The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  The metaphor of the cave explains how this works. It occurs in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates describes the world around us as a darkened cavern, across the back of which a puppet show is flashed with the figures of men, animals, and objects cast as shadows. For a modern audience, the description has an eerily familiar ring. It’s the world of television and the media at its most flimsy and superficial.

  Imagine, Socrates says, that everyone inside the cave had been born there and had been forced to watch the puppet show since birth without being allowed to take their eyes off the screen. “If they were able to talk to one another,” Socrates asks his listeners, “would they not assume that the shadows they saw were the real things?”

  “Inevitably,” his young student, Glaucon, replies.

  “And so in every way they would believe that the shadows of the objects we mentioned were the whole truth.”

  “Yes, inevitably,” Glaucon says.

  We can imagine Socrates now leaning forward and speaking very softly.

  “Then think what would happen to them if they were released of their bonds and cured of their delusions,” he says. Imagine one of them suddenly slipping his bonds and seeing for the first time the lights used to make the shadow play. Think how they would dazzle him and make him doubt his own eyes.

  And then if he were told “what he used to see was so much empty nonsense and that he was now nearer reality and seeing more correctly,” would he immediately affirm the truth? Or is it more likely that he would return with relief to the original shadows as his familiar “reality” even though he has just learned they are only illusions flashing across the screen of consciousness?13

  For Glaucon, the answer is easy. Most people retreat from uncomfortable truths about themselves. They dismiss these occasional insights into reality (“I’m wasting my time playing video games all day” or “This job makes me a peddler of lies” or “Politics is a farce”) as impractical or unrealistic and subside back into their mundane existence among the shadows in the cave.

  So does Socrates’s prisoner. But then, Socrates goes on, warming to his point, “what if he were forcibly dragged out into the sunlight?” There “he would be so dazzled he would be unable to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.”

  “Certainly not at first,” Glaucon adds.

  “Because of course he would need to grow accustomed to the light before he could see things in the upper world outside the cave,” Socrates says. But gradually he would begin to see clearly, and see things as they are for the first time. First he would make out the heavenly bodies and the stars at night, then the moon, and finally the sun itself. After a time, he would be able to “gaze at it without using reflections in water or any other medium, but as it is itself”—and realize it is the source of all true light and reality.

  And having seen the light of the sun and the truth, Plato has Socrates say, “when he thought of his original home” in the cave, “and what passed for wisdom there … don’t you think he would congratulate himself on his good fortune?” He would never again be satisfied with that illusory world; he would never rest again until he finally reached the ultimate source of all reality: the Good in Itself.14

  The Myth of the Cave, from Republic, Book VII

  • • •

  It was a startling, even puzzling concept, then as now. When we say, “I just played a good game of tennis,” and, “Our company’s prospects are good,” and, “He’s been a good husband,” does the use of the word good in all those statements have something in common? Most would say no, if we think about it at all.

  Socrates, however, says yes. For Socrates and for Plato, finding what they do have in common, that single standard of excellence they all share, is what true knowledge is all about. For every quality in life—goodness, justice, courage, beauty, loyalty—there has to exist a single standard, a model of perfection of which, Socrates says, “all equal objects of sense … are only imperfect copies.”15 This model naturally stands apart from its many individual instances in the world, since it is the standard by which we judge all individual instances—which are only pale, dim copies, like shadows in a cave.

  How do we discover that standard? We could look at all the different examples of courage or beauty or loyalty and try to find out what they have in common (that’s the “inductive method”). Or we can save time by realizing that all of them reflect to a greater or lesser degree a single ideal of perfection, which is impossible to know through our senses, but is knowable through the soul of reason. If we can concentrate our minds instead on that higher standard, or what Socrates calls the Idea or Form of that virtue, defined as Courage or Beauty or Justice in Itself—or even Goodness, which is the highest Form of all, setting the standard of perfection for all the rest—then true wisdom will be ours.

  For Plato, then, all certain knowledge requires an element of abstraction from concrete reality. Through Socrates, Plato tells us to constantly reach for the highest level of knowledge beyond mere individual examples, toward a universal standard for judgment that will give us a stronger, more confident position for acting in the world. Our slogan should be “Where there’s a Good and a Better, there must be a Best.” And when we finally reach the Best that sets the standard for all the others, Plato says, we’ve entered the realm of the Forms.

  The Greek word he has Socrates use for these Forms or ideal models is idean, or ideas (sometimes he also uses eidos, a mold or form—which is the term most scholars use in English).16 For centuries philosophers have worn themselves out, and their readers, debating whether the Forms are really Socrates’s idea (sorry) or Plato’s, and what Plato “really” meant by insisting that these Forms were the true objects of knowledge. In the Parmenides, a youthful Socrates is even asked: Are there Idean for the opposites of Beauty and Goodness as well, which we must also seek to know in order to understand Ugliness and Evil? Are there ideal forms of Man, or even Mud and Hair?

