The Cave

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One powerful way to begin to escape from the Cave is to strive to love others without seeking a reward, that is, to love others the way God loves us.

The Cave 

In the Parable of the Cave, Socrates uses powerful images to depict the universal condition of humankind. All of us, ancient Athenians and modern Americans, are like prisoners born in a dark cave with legs and necks in bonds so that we can see only in one direction. Far behind the prisoners, a fire burns in the back of the cave. Their light comes from a fire burning behind them. Between this fire and themselves runs a road, alongside which a screen wall has been built. Behind this wall, men and women pass back and forth, carrying artificial objects. The prisoners understand themselves and the world they inhabit by observing the dim shadows cast on the cave wall in front of them by the burning fire. If they converse, it is about the shadows, which are truth to them; the echo of words spoken behind the screen wall seems to them to be the speech of the shadows.[1]

In the Parable of the Cave, the shadows stand for the authoritative opinions about persons and things that the city binds us to, or in modern terms, culture. Each historical era has its own Cave. In Homeric Greece, the idea of fate blinded men to the reality of human freedom; two centers of authority existed: rituals for the divination of the future and poetry for human affairs. In modern America, belief in materialism blinds us to the reality of the interior life; the two centers of authority are the Nation-State for communal life and science for the way things are. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the last page of The Great Gatsby, describes the American Cave. He imagines what greeted the Dutch sailors’ eyes when they first saw the islands that were later to become New York City: “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”[2]

In the New World, every avenue for profit-making and securing comfort was to be relentlessly pursued. Forests became stands of timber, prairies farmland, and rivers transportation waterways and sources of power. Two centuries later, major cities became blanketed with life-threatening smog, rivers because of industrial pollution became fire hazards, and planet Earth, due to climate change, experienced mass species extinction. The unbridled desire for material goods led to ecological disasters, apparent to all. 

Universities, corporations, and governments set up departments of human resources; men and women became objects to be used, just like plants and animals. Everything became a commodity, waiting for the last dollar to be squeezed out of it. What now lies completely hidden is the human being’s essence, to wonder, to behold, and to offer thanks for the plants and animals that form the web of life. 

The heroes in the American Cave are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs, keen observers of the shadows cast on the wall, all of whom accumulated great material wealth. 

To return to the Parable of the Cave, Socrates supposes that the prisoners are released.  A freed prisoner would look around and see the fire. The light would hurt his eyes and make it difficult for him to see the objects casting the shadows. If he were told that what he sees is real instead of the other version of reality he saw on the wall, he would not believe it. In his pain, the freed prisoner would turn away and return to what he is accustomed to, shadows on the wall. 

“If someone dragged him away from there by force along the rough, steep upward way and didn’t let him go before he had dragged him out into the light of the sun, wouldn’t he be distressed and annoyed at being so dragged?” The prisoner would be angry and in pain, and this would only worsen when the radiant light of the sun overwhelms his eyes and blinds him. Slowly, his eyes would adjust to the light of the sun. “At first, he’d most easily make out the shadows, and after that, the phantoms of human beings and the other things in water, and later, the things themselves.” Eventually, he would be able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally, he could look upon the sun itself. 

He would conclude that the sun was the “source of the seasons and the years… and is in a certain way the cause of all things he and his companions had been seeing.” The honors given down there to those who were good at observing, remembering, and judging the shadows would be nothing to him; he would do anything not to live like that again. 

The freed prisoner would “consider himself happy for the change and pity the others.”  As Homer says, he would “want very much ‘to be on the soil, a serf to another man, to a portionless man,’[3] and to undergo anything rather than” to live in the Cave. 

Suppose the freed prisoner would want to bring his fellow cave dwellers out of the cave and into the sunlight. When he returned to the cave, his eyes accustomed to sunlight would be blind when he re-entered the cave, just as he was when he was first exposed to the sun. The prisoners who remained in the cave would infer from the returning man’s blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that if the prisoners could, they would reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave. 

