Everything is dark, but you hear the sound of chains. A dim light begins to illuminate the room. There are some people on your side and you are all incapacitated from any movement other than just staring at a wall.
But everyone there was born in this place and knows no other kind of life. All you know about the world is what you see reflected on this wall. You are inside a cave in which all the light comes from a fire that projects images of certain objects onto the wall, almost in the same way as a light projector projects a movie in the cinema.
When you see what you think is a rabbit, you're actually seeing just the shadow of something that imitates a rabbit. Even the sounds are fake, they're noises imitated by other people you don't know. can see.
And yes, that's a very strange hypothetical scenario. Nobody among you knows or even wonders whether this is reality or not. The shadows are enough for most people, who are trapped in a point of view on the world.
Until one day someone pulls you out and you see the fire directly and realize that the shadows are actually just a part of objects you never had access to. Then they pull you further out of the cave. At this point you become very uncomfortable.
The brightness makes you dizzy. You can't even see straight. Everything is absurdly different from what you knew.
Your eyes hurt and you can only look at things indirectly, by reflection in the water. Until you get used to the light and start looking directly at the objects in the world outside the cave, which are illuminated by the sun. When night comes and you can look at the sky and the stars without going blind, you look forward to the sunrise.
At first it's very difficult, but after a bit of practice you manage to look straight ahead at the sun, which illuminates everything around you. This scenario I've just described is the first part of Plato's cave myth, presented in book 7 of his best-known work, The Republic. In the myth of the cave, the shadows represent the sensible world, which would be the physical world, of appearances, while the world outside the cave is the intelligible world, which is the world of ideas.
Okay, but what does that mean? To understand the myth of the cave, we have to understand how Plato saw the world. But first, and I promise this will be quick, how about I get some other kinds of knowledge?
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Plato divided reality into two worlds. At the lowest level we would have the sensible world, which is inhabited by material objects imperfect and immutable, which are things as we know them, like trees, cars, animals, people, books. We access this world quite easily through our perception and our senses.
We don't even have to make an effort, because this world is the reality we've known since we were born, just like the shadows in the cave. At the highest level we would have the intelligible world, inhabited by mathematical objects and even more perfect than them for the ideas and true forms of all things. And these forms would be the perfect and ideal objects.
For example, in the world we can find several instances of chairs with different shapes, textures, sizes and other variable properties of matter. But we don't find the idea of a chair around here. And the idea of a chair would be what makes a chair a chair, that is, its essence which can only be found in the world of ideas.
The sensible world only provides us with copies of forms and ideas, that is, imperfect realities and unstable. In the case of the cave it's even worse, because the shadow of a chair would be the copy of the object which itself is a copy of the idea of the chair. In other words, the shadow would be a copy of the copy, as well as paintings and movies.
And this, for Plato, would mean a greater distance from the intelligible world, in other words, less real and less perfect. But the intelligible world is difficult to access. We don't see mathematical objects like triangles or the number two walking around in our physical world.
What do you expect? And we don't see ideas or the shape of things either. We can only access these types of objects through abstraction, through a process of reflection and contemplation of our own ideas.
And this can often be painful. Whether it's because we have difficulty understanding these objects, or because we come to conclusions that contradict our current beliefs about the world. And that's why there's suffering when you leave the cave.
The objects of the world represent the different types of knowledge. Some of them we won't be able to access directly, hence the reflection in the water. But after a while, we even manage to look at the sun, which would represent the ultimate knowledge, which Plato calls good, while light would be truth and the ability to see and our ability to know.
And now we come to the second part of the cave myth. You're free. But that's not all.
You're not alone in the world. The people who have always been by your side are still slaves to illusions. They're still in the cave seeing shadows on the wall.
Knowledge must be shared, and it's your duty to go back to the cave and tell the truth to other people. But that's not an easy task. Your eyes are already used to the light.
Then you go blind again when you enter the darkness of the cave again. And people realize that you're having trouble seeing their world. You then say that the shadows are an illusion and that they are merely the projection of objects.
And as if that weren't enough, that these objects are just replicas and imperfect copies of a much higher reality. People who are condemned to looking at the world from only one perspective and taking shadows as absolute and unquestionable truths are naturally angry with you. The suffering you went through when you were freed from the cave is very uncomfortable, you know that.
But the people who are still in the cave see you as a madman or even as a threat to the order of things, bringing insecurity to the most fundamental aspect of their lives. Questioning the only reality that the prisoners know could even be fatal, which was exactly what happened to Socrates, who in an act of injustice was sentenced to death and the accusation was that of corrupting the youth. One of Plato's aims in this whole story is to show that people are trapped in points of view about the world, that they sort of accept without question the show of shadows that have been offered to them since they were born.
But for him there is a way out, philosophy, which is precisely the activity of thinking about thinking and expanding our capacity to know and perceive the world, to question and have enough clarity and courage to face the pain and shock that awaits us when we seek knowledge. Today we have many and varied caves, some of which we even choose to enter. Life doesn't always make sense and instinctively we look for explanations, we look for meanings and we also seek to fill the void of what we don't understand.
But it's not as if there's a lack of explanations, in fact, there's an abundance of explanations. They are sold en masse. We have a thousand and one meanings of life packaged in beautiful, ready-made packages.
Many are consumed by the people around us and even ourselves. But who should give it meaning? Your life, if not yourself.
Thank you very much and see you next time.