  Plato has Socrates admit he doesn’t know. Perhaps at a certain level he didn’t care. What mattered most to Plato, and to us, is not what the Forms are but what they are not. They are not just collective definitions (like the famous example “A man is a featherless biped”) or universal propositions (“All men are featherless bipeds”). The Forms have a real existence, Plato tells us in the dialogues, but outside time and space. They are not part of the realm of the senses or the world we normally describe as reality. They are the models from which that world is built; so they must be prior to, and higher than, that world we engage in on a daily basis.

  They are also what keep us from sinking into that world. Plato’s Forms keep us from becoming absorbed into the Heraclitean flux of daily phenomena that appear and disappear from our consciousness with pointless persistence—in short, the world of the cave or what we see on CNN and E! TV. By remaining eternal and unchanging, the Forms offer us the light and power of permanence.

  And far from being a crutch or an intellectual convenience, Plato’s Forms are remarkably inconvenient. They remind us that there is always a higher standard, a model of excellence by which everything we do or say or encounter must be measured—and inevitably be found wanting. At one level, we all become Platonists when we are conscious of our own shortcomings and weaknesses. We move through life aware we could be, or should be, someone different: someone more honest, more courageous, more compassionate. In Plato’s terms, this higher self is our own soul reflected in the light of the Forms.

  The American satirist H. L. Mencken once said that conscience is the voice that says, “Someone might be looking.” For Plato, that someone is the higher self. We may resent its presence, but it’s hard to ignore. Being true to that self, the soul, means living up to those models of perfection in thought, word, and action.

  This is hard, because they are by definition invisible to our ordinary senses.

  For Plato, what makes the Forms invisible is their flawless perfection, requiring perception by an equally pure recepto
r, namely the soul. Their knowledge comes to us instead in a kind of introspective mental seeing in which clarity and truth suddenly come together as one. As Socrates observes in the Phaedo, “If the thing is plain and clear, then there is no need to look further.”17

  Now, it is clear that Plato himself had an incredibly vivid imagination. It is reflected in his powerful use of imagery, allegory, and metaphor in all his dialogues. No one should be surprised that he should think it possible to perceive a thing through the eye of the mind and perceive it as true. He did not go to the next step, however, of arguing that whatever is vivid and clear must therefore also be true. He was not what philosophers call an intuitionist; but he will point many followers from Plotinus to René Descartes down that road in the future.18 It is one of the major points that will separate Plato from his Neoplatonist imitators. All the same, they form part of Plato’s legacy, and their pictures belong next to his in the Platonist family album.

  No one can ever know true Justice or Beauty in his mortal lifetime. He can, however, make the search for that higher knowledge his life’s work, just as Socrates did. He can be a lover of wisdom or philosopher in the truest, widest sense—even if that love is always, until our final breath, unrequited. As a result, the life devoted to reason can take on an almost heroic dimension. The shining reflected light of the Forms, in the words of the great Plato scholar Benjamin Jowett, comes to fill “not only the intellect, but the whole man.”19

  By talking this way, Plato and Socrates compelled their fellow Greeks to confront a crucial question: What is the good life? By what standards do we arrange our conduct and judge that of others so that we earn the plaudits not just of the crowd, but of ourselves? How do we achieve that sense of inner well-being that the Greeks called eudaimonia and we call happiness: the sense of waking every morning and facing the world with confidence, energy, and expectation rather than loathing and dread?

  The standard Greek answer was that the key to happiness was cultivating virtues like courage, wisdom, and justice. How do we get those virtues? Plato gives his answer through Socrates: through knowledge of the Forms. Just as there are many chairs, there are many acts of charity; and just as there is only one “real” chair, its ideal Form, there can be only one ideal standard of charity, by which we measure all the imperfect copies.20 The Forms reveal to us what a true equilateral triangle looks like, or a perfect game of tennis, or a perfectly turned urn, so that we can judge the less-than-perfect examples in our midst. However, they also teach us what loyalty is, as well as disloyalty, and allow us to understand the true nature of justice and laws. They lead us to do what we know is right and to avoid doing what is clearly wrong—in short, to make virtue an exact science.

  This point is fundamental for Plato and his legacy to the West. Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil. For Plato and all Platonists who come after him, grasping a standard of perfection is what we need in order to be virtuous and ultimately happy.

  But how do we that? Especially since, as we have seen, the Forms do not exist in time and space, and none of us ever really knows them until we are dead.

  In fact, Plato says, it’s easier than we think. We (or rather our immortal part, the soul) have actually met all the Forms before, in the afterlife. Plato was a firm believer in the theory of transmigration of souls, and another key dialogue, the Meno, aims to convince the reader that all knowledge is actually a process of recollection. This is why sometimes we seem to know the answer to a question before we’re finished asking it—just as the slave boy in the Meno is able, with Socrates’s prompting, to figure out for himself that the area of a square is proportional to the second power of the length of the sides.

  Yet Socrates “tells” him nothing. The working of the boy’s own reason fills in the gaps and makes the connections, “for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.”21 The reason is, Socrates suggests, that his soul and ours knew it all along before we were born. We just need a refresher course to jog our postnatal memory.

