My Old Blog

I met an Oxford philosophy major in Morocco in 2000. We were in Chechauaouene in the mountains, walking around trying to clear our head of Tangiers. I have some pictures of that actually. If I get up the motivation, I’ll post them.

I was mostly out of my “thinking” phase by then and all the happier for it….but, as I’ve said before, I attract anyone interested in philosophy, psychology, or literature….so I usually indulge them until they get frustrated with me for not participating in poking holes in everything.

I explained to him a little of what in the intervening years became the way I see the world….a carefully crafted, incredibly flexible filter of self “suggestion” that curves reality to make up for my genetic predisposition to deconstruct everything and everyone until they become ridiculous, stupid, and useless.

He was interested….if only because, even by then, the web of my worldview had become so nearly airtight as to be amusing and simple…..even if I admittedly used some circular logic. But everything is reduced to belief at some point……even something as absolute as geometry…even if you call them axioms or postulates instead of dogma or commandments.

Remember “proofs” in geometry….where you used other rules to validate new ones? There were a few that couldn’t be “proofed”….they just had to be taken for granted…..like “Two parallel lines never meet” or “between two points there exists one straight line”.

For the mathetmaticians out there, forgive my butchering of Euclid’s Postulates. The point is that everything of consequence is eventually reduced to some kind of belief or non-provable assumption. Call it science…or call it religion….they are all based on something unreducible. Science just tends to be based on things much more unreducible, while we’ve reduced many of the assumptions religion started with.

So…as he got closer to my unreducible assumptions, he told me the story of Plato’s Cave.

In the story (which I suggest you read if you have time), there are a group of people immobile, who cannot turn their heads. They stare at a cave wall all day and that is all they have ever known. Behind them is a raised platform where puppeteers carry objects across for the prisoners to see and behind that is a fire that casts shadows of the objects on the cave wall. The prisoners, having nothing else to do, name and talk about the objects they see.

One prisoner escapes, and turns around. He is blinded by the fire, and eventually gets of out of the cave and is blinded again by the sun. He is confused and does not understand his new surroundings.

Immediately he thinks of the others who are still in the cave. Should he go back and “free” them?

That was the question asked to me: Would you want to be free, or would you prefer to stay in the cave?

I think most people would chose “freedom”….but I think it is not so clear cut. What were the conditions outside the cave? Did it rain all the time? Was it cold? Was food hard to come by?

Let’s keep in mind that the “prisoners” in the cave did not know they were prisoners. Plato never said they were unhappy or mistreated. They simply knew only a life of shadows on a cave wall.

That didn’t mean that their lives were not rich in their own way. They could have felt love with the other voices they heard…shared things in common with others in the way they described the shadows. Perhaps one was a good singer, and entertained the others with his/her beautiful voice.

So let’s draw the extreme scenario…that the cave was warm and the shadow shapes were varied and beautiful….that the other “prisoners” were friendly and a life looking into shadows was rich in its own way…….outside the cave was dark, and it was a struggle to even survive. There was no comradery like in the cave. The cave is the truth to those who live there.

If the escapee goes back and releases the other cave dwellers, he has not freed them…..now they simply all have to participate in a different game, one not as beautiful and more difficult than the cave shapes. Outside the cave becomes the new prison.

You are never truly freed. You can never escape from yourself. My guess is that those who were happy with the cave shapes will find ways to be happy outside the cave. Those that hated the shapes, will also hate the fire and the sun when they see it.

In 2000 I think I would’ve chosen the cave….at least theorectically, although I do realize that someone was asking me that question high in the Atlas mountians in Northern Africa….I wasn’t exactly a cave dweller I guess. Now I think I would answer, “What difference does it make?” Cave or no cave, “free” or not “free”….you make your own prison, and it will follow you wherever you go if that is your choice.

Which one would you choose? Cave or no cave?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Stories/Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.