- Next then, I said… Picture people as
dwelling in a cavernous underground chamber, with the entrance opening upward
to the light, and a long passage-way running down the whole length of the cave.
They have been there since childhood, legs and necks fettered so they cannot move:
they see only what is in front of them, unable to turn their heads because of
the bonds.
- A strange image, he said, and strange
prisoners.
- Like ourselves, I replied.
Plato,
The Republic, 514A
In plato’s cave, nobody sees what’s really
happening. They think they do, but they don’t. Plato says we are like the cave
dwellers. We think we see the Truth, but we don’t. The difference is that we
can see the Truth is we know how. Plato knew how and wanted to show us. But
Plato also knew that we – or at least most of us – are either incapable of or
uninterested in coming to grips with the Truth. Philosophers have the way and
the will, but the rest of humanity doesn’t. we are quite happy living in our
pleasant illusions, far removed from the Truth. This is why we build the
imaginary worlds – dramas – that Plato found so disturbing. For what are
storytelling, literature, and theater but attempts to escape from reality into
some fantasy? The storytellers, writers, and thespians all say we can learn
something about ourselves from their productions. But what do we learn, really,
if all that is depicted is fiction? Fiction cannot be the Truth, for it is the
opposite of the Truth. And even those productions that claim to be something
other than fiction – histories and the like – aren’t they simply poor
reflections of a reality that is gone and cannot be revisited, and therefore
really fictions themselves?
Perhaps they are, and perhaps they aren’t.
In any case, Plato was on firm ground in asserting that we naturally see the
comfort of illusions.
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