What Does Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Intend to Teach Us?

In Plato's underground cave there are people chained and shackled so that they can only see one wall. Behind them is a fire casting its light upon the wall. Between the fire and the people is a roadway through which other people travel carrying all kinds of objects which cast shadows on the wall.

The chained people take these shadows to be realities. However if one of them were to be released and allowed to look around or even to leave the cave into the clear light of day he would realize that in fact the shadows were not reality.

I think the allegory of the cave is meant to be more than just a way of saying that if we rely on our sense perception we will never attain knowledge, but always be subject to the world of appearance. Rather there is a stronger message that through our intellectual capacities and philosophy in particular we can break the chains that "fetter us" we can aim for the light we can be enlightened. In other words by becoming philosophers we can be free!

There is as well a second part to the allegory. The freed person returns to the cave and is subject to ridicule and danger. Clearly he would not be happy with this situation. But one of the things we learn to see outside the cave, in fact the highest source of knowledge is that of Goodness. In the larger context of ‘The Republic’ (from which the allegory is taken) Plato wishes to describe the ideal state for mankind. Plato thinks that knowledge of Goodness is required in order to run such an ideal community. However those with such knowledge, like the man sent back to the cave are reluctant to go. Bizarre or brilliant depending on how one views Plato, it is those who least want power and responsibility that should have it.

Is Eating People Wrong?

Yes. Kant had the answer to this one: it is immoral to treat a person as an object. If you eat someone, that's what you're doing. Now, there is an interesting variant on this, however. One could conceive of ritual cannibalism, where one eats the dead to show respect for them to symbolically join with them by taking them into oneself, as moral, because then you're treating them as people, not as food. The ritual cannibalism (yes, "communion") of the Catholic Church is something like this. Is that kind of cannibalism moral? I'm not sure, but it seems that it could be, with suitable respect for the dead. But aside from that kind of cannibalism, using a person as food is denying their humanity.

But, what if you're on a desert island, a ship lost at sea, or whatever, and you and some others are starving... and someone dies. Is it moral to eat them? I'd say yes, myself... I'd want to be eaten in those circumstances, anyway, if it was me that died first. What's the difference between that and, say, donating your organs after you die to medicine, to save lives?

Now there's another kind of cannibalism which I have not really thought through as to its morality, and that's where human beings might clone their own flesh to feed themselves, in some future where food is scarce. Is eating cloned human meat, grown in a vat a) cannibalism, b) immoral? After all, that's nearly what we do now with chickens, commercially. Does it make a difference what the meat is, genetically? My take on this is that it's only our cultural conditioning which makes us feel that this is repulsive and immoral, and that there's not any real immorality there; humans are not treated as objects or as food; there's just meat with human genes. On the other hand, taking human genes and employing them in this fashion, it might be argued, is using the human blueprint, at least, in a way that denigrates it and that opens the door to real abuses. That's certainly a reasonable response, and that's why I don't know the answer to this one... I don't have what I'd consider a decisive reply to it. Which isn't to say there isn't one... maybe there isn't; or perhaps I just haven't thought of it yet.

If You Don’t Know You’re Unhappy are You?

It seems a paradox to say that a person could be unhappy, even though they didn't think that they were unhappy. Surely happiness is a feeling which you know you have, if you have it, and know you don't have if you don't have it.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle would not agree with what I have just said. He had a conception of 'happiness' as more than simply a subjective feeling but rather a judgment that we make about the quality of a person's life. A man who is being cheated on by his wife is not 'happy' according to Aristotle's definition, even if he is blissfully unaware of the fact and thinks that he is the happiest man in the world.

You might reply that Aristotle is not talking about 'happiness' per se, but something else. The substantial question is what sort of happiness we should want.

There is another dimension to the problem, however. Since Freud, we have got used to the idea that we are not always aware of how we truly feel. You assert you are happy, and as you utter the words you seem to believe what you say. Yet deep inside there is a gnawing unhappiness which is causing you to 'act out' in various ways, spoiling relationships and hurting people. Freud said that his objective was to transform a person's neuroses into 'generalized unhappiness'. It sometimes seems as if he thought that everyone ought to be 'unhappy'.

Are There Questions We Can’t Ask Because the Answers Cannot be Known?

The question we are asking is a question of metaphysics, which concerns our understanding of the concept of truth. If a question can be asked, one of the things which follows from that is that we can grasp what it would mean for that question to have an answer. Of course, not all questions which have answers, are questions we can answer. For example, most people would agree that the question how many times I clicked the mouse today has an answer, but if I am not running a program on my computer which counts mouse clicks, then barring total recall there is no way I can discover what that answer is. I can ask the question, but I cannot answer it.