  Still, even if we accept Plato’s reincarnation of souls, the effort to present all knowledge as a matter of déjà vu seems unconvincing. It works best with mathematical proofs, as in the Meno. But Socrates also supplies a surefire method for “recovering” that knowledge lost at birth—to grasp truth as if we knew it all along. That is, through questioning and applying reason to the answers. This is the Socratic method, which Socrates used first to test our ignorance (“What is friendship?”) and then to present a solution to our ignorance. The Greek name for Socrates’s method is elenchus, which means a test or trial. Later, Plato elaborated the method into a formal procedure, a kind of sustained mental workout for the soul to prepare it to receive the truth, called the dialectic.

  Plato was not the first Greek to see thinking as a kind of winnowing process: of asking questions in order to get rid of what we know is false, so that what is left must be true.22 However, he is the first to say that this process gets us to the one true Reality. The dialectic is in effect our ticket out of the cave. For example, we discover through dialectical reason that the husband who cheats on his wife, or the man who allows a friend to break the law, or the law that unfairly punishes the innocent, can’t be good husbands or true friends or just laws by definition, since all three violate a higher standard our minds perceive as the essence of fidelity or friendship or justice. Dialectic teaches us that contradiction is the essence of the false, just as consistency with first principles is the essence of the true.†

  For Plato, this kind of reasoning before getting enmeshed in the details of individual experience, or a priori reason, keeps the illusions and imprecisions of one part of daily experience (just ask anyone trying to pick out a mugger in a police lineup) from distracting us from a higher perfection. And the process of distinguishing the false from the true is made easier when we assume, as Plato does, that our reasoning self—the soul—shares the same perfection for which we want to strive.

  “When one tries to get at what each thing is in itself,” Plato has Socrates say in the Republic, by asking the inconvenient questions, sifting through the answers, and “relying on reason without any aid from the senses,” then he has mastered the dialectic. He will stand “at the summit of the intellectual realm,” just like the man who stood on the mountaintop after escaping from the cave and saw the sun, and see “the Good in Itself” by an act of pure thought.23 Not only will he know the truth, he will be prepared to act on it. He will be ready to change the world in the light of truth and a higher reality.

  Still, for Socrates himself, the final escape from the cave comes only with death. The soul is finally free of the imperfections of the body and can reunite itself with all the categories of knowledge in their abstract perfection. In this sense, Socrates’s philosopher truly does make “dying his profession” and death a joyous moment of release from ignorance as well as life.

  In this, he may find others willing to help. Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine what others will say when the man who finally sees things in their true light returns to the cave, returns to the world of ignorance and illusion.

  Wouldn’t they say “that his visit to the upper world had ruined his sight, and that the ascent was not worth even attempting?”

  Glaucon nods.

  “And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would try to kill him if they could lay their hands on him.”

  Glaucon seems to pause, and then says, “They certainly would.”

  Already, Plato hints, the hemlock is waiting.

  The soul of reason. The light of truth. The path of dialectic leading to understanding, even of goodness itself. These are Plato’s great ideals. Still, the Myth of the Cave reveals a bitter truth: Most people prefer life in the cave. The world and institutions around us reflect it—and as Glaucon realized, people get upset and even furious when someone challenges their fondest illusions—what Francis Bacon would call the Idols of the Tribe—espec
ially if everything else is collapsing around them.

  That sense of collapse came to Athens with the defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. As with the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, the humiliating defeat brought into power collaborators with the victors, a junta of thirty pro-Spartan politicians known as the Thirty Tyrants. Most came from blue-blooded families. Critias, leader of the most radical pro-Spartan faction, was a cousin of Plato’s mother. Her brother, Charmides, was one of the principal figures in the reign of terror that the Thirty Tyrants brought down on their democratic opponents.24

  Socrates—the real Socrates, not the spokesman in Plato’s dialogues—was caught in the crossfire. He knew many of the Thirty well. He was certainly no fan of the machine-style democratic politics Pericles had used to dominate Athens and which led the city into the disastrous war with Sparta in the first place. In the Gorgias, Plato even has Socrates say that Pericles made Athenians “idle, cowardly, talkative, and greedy”—a far cry from the kind of praise modern commentators usually heap on the father of Athenian democracy.

  But Socrates drew the line when Critias and his colleagues began arresting and executing opponents without trial. He commented sardonically that he had never heard of a herdsman who took pride in thinning his own herd.25 Even this mild criticism enraged the Thirty Tyrants, who turned against him. Later, they summoned him to lead a citizens’ committee to arrest a former pro-democrat admiral, Leon of Salamis, on patently false charges. Socrates refused. “Powerful as it was,” Socrates explained later, “the government could not terrify me into committing a wrong action.”26 Instead, he went home, fully expecting he would be arrested the next day.

  Fate intervened—as it happened, fate with a cruel sense of humor. A fresh revolution came to Athens, and the Thirty Tyrants were swept from power. The hunters became the hunted, and those they had persecuted took over the city and launched a counterterror of their own. By his actions, Socrates should have been one of the revolution’s heroes. But the democrats remembered only his earlier critiques of Athenian popular rule and his previous associations with some of the Thirty. Socrates made a convenient scapegoat, and the charges that he had “corrupted the youth of Athens” and trained traitors masked a desire for political vengeance.