Our Cave

I checked the internet for remarks on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Emma Green, in her opinion piece in The New Yorker, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?” states, “There’s a sly tension in the allegory. Plato clearly believes that it’s better to live in the light and know the truth. But he also acknowledges that a person can be blinded in two ways, both as they’re emerging from the cave and again as they’re returning to it. It can be difficult to know which direction leads to the truth. Even Plato’s fanboys might get lost on their way.”[4]

Ignoring the snide “fanboys,” we easily see that Green does not understand the Cave. Even a cursory reading of Plato conveys that life outside the Cave encounters the Truth and thus is vastly superior to life in the Cave. 

In my brief survey of the internet, I found YouTube videos and college classes that described the Cave abstractly but with no mention of the Cave of modernity or American life, which gave the impression that the Cave was personal, not cultural.

Even Eva Brann, Dean of St. John’s College, Annapolis, from 1990 to 1997, seemed unwilling to accept the insight that American culture has a Cave that is difficult to escape from. She conjectured that “Aristotle’s own cave story, reported by Cicero (On the Nature of the Gods II, xxxvii, 95), was a counter-image to combat Socrates’ scandalous view. For the inmates of Aristotle’s cave, a well-furnished underground apartment, need only a chance to catch a glimpse of the upper world with its sun by day and its stars in their regular courses by night, to know immediately that theirs is indeed a world ruled by gods. But this splendid world, Aristotle, contrary to Socrates, implies, whose divinity is immediately apprehended by anyone with unjaded vision, is, precisely, our own present habitation, toward whose beauty our senses have grown dull.”[5] Moderns do not inhabit Aristotle’s Cave, for they see the motion of the sun, moon, and stars through Newtonian mechanics. In the Aristotelian cosmos, celestial bodies have souls that cause motion by imitating the prime mover. Does Brann really believe with Aristotle that the Sun has a soul? I certainly don’t. 

Brann rejected Plato in favor of Aristotle because the personal transformation demanded in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave conflicted with her opinion of a Great Books education to which she was firmly attached. In “Liberal Learning, Great Books & Paideia,” a talk delivered at the 2014 CiRCE Classical School Conference, Brann succinctly laid out her understanding of liberal education. She declared that personal transformation is a modern myth, for “people develop, come into their own… discovering and assuming what we call our identity.” She added, “The fully adult human being’s efforts to maintain the being that has been achieved by learning; this is growth without change, insight that confirms and enlivens, without altering, one’s being.” Study of the Great Books “makes us into what we were meant to be, then it maintains us in the life so achieved.” 

Not surprisingly, Brann’s view of liberal education rests upon an understanding of the human person. I will be so bold to say that she is completely wrong. Her beliefs are contrary to every spiritual tradition, Eastern and Western, opposed to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. The deep teaching of these religions is that the identity that Brann speaks of is an illusion, for we do not know who we truly are. The aim of spiritual teaching and practice is to wake up students and turn them toward the light. 

In all fairness to Brann, I must mention that fleeing Nazi Germany in 1941 at the age of twelve must have been a terrifying, unsettling experience that she wished would never happen again. She sought stability, and I surmised Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was too unsettling for her, and that is why she chose Aristotle over Plato. Who am I to criticize her allegiance to a political regime that saved her life? 

With the internet and marketing techniques, the American Cave is filled with images from many sources. Every morning, I receive dozens of emails offering new gutters for my house, $100,000 life insurance for $1, and 80% off exercise classes. Senator Martin Heinrich informed me that the Fentanyl Act is now law, Calm extended an offer to support my mental health journey, and Jack Kornfield invited me to take a transformative course, his way of taking me out of the Cave. I just received an invitation to attend the Rewiring Your Brain World Summit, a mix of two incompatibles: spirituality and materialism. All these email illusions disappeared when I hit the delete button on my computer. 

When I turned to my morning glance at the New York Times, I read two dismal headlines: “Israeli Military Warns Thousands in Rafah to Evacuate” and “Russia to Hold Drills on Tactical Nuclear Weapons in New Tensions with West.” Few Americans share the illusions driving the wars in Ukraine and Gaza: the establishment of a Greater Russia and the Zionist goal of Israel being freed from Palestinian rights. 

