On the other hand, these people who display the shadows may also believe within the objects(or knowledge) that is displayed. They may be afraid themselves to leave the cave, but they have more freedom and knowledge than that of the chained people. To add onto that, the prisoners who were able to escape have a important significance as well. These are the people of possibly all classes that have denied the "knowledge" that was forced on to them and were able to think "what else is out there?" They escape and leave the cave and are revealed to the real world which contains much more knowledge than is displayed on the wall. This scenario, according to Plato, mirrors our world. I feel this may be true. Politics and the news influence our everyday thinking and opinions. The upper class and influential people in politics have a lot of power. To sum up my view of Plato's cave, I think it very much reflects our situation in the 21st century. It is alarming to think that Plato can create a scenario in his time that can still reflect a time centuries after his.
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