Reflections On the Cave

As befits a bear, I often think about the cave. Not so much the cave in which I reside as much as Plato's. Now I really enjoy the image of Plato and Socrates hanging out in their man cave, drinking some beer, possibly with some yet to be named herb (Pliny wasn't born for another 500 years...) providing some sublime aromatic characteristics. While hanging out, staring at the wall of this cave, watching the flickering shadows, they might begin discussing the nature of these shadows. Now these guys weren't the sort to just accept that a shadow is a shadow. They'd want to know where it came from, and why. Being two Greek dudes living in roughly 400 BCE, they did not have a great idea as to the origins of these things. That didn't mean they didn't have their theories, and even if they didn't have the means to measure the world around them, they could measure their own perceptions. Now that they had a couple drinks to wind themselves down, and had started considering their shadows, they might have begun to wonder how these shadows might compare to the objects they would see in their everyday lives. What was the difference between the real things they saw and the shadows? What would the shadows mean to someone who spent their entire life in a cave, seeing nothing but the shadows of passers by, muddled the light of a setting sun or a dying fire? What if that which they saw clearly in their own lives was nothing more than the shadow of a truer reality, seen through the smoky filter of their own eyes, illuminated by the fires of their own preconceived notions, waning and waxing with the tides of their own emotion? Out of the incoherency of their own discussion, a concept arose; a concept of reality as something not quite real, a muddled picture of a clearer universe, seen like the shadows on a wall by a prisoner chained to the floor of a cave, able only to see that which was illuminated by a fire behind him. These shadows would be the width and breadth of his existence, knowing nothing more, he would know he had no limitations. What would separate us from this prisoner? We cannot conceive of something we've never experienced, as the prisone could not conceive of anything outside the cave.

I'm no philosopher, and this is no treatise on Platonic solids. But this is something I think everyone should consider. Just because you can observe reality, does not necessarily mean that it is crystal clear. Keep in mind that you are looking through a mirror that is clouded with a lifetime of expectations, flawed by your own imperfect biology. The next time you damn another's ideology consider that they may be seeing the same world that you are, and are conveying it as honestly as you do, but are simply viewing it from another angle, through their own filter. So do not be so sure that you are right and they are wrong. It may not be so black and white.

Also if this is all getting s little too involved for you, maybe you should grab a friend and a beer, head outside, and watch your shadow by the fireside until it makes sense. And if you've never read The Allegory of the Cave, do so. Here's a nice picture.