4 Cave

The Fourth Chapter

in which you once again ask yourself,

Where Am I?

Preparation

Required Reading: Evans, “Caves All the Way Down” (Aeon)

Recommended Reading: Miller, “The Value of Uncertainty” (Aeon)

Writing:

1. Evans describes the “mystical theory” of psychadelics. What is the mystical theory? Answer with paraphrase, not quotation.
2. An argument is a thesis supported by one or more reasons. What is Evans’ thesis? What reason(s) does he provide in support of his thesis? Paraphrase or quote briefly.
3. What is your immediate reaction to Evans’ argument? Agreement, disagreement, or something else?
4. Respond to the following question by writing at least one paragraph: “Are we really leaving Plato’s cave when we trip, or just emerging into another, bigger cave?”

Introduction

Look behind you: Normal World is long gone, my friend. You started with the question what should I do?, which is a Big Question but also a really Normal question. You ended up with why should I care?, which is a Bigger Question: an earthquake question. At first, philosophy was about coming up with better answers to questions that mattered; it was about becoming a happier person by becoming a good person, figuring out right and wrong. Now it turns out that philosophy is actually about becoming a happier person, by figuring out that there is no right and wrong, no good or bad. Philosophy just wants the truth. In Normal World, that means the truth about “what you should do.” But you go deeper, and it turns out Normal World itself is a lie, and the truth is this: being happy means getting what you want. Philosophy shows you this truth, and then philosophy trains your mind so you become smart and strong enough to act on it: smart and strong enough to get what you want, without getting caught, and without getting caught up in guilt and shame. You’re free. You can do whatever you want, if you can figure out how to get away with it.

You think this is a joke, but it’s not. This is a real live possibility. This may actually be the truth. And philosophers accept the truth, wherever it leads, no matter what other people think. A lot of people have said that philosophy is too dangerous, that people shouldn’t study it. If you think those people were afraid of nothing, that they were being melodramatic, you aren’t paying attention. Remember how Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living”? That sounds so nice, doesn’t it. Like something inspiring you post on Instagram. 

Do you know what happened to Socrates? They executed him. (That’s him right there, in the picture, about to drink the hemlock. Still talking philosophy, right up to the very end.) And it was not for telling jokes. It was not for being too “inspiring.”

At this point you’ve got two options. You can stay in Normal World, believe in normal ethics, feel happy because other people think you’re good in all the normal ways. You can use philosophy to become a better person, to think more clearly about right and wrong, to improve other people’s muddled thinking, to tackle the Big Questions. You can do philosophy, but you can also stay where you are. You’ll be making Normal World better. Fixing things up. Decorating the walls. 

Or you can walk away. You can keep going down the rabbit hole, following the Bigger Questions, until you have eliminated every inhibition, every fear, every concern for what people think of you, every feeling of guilt and shame. You can keep going until you have mastered the arts of manipulation and deceit (you think philosophers don’t know how to manipulate and deceive people?), the arts of talking and arguing (no one is better at this than a philosopher), the arts of strategy and tactics (philosophers above all others are able to perceive what is logically required to reach a goal). You can keep going until you have learned from philosophy how to be happy, by learning from philosophy how to admit what you really want and make it yours. No limits. Anything and everything you can imagine, any and every impulse.

Do you think you’ll somehow become “less human” if you let it all go? No! To deny our own impulses is to deny the very think that makes us human! 

You take the first option, the story ends. You take the second option, the story keeps going, and you see how deep the rabbit hole really goes. I’m trying to free your mind here. But I can only show you the door; you’re the one who has to walk through it. 

What’s holding you back? 

* * * 

Now: listen. Whenever someone says “you have two options,” you should immediately ask if there’s maybe a third option. Philosophers are always doing that. When they hear “you either go this way or that way,” they get suspicious, because there’s usually another way. You just have to wander around until you find it. And that’s what philosophers like to do, right? Wander around the city, get off the beaten path, go down the rabbit trails till they discover something interesting. 

