Part Three

Interlude

You’ve been walking through the City for a while now. Do you still want a map? Are you still anxious to get your grade and get out? Or have you started to settle into the feeling of just wandering around, relaxed enough to stay alert to what’s in front of you, not distracted by fantasies about escaping the City and finding the Correct Answers? What’s your mental posture right now, at this very moment, as you’re reading these words?

Just because you’re wandering without a goal doesn’t mean you can’t tell a story about where you’ve been so far. Let’s do that now. Retrace your steps in your mind. What have you seen?

In Chapter One you saw the three faces of philosophy: it is (1) a way of thinking, (2) a conversation between thinkers, and (3) an attitude or “posture” of the mind, which becomes a whole way of life. You saw the three questions that philosophy asks: (1) what is it?, (2) how do I know what it is?, and (3) what should I do with it? And you saw that the three rules for answering these kinds of questions: (1) there are no right answers, only better and worse ones; (2) the best answers can contradict each other; and (3) philosophers must care very much about getting the answers right, while staying very relaxed about getting the answers wrong.

This book focuses on the third face, philosophy as a way of life, and on the third question, what should I do? Really, you are wandering around the more specific question “what should I do with my life?” Now, if philosophy is a way of life, then that’s almost like an answer to the question about what you should do with your life: you should live it philosophically! But in another way it’s not an answer, because to live philosophically is not about knowing answers and applying them; it’s about asking questions. So, to live philosophically is to take the question “what should I do with my life?” seriously, as opposed to assuming you already know what to do with it.

But “how should I live?” is a very big question, so in Chapter Two you saw it shrink into a smaller question, a question about what to do in a particular situation. You came across the Trolley Problem, and while exploring Philippa Foot’s Trolley Problem you got introduced to “the Basic Move” — a kind of philosophical form for thinking, just like there are kata in martial arts, scales in music, or drills in sports. The Basic Move is:

You use then variation and distinction to perform the reflection; we will not review all the instructions here. The Basic Move is the philosophical method: a way of thinking that unearths the assumptions that lie buried in your answers to the “what should I do?” question. You practice the Basic Move because you want to be able to tell right from wrong. You want to be a good person. You care about this question because you care about being good.

In Chapter Three you unearthed the assumption that got buried in Chapter Two. Why do you care about being good? Well, like Aristotle said: because you care about being happy, and you assumed that being good is connected to being happy. But Plato’s story of the shepherd and the ring challenged that assumption. It told you that the idea that you have to be good to be happy is an illusion propped up by society that keeps you from being as happy as you could be. Philosophy is the ring that dissolves that illusion; it frees you from the social pressure to “be good,” and makes you smart enough to get what you want. Getting what you want, not being good, is real happiness. The choice is to be a slave, a prisoner, or to become the master, to take the throne. Philosophy shows you that you have a choice, and helps you become the master.

In Chapter Four you unearthed the assumption that got buried in Chapter Three. The shepherd used the ring to unearth the assumption that it’s important to do what’s moral, and discovered that Normal World morals are fake: just “social constructions. But he assumed that his own desires were real, that they were his desires. And you assumed that, along with him. Plato’s story of the cave challenged that assumption. It showed you prisoners who are forced to watch a shadow play for their whole lives. The shadows tell them what is “good” and “bad,” so the shepherd is right about that: normal morals are fake. But the shadows also tell the prisoners what to want, so the shepherd is wrong about what happiness is. The shepherd got what he wanted, but it wasn’t actually what he wanted: it’s what society made him want. Philosophy breaks the chains and dissolves both illusions. It shows you that you don’t actually know what you want: you have to learn what’s worth wanting. And it shows you that the choice between slave and master is a false choice: prisoners and puppetmasters both live in the cave. There’s a third option, which is to exit the cave completely. Outside, in the sun, is where you learn not how to get what you want but how to want what’s truly good. Outside the cave, what you want, what you enjoy, what gives you pleasure, is the same thing as what’s good and right. Outside the cave, you’re like Confucius in his old age, after a lifetime of learning:

In Chapter 5, you went back into the cave to take a closer look at how life works for the people inside. The world inside the cave is the world of power. It’s the world of puppetmasters and prisoners. Where did they come from? The cave, the hierarchy in the cave, has a history. It’s the history of a struggle for respect. We want others to respect us, but we don’t want to respect them, because if we respect them, then they’re a limit on us getting whatever we want. So we try to put them into boxes. We try to define them before they can define us. We try to get them to believe our illusions about them before they get us to believe their illusions about us. We are all throwing shadows at each other. The ones who end up caught in the shadows, deceived by the manipulation, are the prisoners: the slaves. The ones who end up casting the shadows are the puppeteers: the masters. But — and this is key — from the philosopher’s point of view, it’s not better to be a master than to be a slave. Both are trapped in the cave.

In Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, you looked at these shadows in more detail. There are two different kinds. Some are daydreams: those are the pleasing illusions we have about ourselves, the illusions of superiority. Others are nightmares: those are the distressing illusions we have about ourselves, the illusions of inferiority. The key is to see that both are illusions: neither is the truth. If we are masters, the cave makes us believe we deserve to be, because we are “naturally” superior. And if we are slaves, the cave makes us believe we deserve to be, because we are are “naturally” inferior. In these chapters you learned that the shadows that deceive us about who we are can come from other people: we tend to become what others say we are. You started to think about philosophy as a way not just to examine your thoughts, but as a way to examine your relationships with other people. Your thoughts affect those relationships, and those relationships affect your thoughts. Di Pizan’s “slander” and Du Bois’ “double consciousness” are trying to capture that process.

So philosophy turns out to be not just about the question of “how should I live”; now it is also about the question of “how should we live, together.” Now, philosophy becomes political philosophy. It is about trying to understand why some people are masters and others are slaves; why some are kings and others are shepherds; why some are prisoners and others are puppetmasters. It is also about trying to understand why our attempts to undo that relationship and make things more equal tend to end by just reversing it, so that the slaves become the masters and vice versa. The cave story says that there is a third option. Instead of exchanging one illusion for another — instead of exchanging a nightmare for a daydream — we can try to get out and see ourselves clearly, in the light of the sun. In the daylight, we will be able to distinguish what is our true “nature” from what is just the product of ‘nurture” disguised as nature. Then we will be free to be ourselves, instead of being imprisoned in the shadows of ourselves that others have made for ourselves. And we will be able to relate, not as inferiors and superiors, but as equals.