Ok I’m new here so what better way to start off a new topic than to do it with my favorite philosopher.
I’m sure most of you have heard of the famous “Simile of the Cave” theory given by Plato in the infamous “The Republic” book.
My question is how many of you think this way and why?
Does he mean we should’nt believe what we see or make our own reality BY the things we see?
here is a thread that touches on the subject. A poster named Nick_A also used to post on the Cave allegory a great deal.
Here is what I had to say on the topic of our perceived reality vs. what actually is:
My sense of reality has become slightly more nuanced since then and I take this stance:
So, what while we might only see shadows, we use those shadows to create a fully fleshed-out and consistent universe. The chains are only there if we think of them as such.
At a human level, the sun is the ultimate source of useful, productive energy. Deeper still, the sun illuminates…
The philosophical question is always about shadows: the profound density of the indiscernible, the abyssal heights and cataclysmic depths of the undecidable…
Against a transcendent lumination, we ought to return to the worldly and rapturous power of light, especially when it causes shadows to contract to a minimum, that is–at noon.
I guess this is a Nietzschean question, really. In fact, Alenka Zupancic touches on roughly similar ground in “The Shortest Shadow,” which tries to argue Nietzsche’s philosophy of “forces” is metapsychologistic–i.e., it is metaphysically nondualistic, yet always about art and power (the ‘two’)…
It means we have no choice but to make of reality what we see of it. The trick to seeing the bigger picture is to get outside the cave where you have a new perspective, i.e. objective to objectivity itself.
I think what Plato emphasizes is what’s outside the cave rather than what the prisoners see in the cave. In any case, the cave is always real. We shouldn’t doubt it just because there’s more out there than what we see.
Again, the theory of forms which plato touched on is explained in great detail in psychology. Please read on ‘Cognitive construct’
There is no philosophical connection why we can see forms of things, and the fact we can construct a form in our head does not mean form exist independent of the mind. Plato thought form must be something perfect by which all others are compared to. but form is really the simplest presentation of a physical fact. the salient feature is the form.
In reality, the phenomenon of the ‘form’ is really a psychological issue.
While I like the idea of the Cave allegory and a lot of the ideas in it, I find that most of Plato’s stories are poor argument. In Plato, Socrates invents a piece of fiction and uses the behaviour of his fictional characters as “proof” of his point.
Like his “ring” story, where an invisibility ring is found and people use it immorally, “proof” that people will do immoral things when not watched.
Some people would call this manufacturing evidence.
I like the Cave story, but I don’t think it proves anything much. It merely speculates a fanciful idea about skepticism and how this world might not be real. Nice idea, but little to support it.
It’s not a “proof” so much as a demonstration; and it is supported by modern studies in the philosophy of linguistics and the nature of social reality. Plato went to the East in his youth, where he was exposed to Vedism. The Cave analogy is, I believe, an attempt to bring Vedic mystic’s idea of Self into a framework where Greeks could more readily understand it.
The problem with Platonism is that it denies the reality of the only world we know, the world or becoming and contradiction, and creates a yearning for some intangible ‘true world’ or pure being.
In the end, such an attitude can only lead to a nihilistic attitude, in which reality of the existential senses is denied, and some unknowable, intangible reality is posited in its place. In that the only life that we experience happens in this so-called cave, the existential fact is that in this life it is the "true"world of forms outside of our experience that can be know more than illusion for us.
What if the transitoriness of the world that we know, the world of becoming, is actually jusrt as real as it feels? After all, experience would teach us that the shadows outside the cave are more the stuff of our imagination than they are relevant to the world which gives us sustenance.