Next, I read the story “Trump Held in Contempt Again as His Criminal Trial Speeds Along,” which made me think about how America is split into two seemingly irreconcilable groups. The morality play of the Left focuses on an imagined future where every individual is free to choose any lifestyle he or she desires unhindered by social pressure and law. Progressives claim that history is on their side: Kings, princes, and nobles no longer exist; oligarchs and patriarchs are being eliminated; the few remaining social fetters of Protestantism will disappear. “At the heart of freedom is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life.”[6] To ensure freedom for all, the LGBTQ community must be protected by law because the Right hopes to marginalize them again. Chronic illness, ignorance, and poverty preclude freedom; thus, every American has a right to health care, education, and employment. A woman owns her body and has an inherent right to abortion services. The founding principle of America is equality, now subverted by wealthy individuals and Corporate America. To restore the promise of America, the unjust influence of the economic elite must be countered by a more progressive tax system; otherwise, America is lost.

The illusion of the Left is that human nature does not exist, that there are no universal values, such as courage, justice, and charity, and that is why your concept “of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life” may be opposed to mine, but neither one of us is correct, for no one grasps the truth. Unwittingly, the Left espouses nihilism. 

The morality play of the Right harks back to a golden era, a past sometimes imaged, where America embodied the traditional values of Protestantism, essentially middle-class life of the 1950s. Decent people, the majority then, adhered to family values. The men worked hard, prospered, and looked after their families; the women willingly sacrificed career ambitions for their children and their husbands’ careers. The Left has no place for religion and with its adherence to individualism preaches the shallow social ethic “be nice to one another,” which does not inspire anyone to build cathedrals or write symphonies. However, with the ascendency of liberal values, indecency, perversion, and moral corruption became normal; psychological and social disorders took over the Left. Scornful of normal, decent people, the Left is intent on destroying tradition. All that the decent, normal people want is to reclaim America. The elites on the West and East coasts have isolated themselves in gated compounds and do not know what is really going on in the hinterland or with the declining middle class.[7] To save the world, the elites would force a vegan diet on everyone and ignore that the good-paying jobs were shipped overseas, followed by a marked increase in midlife mortality of white non-Hispanic Americans, the result of deaths of despair caused by drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide in a declining middle class. Abortion, a crime greater than slavery or the Holocaust, must again be prohibited by law; over 61 million medically induced abortions have been performed since Roe v. Wade. America is exceedingly close to losing its founding principles. Freedom is to choose the good, not the license to do whatever one wants. 

The illusion on the Right is that only the freedom of white men counts; the oppression of Blacks, Native Americans, and women is ignored. 

The Ethos of Capitalism

If Plato is correct, then the Left and Right must share a common illusion, probably one instilled in children through schooling. Consider a typical fifth-grade class observed by anthropologist Jules Henry.[8] “Boris had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he ‘think.’” Undoubtedly, Boris remembered hearing the teacher tell him to reduce the fraction to the lowest terms, but then he could not speak. When the teacher told him to think, his mind was probably paralyzed, and his ears buzzed. Other children, frantic to correct Boris, waved their hands to get the teacher’s attention. The teacher, quiet and patient, ignored the waving hands and asked Boris, “Is there a bigger number than two you can divide into the two parts of the fraction?” After a long silence from Boris, she asked the same question again, this time more urgently, and still there was not a word from Boris. She then turned to the class and said, “Who can tell Boris what the number is?” A forest of hands appeared, and the teacher called on Peggy, thrilled to give the correct answer: four. From the smile on her face, Henry knew Peggy felt great about herself; Boris’ failure was his problem, not hers. 

In the schoolhouse, winners are taught to look to the good they have gained and ignore the unavoidable emotional damage caused to the losers. The goal in a competitive society is to win without violating the rules. That’s how the game works in America, and that’s how the ethos of capitalism squashes the natural empathy young children feel for the pain of others.

