The Allegory of the Cave - Today [corrected]

‘Seeing as deeply imprinted by social ideology. Plato’s allegory of the cave is so deep, illuminating so many aspects of life. I want to adapt the allegory to my time.

 

    The allegory begins with prisoners who have lived their entire lives chained inside a cave. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. These cast shadows on the opposite wall. Plato would have used the screen for his allegory were he alive today. The prisoners watch these shadows, believing this to be their reality as they've known nothing else. These prisoners do not understand that they are prisoners. They do not understand that the shadows that they take for real are social constructs. These social constructs appear on the cave wall (the screen) only because it is in the interest of the constructors – those with the power to construct – that the prisoners internalize their particular constructs as real. If there are power conflicts among the constructors of what passes for reality, then conflicting social constructs will compete. Epistemological bubbles might form as in our cave, and echo chambers discredit any source that puts forward competing shadows. The Cave consists of the technological and ideological power to get people to uncritically take over a set of constructs, which are their invisible chains. The people who are more or less of the chains are still chained, but unhappy.

 

     The idea is that the power holders construct images of the things we experience, including deep concepts like ‘soul’, ‘self,’ ‘human nature’ ‘nature,’ ‘beauty’, ‘pleasure,’ ‘valuable’, and ‘justice.’ The constructions project all the varying particular shadow-images we perceive, and which form our minds and our ideas of things. We take these shadows of constructs for reality, mostly unaware that the shadows are formed by constructs and the constructs are projections of power and will, desire and fantasy.  Today we don’t need to image shadows on the walls of a subterranean cave – the subterranean cave wall is the screen on which we watch TV and get assimilated by social media.

 

        The way we conceive our bodies is an excellent illustration of this. I used to walk around with the feeling: ‘here am I; there is the natural world’, my environment, so to speak, that which surrounds me but which I am not a part of. A forgetting that I and my body are one, and that my body is nature pure. I have long known that our current regime, capitalism-science-technology, conceives of nature as a ‘resource’, sometimes as a pure object, sometimes as a contrary beast to be domesticated, to exploit, to rape. And our bodies are nature, and they are seen as a resource, as a pure object, as a contrary beast to be domesticated. Michel Foucault insightfully (and perhaps unintentionally) describes the body as conceived from the perspective of the constructors in the cave: 

 

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. (Foucault Reader, 1984, 83) 

 

They have studied the body in the field of historical demography or pathology; they have considered it as the seat of needs and appetites, as the locus of physiological processes and metabolisms, as a target for the attacks of germs or viruses; they have shown to what extent historical processes were involved in what might seem to be the purely biological base of existence; and what place should be given in the history of society to biological “events” such as the circulation of bacilli, or the extension of the lifespan. But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault Reader, 173)

 

      And ‘I’, who am one with my body, am an ‘I’ manufactured by the regime in which we live, capitalism-science-technology, as Wendell Berry calls it, emphasizing how inextricably intertwined the three pillars of the regime are. So this regime has conditioned my understanding of self and reality - and everyone else's who was born into it. Republicans hate democrats but both see a forest either as picturesque scenery or natural resources to exploit. We see our bodies as the constructors within capitalism-science-technology construct them and the rest of nature (not usually consciously): as objects to mine for pleasure, or for profit; as an aesthetic object designed to impress – as a French garden or an urban development project; some of us gentrify their bodies; other use them as billboards for counter-cultural advertising slogans. Some despairingly see theirs as a garbage dump; others as a nature preserve, scenery to be enjoyed by tourists. Some bodies are ok to brutalize, in shop windows in red light districts, as some landscapes are – some of us, prostitutes and factory workers, are Appalachian strip-mine bodies. Women’s bodies are always constructed by the reductive masculine gaze, which many come to make their own gaze or resist in a difficult rebellion. Pleasure can be perverse. But Reality will have its say. Our little bodily ecosystems are doomed to death and decay, one and all we are fellow travelers to the grave. The universe will outlive our fall. 

         Now it is clear: much of our ‘I’ (a concept like any other) is just as much an imprint of the shadows projected not only from the ideological constructs of capitalism-science-technology, but the very structures of daily life – obedience on the job, the idea that a man or a woman has economic value only to the extent he or she becomes a tool of another’s profit: such conceptions translate into the concrete ways we structure work and the power relations at work. And the same goes for so-called free time. This structuring, which is the translation into physical processes of idea-constructs, also forms the ‘I’ that takes over the constructs of the body, work, and so on. Not totally. Of course, imprints from our formative years in the family matter – also socially constructed, but perhaps not completely obliterating nature, reality in the form of parents loving and caring for children. But at some level the world is a cave of the mind we cannot get out of, or at least not completely. Even in rebelling against the cave we are defined by it, though negatively. It is through the sublime that we glimpse reality, if only temporarily and partially. No one lives entirely in the light.  Marxists thought they could reconstruct a society outside of the Cave. We saw where that ended up.            

        This defines the task of education for those who like myself believe there is a world outside the cave: first, to turn away from the shadows and understand the constructs and why they are made as they are, and then train the mind and heart to imagine a world in which images are not subject to the spider web in which the drive for power over nature, including human nature, dominates. Of course, even in the cave some light finds a way in. If we have known anything close to genuine love, we can’t be completely cut off from reality. We have been left treasures from those of us who have glimpsed reality outside the Cave, including Plato and his teacher Socrates. (And reality always transcends our ability to understand it, even as a great poem like the Iliad transcends our ability to make a final translation of it valid for all times and places.) Some believe that the maker of reality outside the Cave - Christ - has enlightened us, though we know how even the most sublime teachings get reduced back to the categories of Cave life.   (Think of the Cave projects for which Christ has been pressed into service. Think of how uncharitably, ungenerously most people who call themselves Christian see the world and other people. Alas!) Still, even in the darkest night we can see God’s love in the light of the stars. We must train our minds and hearts to treasure this light as well. 

 

   I will end with thoughts of Iris Murdoch, keys to getting out of the Cave:

 

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Understanding the reality is the work of love, justice and pity. Love is an attending to the individual conceived as an independent reality.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.