But now consider the question: ‘Has there ever been, in the history of the universe, a period of time during which absolutely nothing happened?’ In other words, can there be such a thing as an empty time? If you allow that there might, sometimes, occur periods of empty time, then it follows that it is logically possible that in between each key tap as I write these words, the universe stops still for a million years. There is a case for saying that because we cannot conceive of what it would be to 'know' that an empty time has ever occurred, that is one question we cannot even ask.

Is Atheism Logically Untenable?

Must we keep an open mind about God, even those of us who are skeptical about the grounds for theism?

Let me first give some examples of things I personally do not feel I need to keep an open mind about. You may or may not agree:

I do not need to keep an open mind about whether it is possible for someone to predict events that will happen in my life by observing the movements of the planets and stars, or reading the lines on my palm.

I do not need to keep an open mind about the claims of Scientology.

I do not need to keep an open mind about Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust.

Isn't it irrational of me to be dogmatic, when there are people who believe in astrology and palmistry, or in Scientology, or in Hitler's innocence? — Just because people believe something — perhaps lots of people — just because the available evidence does not logically rule out the possibility that their belief is true, is not in itself sufficient reason for suspending judgment. My argument is if you allowed that such considerations were sufficient for suspending judgment, "just think what the consequences would be."

When it comes to the question of the ultimate ground of our existence, we are all profoundly ignorant. All that is left is the practical decision — the existential choice — whether to live in fear of God. However, existential choice still leaves us with three possibilities: we can choose to embrace theism; we can postpone the choice and profess agnosticism; or we can choose to embrace atheism.

In these terms, I would argue, the atheist option is neither untenable nor illogical. What the atheist has and the agnostic lacks, is something akin to religious faith. For those who find such faith supporting and life enhancing, that is sufficient ground for belief.

What is Determinism?

Determinism makes the ideological point that our actions and thought are determined by some universal basis. This universal basis can be language (Bakhtin talks about linguistic determinism), class ideology (Marx talks about determinism of class-consciousness), will (Nietzsche said that everything is determined by will), writing (Derrida says that everything is writing) and so on.

For example, according to linguistic determinism: if one's native language is English one thinks with the help of language as well as one thinks in this language. Language belongs to one as well as one belongs to language. Everything we say in English is contained in the English language. That is why the writer just expresses the structures which are contained in the language to which he belongs.

Language is the tool of thinking, according to Wittgenstein. But it is not a tool like a hammer. So, one can lose one's hammer and yet hit the nail without a hammer. But one can think nothing without language. Really language is the way of thinking. If one's native language is French, you think as Frenchman, you have the logic and world outlook of French culture.

Every language, in my mind, creates its own would outlook, its own culture therefore its own thinking. For example, what color do you associate with happiness? It might be pink or yellow, perhaps? But for the Chinese, black is the symbol of happiness and laughter. Another example, with what do you associate the flower chrysanthemum? For the Japanese, the chrysanthemum is the symbol of death as well as the symbol of the Emperor.

So, there is linguistic determinism: we can think nothing without language. Everything we think belongs to our world outlook (this is ideological determinism too) and to native language (this is linguistic determinism). Every word we think, say or write belongs to our native language, therefore our thinking, saying and writing is determined by our language.

The basis of determinism, in my mind, is the human aspiration to understand the underlying nature of the person. Freud says that a subsection of the person is sexual appetite, therefore he creates the determinism of sexuality. The basis of the person (Ego) in his mind is Id, which embraces all sexual wants and instincts. I think that the philosopher creates determinism to understand and to describe the nature of the human person and to build his own system of philosophical ideology.

Why Can’t Descartes Doubt his Own Existence?

In his First Meditation, Descartes wants to more or less abandon any belief that he can doubt at all. This is a way of finding a belief that is completely certain, a belief that he can be absolutely sure is true. If he cannot find any reason to doubt a belief, even the slightest bit, then it's certain in this sense. And the reason he wants to find such a belief (or such beliefs) is that he thinks that he can then base the rest of his beliefs on them, and he will be able to be sure that his beliefs rest on a secure foundation.

The problem is that he seems to have found skeptical arguments that show that there is no absolutely certain belief, that every belief he has is open to some (perhaps very slight) doubt. These are the skeptical arguments he gives in the First Meditation. It might seem, then, that he's doomed to be without an absolutely certain foundation for the rest of his beliefs. And this, clearly, would be a grave problem for his aims in the Meditations.

But this is where the fact that he cannot doubt his own existence comes in. It turns out that he really cannot doubt the belief that he himself exists. For the mere fact of his trying to doubt that he exists, or of his thinking anything at all, clearly shows him that he does exist: “I think therefore I am.” So there is no doubt, not even a very slight one, that he exists. Consequently, there is at least one belief that is absolutely certain: that he himself exists. So it turns out that there is a belief of the sort he needs to ground the rest of his beliefs on a secure foundation.