Imagine prisoners who have been chained
since their childhood deep inside a cave:
not only are their arms and legs unmovable
because of chains; their heads are chained
in one direction as well so that their gaze
is fixed on a wall.
Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire,
and between the fire and the prisoners is a
raised walkway, along which puppets of
various animals, plants, and other things
are moved along. The puppets cast shadows on
the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows.
Behind this cave there is a well-used road, and
upon this road people are walking and talking
and generally making noise. The prisoners, then,
believe that these noises are coming directly
from the shadows they are watching pass by on
the cave wall.
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The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game : naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of objects. They are thus conditioned to judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes and dislike those who play poorly.
Suppose a prisoner's chains break, and he is able to get up and walk about (a process which takes some time, as he has never done it before). Eventually he will be compelled to explore; he walks up and out of the cave, whereby he is instantly blinded by the sun. He turns then to the shadows on the floor, in the lakes, slowly working his way out of his deluded mind, and he is eventually able to glimpse the sun. In time, he would learn to see it as the object that provides the seasons and the courses of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things that he has seen.
Once enlightened, so to speak, the freed prisoner would not want to return to the cave to free his fellow prisoners, but would be compelled to do so. Another problem lies in the other prisoners not wanting to be freed: descending back into the cave would require that the freed prisoner's eyes adjust again, and for a time, he would be one of the ones identifying shapes on the wall. His eyes would be swamped by the darkness, and would take time to become acclimated. He might stumble, Plato asserts and the prisoners would conclude that his experience had ruined him. He would not be able to identify the shapes on the wall as well as the other prisoners, making it seem as if his being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight. (The Republic bk. VII, 516b-c; trans. Paul Shorey)...cont'd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cavePlato
Book VII of The Republic
The Allegory of the Cave
http://www.meditationsight.com/Documents/Cave.htmReality
by Peter Kingsley
http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Peter-Kingsley/dp/1890350095/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216359545&sr=1-1Book Review:
Peter Kingsley's book "Reality" is that rare kind of book that comes along every once in a while that will kick the legs out from under you and leave you precariously holding onto the thread of the reality that you once took for granted. But do not read it unless you are ready to live without the reassuring substance of the material world and the cozy little circle of thought that we in the West have built for ourselves, cutting off the otherwise disquieting pieces of our experience that cause us to question our surety that we have got it right.
Kingsley, who is a master philologist, takes us on a voyage to rediscover the man Parmenides and the man Empedocles -- not the abstract Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers of crusty old books, but the men who were more than just philosophers. They were participants in, and indeed prophets of, a sacred tradition -- a way of life -- that existed for hundreds of years, perhaps longer, and which, according to evidence presented by Kingsley, was shared across the known world, at that time. In short he presents the human sacred tradition that predated what we now call the "West" and the "East." And he presents it as a story that will sweep you along, if you are open to the truth about these men, and leave you gasping at the treasure that was stolen from us in our march to rationalism.
In the ontology of Parmeneides, uncontrived and elegantly expressed in his poem which Kingsley provides a more accurate, contextual, translation of, is a foundation that has tremendous ethical and practical implications for human society and what it means to live a human life. For over 2,000 years we have stubbornly refused to see the holes in the fabric of Western Materialism. And I think it is fair to say that nothing would survive a reanalysis that took into account reality as Parmeneides presents it to us. Kingsley shows us how this tradition, which Parmenides and Empedocles shared, is in fact the foundation upon which our Western intellectual tradition is built; a fact which has been successfully pushed into the background or glossed over -- until now.
Kingsley's work presents a fundamental challenge to the edifice of Western intellection as it strips the past of its convenient shrouds and lays bare an imperative to once again contemplate the Sacred in Philosophy and in our lives. It is not just the clarity that he brings to the works of Parmeneides and Empedocles that lends a powerful force to this "striping bare," but that he connects disparate cultures in a once-widespread, shared, sacred way of life that existed before the transistor and integrated circuit. But beware: Kingsley is not some latter-day prophet bringing the Good News to us here in the 21st Century. Rather, it is up to us to take what his scholarship offers and find our way forward. The work of Parmenides and Empedocles represent an esoteric tradition which requires committed study, but which provides us all that we need, now that Kingsley has given them back to us.
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