plato's cave: cultural consumption? by Greg Freed

Recently I fell into depression. I stagnated spiritually, socially, professionally, and physically. I gained weight. I lost my reason to interact with the outside world. I cut off my friends and family, and I alienated my lover. Worst of all, I stopped reading, and I packed my mind so full of distractions that I couldn’t think. I purposefully and willfully silenced my mind.

What did this silence consist of? Cultural consumption. I started watching television, a thing that I’ve only been known to do in the low points of my life. I got deeply involved in video games, a lifestyle that I hadn’t participated in since I was an angry teenager who blamed his parents for all the problems in his world. Every minute I wasn’t connected to either of those networks, I listened to music. So much noise, so much glitz.

Further, work made me angry, the everyday grind. The stagnation of my relationship infuriated me especially because it wasn’t either of our faults, or maybe it was both, or maybe it was her or mine. It doesn’t seem to me like it was either of our faults. Anger worked like friction on my thoughts, and as my mind slowed down, I stopped sleeping. I enjoyed thirty-six hour days. I was so busy learning leetspeak and perfecting game reflexes and resenting my girlfriend and loathing the American workplace that my mind just shut down.

Now I’m out of that particular prison, and I realize that I put on worse weight than belly fat. My mind became laden with cultural references and lethargic. Getting my mind back in gear has proven to be the worst struggle of reclaiming my self; I can carry boxes, hire trucks, end relationships, recontact lost friends, find new work. Yet I can only clear the years of rust off my mind, wash the dust off, and pray that the damn thing still works.

g.f.

We are a visual people. We see a steep ascent before us, and our legs quake at the sight. Our imaginations begin to churn, wondering just how much our legs will burn, just how much trembling we’ll do at the end of the day. We even contemplate how sore we’ll be the next day, all this based on the very real image of a climb before us.

We are also an abstract people. We cling to allegories as the blood of life, the leaven of lessons. All of the greats we hearken back to, whether Jewish prophets or Christian Christ or Muslim Mohammed or even people of respect outside the Abrahamic tradition, such as Buddha and the Dalai Lama and even Socrates, spoke in allegories. We listen and we analyze, or we listen to the teacher’s own analysis and analyze that.

Because of this dual visual quality, the mind’s eye sees and recognizes the dilemmas of allegories as easily as the bodily eye grasps the difficulty of ascents. How fitting, then, that when we begin to consider the philosophy of education, the first argument we run into is an allegory of ascent: Plato’s cave.

Let us leave for a moment the more devious and therefore more discussed qualities of the cave—the bondage, the shadows, the puppeteers—and consider instead the discussion of ascent.

Socrates has his freed prisoner dragged up a steep ascent into the light of the sun by a teacher against his will. Why?

Education is a difficult ascent, and without a teacher a person would be disinclined to climb. In addition to being visual and abstract, we are also a self-interested people, and what good can come from climbing out of a cave when all you’ve known your whole life is the cave?

The will to leave is not always an open choice, and the teacher in the allusion is not always an other. When enough proof stands up against a logical structure saying, “We cannot be explained,” leaving the cave becomes necessary though the choice was not made by the seeker. Simply put, the seeker stumbled over the weakness of his own paradigm and, once recovered, found himself in a new cave.

But all paradigm shifts share these symptoms, cause the seeker to stumble from one set of first principles to another without generating much upward movement if any at all. Logical structures are nothing more than approximations of how the world works, each separated from the truth by a degree of error reversely proportionate to the accuracy of the measurement methods, which implies in itself that as long as measurement methods exist, so will a degree of error. Insofar as each paradigm has inclusive error, they are a cave that traps the mind from grasping a more true and more infinite answer.

Which leads us to discussing what I mean by the seeker “stumbling” from cave to cave. Socrates described one cave regarding the Greek or even Athenian lifestyle, a paradigm for how one ought to live one’s life, but the cave he noticed existed as just one cavern in a system of caves. Every ethical paradigm is itself a cave from which a seeker needs to abstract in order to escape, abstract as opposed to setting another set of first principles. Yet in my short life, stumbling from paradigm to paradigm is the only upwards action I’ve seen people take.

The implication that a paradigm shift is an upward action assumes that by shifting paradigms, the seeker comes closer to approximating truth. Some may consider this assumption generous since sometimes stumbling is just as reckless as the word intends; a seeker can fall into Christianity, Buddhism, and then emotivism in very quick succession without very much hassle, since on the surface so many tenets of each structure line up closely. Consider a person drawn into Christianity because of a desire to perform charity, and when that passion burns out the seeker falls into Buddhism and claims that any desire—including the desires fed by charity—leads to despair, and then when despair finally becomes too much to take on alone the seeker turns to emotivism and claims that neither goodness nor despair exist accept as relative values and thereby have no philosophic truth. Who can say how close this hypothetical person may be to escaping the prison of paradigms? Certainly, though, the story is not far from the truth of at least several lives.

But that description exactly represents philosophic stumbling, in which so many of us participate. Groping around in the darkness of our network of caves, we’re too busy wondering if we’ll rudely run into a wall to also check that our feet aren’t tripping over stalagmites. A guide would be very helpful in navigating philosophic structures, especially if that guide knew the cave so well as to know where all the stumbling blocks sat.

The closest parallel I see in today’s world to Socrates’ reference to an instructor is a guru, an Eastern teacher who promises to lead you to enlightenment. I have never studied with a yogi or a guru, so I will leave that matter to Elizabeth Gilbert, who has covered the matter quite nicely.