Here’s something interesting. Look again at the story of the ring. The shepherd says that happiness is getting what you want, and morality is just a made-up idea that gets in the way of us getting what we want. So he thinks “what you want” is natural. Whereas “what you should do” is unnatural. Morality is artificial and fake; but desires are authentic and real. 

Is that true? 

The philosopher, wandering around the story, taking her time, slowing down her thinking, asking some questions, has suddenly uncovered the shepherd’s hidden assumption. She shepherd is assuming he was born with his desires and impulses. Maybe at some point he asked himself a Big Question: “where do my desires come from?” And he answered “they don’t ‘come from’ anywhere, they’re just me.” And then he forgot that he’d answered it, and then it turned into “common sense,” and when he found the ring that would fulfill all his desires, it never occurred to him to ask whether the desires he was fulfilling were actually his desires. 

So he thinks happiness is getting what he wants. What if what he wants isn’t what he wants, at all? He thinks morality is made up by people; what if his desires are made up, too? Would he really be “happy” if he uses the ring to get what other people made him want? 

Now, you’re going to read another section from Plato’s Republic. It’s called “The Allegory of the Cave.” It’s probably the most famous answer to the question “Where Am I?” that has ever been given. And it suggests that shepherd never actually escaped his Normal World, that he never really knew where he was, and that if you take option two — if you follow the shepherd and use philosophy to get what you want — then you’ll never escape your Normal World, either. You’ll think you’ve escaped, and that illusion will only make the walls of your prison higher; it’ll only make your chains tighter. The Allegory of the Cave tells us there’s a third option, another way that really does lead out toward truth. 

And remember, all philosophy offers is truth. Nothing more. 

Discussion

It’s like this. In the story of the ring, philosophy is about getting what you want, by getting rid of what stands in your way, which is just everything they ever told you about right and wrong. In the story of the cave, philosophy is not about learning how to get what you want: it is about learning how to want what’s actually good for you. In the story of the ring, you keep your old desires, and you get rid of the old beliefs that tell you that desiring those things is bad. In the story of the cave, you get rid of the old beliefs, but you also get rid of your old desires.

The cave story tells you the same thing as the ring story about Normal World. Both stories tell you that Normal World, with all its traditional beliefs about “what you should do,” is a lot of nonsense. It’s an illusion. But the ring story stops there. In the ring story, the truth philosophy offers you is just that there is no truth. The shepherd sees that normal morality is a sham, because it’s all based on consequences. No one actually cares about being good, they just care about getting what they want, since that’s what a consequence is: something you want, or want to avoid, a desire that gets used as a carrot or a stick to keep you line. 

The cave story says that the shepherd is right about this: normal morality is a sham. But when the shepherd concludes that since normal morality is a sham, then there’s no morality at all, that it’s all about getting “beyond good and evil” — well,  the cave story says the shepherd is wrong about that. Normal morality is a sham; but morality is not. Philosophy shakes up normal morality. But it’s not just trying to destroy things. It’s not just an earthquake. It’s also trying to discover something in the rubble. It’s trying to find real morality. It’s trying to find what’s really worth wanting: what’s worth wanting regardless of consequences. 

That’s important. The ring shows the shepherd that no one would be good if it weren’t for consequences, and that shows him that theres’ no such thing as “being good” at all. So he learns to avoid the consequences, to not feel guilty when other people want him to, to be immune to social pressure. The prisoner in the cave, the one who gets free — philosophy shows him something else. Philosophy shows him that it is possible to be good without thinking about the consequences. But that’s exactly it: he too learns to act without fear of consequences. He too learns to not feel the pressure of other people’s opinions. He too learns to be free of tradition and convention. He’s like the shepherd in that way. So what’s the difference? That’s what you have to grasp. 