Teachers from Western society could never offer the strength and tenacity to challenge a pupil as Socrates indicates is necessary in his allegory. First of all, teachers are sophists. That is not to say that they are greedy, for teachers receive a meager salary, but rather that they require payment for their services, which in itself compromises their ability to uplift. A teacher has a job to perform, which is to gorge students, filling up their eager bellies with brute memorization of proofs that would be better taught by logical explanation of the theorems that prove the proofs. After all, a teacher is the first bastion of paradigmatic thought and should promote first principles, since paradigms are by definition logical. However, broaching first principles might identify too early in a student’s career that logical structures are vulnerable to attack, and our educational system does push indoctrination over abstraction.

Because teachers are by role functions rather than humans, their ability to love is always hindered by the role they are paid for and expected to perform. Besides, their job of shepherding students into the Western tradition is hard enough without asking them to lead a large group of ornery sheep into the abstract abyss of philosophic doubt. Beyond that, a full recognition of philosophic doubt is not a requirement for teaching certification; if anything, it is a hindrance in getting the job since it would require a teacher to question the values of the pedagogy.

But teachers are not the only pedestals of paradigmatic gluttony. We consume all sorts of media today, engorging ourselves with artistic calories that we will never put to good use. Even our overabundance of art in today’s culture is itself a sign of our creative excess rather than our mental health; we are so accustomed to over-consumption that we take pride in creating for the sake of creation just so that there is more art to consume.

It’s no small wonder that our minds, made so obese with images and having become languid through lack of use, quake at the thought of despair, shudder before the rising mouth of the cave. Were any of us to attempt to abstract beyond the borders of our own culture, we would surely fail due merely to sloth. In our scenario if we even found the mouth of the cave, we would be so ill-prepared for the undertaking and so overburdened with imagery that the chains—formed by the height of our culture—weighing us down would scarcely matter. We could barely feign to begin. Only vaguely and without actual hope could we lust after victory.

Here, those who are with me might want to cry, “But we have no guide, which makes us special in the history of humanity!” What a symptom of our time that we want so very badly to stand out despite the fact that our history tells us that our society has nothing new to offer the world but technology, a cultural force that has little to do with philosophy or philosophic doubt. Let me differentiate myself from yet more people here: Technology does not have the ability to change the nature of man; its only benefit to us in our most basic dilemma is its ability to record that the states of sadness and happiness exists en masse, replacing the belief that despair is a private possession of artists and self-realization a protected benefit of the very few very wise.

And what does lacking an apparent guide have to do with our inability to leave the cave, even assuming that a guide does make himself apparent? It is in our power to purposefully, though slowly and blindly, map out our cavernous system with our hands and ingenuity, to know it in our mind’s eye even in the sections that are too dark for our natural eyes to see. We see the walls of the cave by the fire of the puppeteers; we feel the stumbling blocks with our stubbed toes. We are not helpless without a guide.

Yet the will to map out the borders of our own cell, our American culture, is too much for some. Turning a flabby face from side to side, one might shrug, saying it’s just the same as anywhere else; that the boundaries of the American paradigm amount to the same as any other paradigm, asking what value could come from challenging a structure that in itself is no worse and might be quantifiably better than other paradigms. After all, Americans are fans of big, comfortable places to recline and take it easy; life is hard enough without inviting pointless struggle into it, and whatever paradigm we end up with next might not be either so big or so comfortable.

Others have taken up the challenge with zeal, moving into another cave and shouting back, “Ha! I can enjoy things from here that you will never enjoy there!” In a way they’re right: philosophic structures do vary in comforts as broadly as humans can have interest in objects and activities. In quite another way they are just as imprisoned by their comforts as the lazy Americans: the cave is all around and blocks the view of the sun and stars.

Learning about the cave should never allow it to subsume a seeker’s idea of home. Journeying through, or even desiring to begin the journey, starts with a realization that the cave is a prison and not a home, that the seeker is a pilgrim and separate from the culture that birthed him. A seeker should always refuse to pursue identity by means of rebellion, should always shirk the desire to claim that what has been found in the darkness is ever so much better than where the seeker started. No matter what any cave contains, it is by definition dark and damp and terrifying, and the room cannot offer pleasures to compare to pastures outside where the sun shines.

And what about our guide? No, our society does not have one to offer. We have so many marketers, so many mouthpieces of paradigms, but we have not one articulate person who has truth in mind, especially insofar as truth separates from any specific paradigm, which it must. Even prophets had to seek a guide, even Christ, even Buddha. Mohammed, the Dalai Lama. Even this article’s source; yes, even Socrates. Even Dante had to look to Virgil before he looked to God; even Aeneas had to pray and make sacrifice before Fate provided him a way through the moor.

Do not feel singular in the face of despair, for you are not alone there. Even when despair seems so large that it blots out the whole world in its shadow, you are not alone. I beg you, though: begin to exercise your mind. Remember Dante’s wood; Remember Buddha’s fasting; Remember the Jewish call to remember; Remember Mohammed’s angel; Remember Christ’s dove-like Spirit; Remember Socrates’ command from the oracle at Delphi. Do not despair when all you see is despair; it is the end of paradigms, the exit to the cave.

Climb.

Greg Freed is a regular contributor to Tant Mieux and to Cyrano. - s.r.p.