Look at the story again. All the elements are important. Start with the prisoners: they are like the shepherds, going about their day, doing their thing. They’ve got their Normal opinions about what’s real, what’s true, what’s good and bad. They think it’s all real, and they’re wrapped up in it all: they think it matters. But it’s all an illusion, a fantasy: it’s a shadow of what’s real. They’re in a prison so total they don’t even know they’re in prison. That’s what keeps them there, actually: not knowing where they are. Then, one of them gets free (how? it’s not clear, is it? does someone help?). And he turns around — all of a sudden he can turn his head, look at where he is from a different angle. He’s been seeing things from the same angle for so long that the very possibility of seeing things differently never occurred to him. 

And what’s the first thing the prisoner sees when he turns his head? He sees the men behind the curtain, the shadowcasters: the puppetmasters. All those Normal ideas about what’s real, what’s true, what’s good and bad: they don’t come from nowhere. They’re made up. Other people made up the Normal opinions, and they’ve been beaming them into his brain since he was a baby. And this is an earthquake in his mind. He sees he’s been had, that he’s been a prisoner of other people’s thoughts, a slave to the images they’ve been projecting into him. He’s been a slave to them. They rule the cave; they’re the masters here, the invisible prison guards. 

Now, this is where the ring story stops. In that story, the shepherd becomes the king: the slave becomes the master. In the cave story, that would be like the prisoner becoming the puppetmaster. And that’s a temptation the prisoner must face. He turns around and sees that he’s been on the bottom of the hierarchy without knowing it. Now that he knows it, wouldn’t he burn with envy? Wouldn’t he want to be on top? He’s been manipulated all his life; wouldn’t he now want to become the manipulator? Wouldn’t he feel like it was his turn?

And so he’s got to be dragged past the temptation to the join the puppetmasters, dragged further up the road, until he gets all the way out of the cave. Because that’s the thing. Maybe you’d rather be the puppetmaster than the prisoner; maybe you’d rather be the master than the slave. But the cave story shows us that both of them are still in the cave. What does that tell you about the puppetmasters? Well, the cave is Normal World, which is the world of illusions that people confuse with reality. If the puppetmasters live in the cave, that means they’re just as trapped as the prisoners. They think they’re better than the prisoners, because they know it’s all a sham. But they’re not better. In fact, in one way they’re in worse shape. 

Because a prisoner who gets free will discover what it’s like to want freedom. When he first sees the puppetmasters, he might confuse “happiness” with what they have. But he also knows now that he’s been wrong, fundamentally wrong about “happiness”, for his whole life. So he’ll be open to the idea that he could be wrong about this, too: that maybe what the puppetmasters have isn’t real happiness, that there’s some better kind of happiness that he doesn’t want to miss out on. But a puppetmaster, who always gets what he desires (by manipulating other people’s desires), will have harder time imagining why anything could be better than the power to get what he wants. He’ll have a harder time accepting the idea that what he wants is also an illusion, a product of the cave he lives in. 

So the prisoner can be led out — although the story says he has to be dragged. That he doesn’t really want to go. And why would it? Because it’s hard: philosophy, getting free of your cave, is hard. Unimaginably hard. Maybe it’s even impossible: that’s also a live possibility. Remember, this is just a story. And philosophy just wants truth, even if the truth is that there’s no getting out of the cave. But anyway yes, assuming you can get out, it’s hard. It takes a long time, maybe a lifetime. It’s not magic. So you don’t want to do it. The prisoner wants to stay where it’s easy. I mean — wouldn’t you rather sit in a dark cozy movie theater, being entertained 24/7, than set out for the unknown, on a journey that requires you to learn very different methods of thinking, to read a lot of difficult books, to adopt an odd “posture of the mind” that can be pretty uncomfortable sometimes? And because you don’t want to do it, you have to be dragged. 

Who has to drag you? A teacher, of course. Not necessarily your philosophy teacher. Your philosophy teacher might be stuck back in the cave with all the other prisoners. Or she might be one of the puppeteers. But some kind of teacher is necessary. You can’t do it alone, and it’s not because the methods are hard and the books are difficult and the mental attitude is awkward. It’s because you don’t want to do it alone. So you need a teacher to show you what it’s like to want to do this. That’s what a real teacher does. A real teacher doesn’t stuff knowledge into your head. A real teacher shows you what it’s like to want different things, or to want things differently. What it’s like to want knowledge “for its own sake” — not for the sake of getting the carrot or avoiding the stick. 

So the prisoner gets dragged out of the cave, and what’s outside? Reality. Real morality: what’s really good, what’s really right. Not Normal Morality, that’s for sure. The things they call good inside the cave might turn out to be totally bad, and the things they call bad inside the cave might turn out to be totally good. But outside the cave, there is good and bad, true and false, beautiful and ugly. Outside the cave, there’s more than the happiness of “getting what you want.” There’s the happiness of being able to want, to truly enjoy, what’s truly good. And that’s the happiness the prisoner discovers. Just like the shepherd, he gets everything he wants — but only after he’s learn to want different things. Different both from what the prisoners want (to be entertained, to be socially approved, to win points in social games), and from what the puppeteers want (which is nothing but power). And what is it he has learned to want? 

That is harder to describe. That is what you are looking for, when you do philosophy. The story does not tell you what “the truth” is. It does not give you true morality. It says: there is truth, there is morality, and it is worth looking for. But to find it, you will indeed have to leave Normal World, leave your conventional opinions. You’ll have to be like the shepherd, but you’ll have to go further than the shepherd. You will have to question everything, and some people  will not like that. Because — well, what happens when the freed prisoner returns to the cave, and tries to tell all the others what he has found? What happens when he tries to free them?

Right: they kill him. Like they killed Socrates.

Because real philosophy is every bit as dangerous as Normal People say it is. It’s just as dangerous as the fake philosophy that the shepherd found. It’s not a magic ring that makes you king by making you a murderer. But it’s a powerful magic all it’s own. If you ask a big enough question, it can tear down Normal World. And normal people don’t like that. It feels like you’re murdering what they love. 

So that’s what you’re dealing with here, when you talk about “doing philosophy.” You’re talking about whether you can ever get out of your cave and really, finally live, and how you get out, if indeed you can.

Let’s assume it’s possible, and let’s assume you want to. Let’s assume you want to keep asking the big and bigger questions that uncover the hidden assumptions and pierce the illusions that hold you back. How do you do it? 

One thing about the cave story: it says all of us are deluded by illusions, by shadows on the wall. But different people might see different shadows. The illusions that hold one person back might be different from the illusions that hold another person back. In Part Three, you’re going to think about two different kinds of illusion. Both of them are illusions about ourselves, about who we really are. They are the shadows that hide the truth about ourselves, the truth we leave the cave to find. We’ll call the first kind “daydreams.” These are illusions that we like, pleasing illusions of superiority. We’ll call the second kind “nightmares.” These are illusions that we don’t like, distressing illusions of inferiority. The daydreams make us believe that we are better than we actually are; they nightmares make us believe that we are worse than we actually are. 

For some of us, the cave is mostly a daydream; for others, the cave is mostly a nightmare. But the point is this: daydreams and nightmares are both illusions. They’re both lies. And philosophy wants only truth: nothing more, nothing less.

In the next three chapters, you are going to explore the relationship between the daydreams and the nightmares, and between the prisoners and the puppetmasters. You are going to start by thinking about a question that takes us you into a special branch of philosophy, which is called political philosophy. Political philosophy focuses on the third kind of philosophical question, the one we focus on in this class: the ethical question what should I do? Except that when you are doing political philosophy, you are asking not so much about what you should do, as you are asking about what we should do. Instead of “what should I do with my life?” or “how should I live?”, you  are asking how should we live together? 

Reflection

1. Visualize the cave in as much detail as you can, paying careful attention to Socrates’ description. In your journal, draw a picture or map of the cave.

2. The Cave is a situation with certain features. For example; there are shadows, chains, fire, etc. Based on your reading and your drawing, make a list of these features.

3. The Cave is an allegory: each feature of the situation represents some feature of what Plato sees as our human situation. Use your list: suggest what each feature might represent about the human situation. Write at least 250 words explaining how Plato seems to see the human situation.