The following week, Boris’ class was divided into two competing teams for a spelling bee. Boris was the last person chosen and the first to go down. The following week, the communal activity was show-and-tell, typically reserved for younger children. As an educational experiment, Boris’ teacher asked her students to bring to class an object beginning with the letter “b.” Boris thought of bringing himself but brought his baby blanket; though faded and frayed, it always comforted him. When he stood in front of the class to give his one-minute description of his show-and-tell object, the magic of his baby blanket failed him. His palms sweated, his knees knocked, and he managed to say, “My baby blanket.” Some students snickered, others laughed, and one boy said, “Way to go, Boris.”[9]

In this fashion, Boris learned to hate the students who excelled, for they robbed him of dignity and worth. He was trapped in a situation that subjected him to repeated humiliation. 

When the pain became unbearable, he would “act out,” tear pages out of his textbooks, tip over his desk, and punch one of the “winners,” usually Anton, the boy seated behind him. He was then sent to the school psychologist to diagnose Boris’ problem. Neither the psychologist nor any teacher had the insight or courage to say the problem was the system that set students against one another, not Boris. 

Like Boris, the unsuccessful students grow to hate the successful ones. “Since all but the brightest children have the recurrent experience that others succeed at their expense, they cannot but develop an inherent tendency to hate—to hate the success of others, to hate others who are successful, and to be determined to prevent it. Along with this, naturally, goes the hope that others will fail. This hatred masquerades under the euphemistic name of ‘envy.’”[10]

Not only Boris, but many other children in grade school learn readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, and ‘atred. Yet, we are shocked when that intense anger and hatred spill over into a school shooting. The officials hire security guards, install metal detectors, and institute practice lockdowns but seem unable to see how their competitive education instills self-loathing and hatred. 

Ten years later, probably few of the students that Henry observed will remember how to manipulate fractions. But surely, no student will forget the real lessons learned that day, the three moral precepts of capitalism. I succeed only if someone else fails, and the converse—if someone else succeeds, I must have failed. Implicit in these two precepts is a third: My success is entirely due to me, and no other person has a legitimate claim on its benefits—the ultimate injunction of capitalism, an economic system based on individualism, where each person is solely responsible for their success or failure.

Individualism

Alexis de Tocqueville, political philosopher and social critic, was the first person to use the word “individualism” and reports “that word ‘individualism,’ which we coined for our own requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group, and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.”[11] Tocqueville points out that “in all nations materialism is a dangerous malady… [but since] democracy favors the taste for physical pleasures and this taste, if it becomes obsessive soon disposes men to believe that nothing but matter exists.”[12]

In modern life, my constant reference point is always myself. Hence, I believe that every part can be separated from the whole and that the whole can be understood as simply a collection of parts. With such a habit of mind, I attempt to understand every whole solely in terms of its parts. But the smallest parts of anything are material. Consequently, I form the habit of thinking the whole is a collection of parts; such a habit makes me a firm believer in materialism—I cannot think any other way. 

At the core of science is an unquestionable, sacred idea succinctly articulated by biologist H. Allen Orr: “The universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter,”[13] a concrete representation of the philosophy of materialism, which holds that every object as well as every act in the universe is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter.

Psychologist Joshua Greene and neurobiologist Jonathan Cohen declare “every decision is a thoroughly mechanical process, the outcome of which is completely determined by the results of prior mechanical processes. Every human action can be explained mechanically.”[14] Francis Crick asserts that “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”[15] Richard Dawkins states unambiguously that “any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity, and environment.”[16]

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger gives an irrefutable argument that materialism is incapable of even explaining how we see. Suppose sunlight is reflected from a red apple into the eye of a landscape painter. The sunlight passes through the lens of the eye and strikes the retina, a sheet of closely packed cells—4.5 million cones and 90 million rods. Activated by the incoming sunlight, chemical changes occur in the rods and cones, which are then translated into electric impulses that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. Further electrical and chemical changes take place in the brain. In terms of the physiology of seeing this description is complete; however, the sensation red has not entered this scientific account of perception. The landscape painter experiences the red of the apple, not the myriad chemical and electrical changes that are necessary for seeing. 

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato directs us to what is universal and timeless. Mathematics is of great importance for Plato because it is the easiest access to the timeless. For me, when I was fifteen, I saw Euclid’s demonstration that the prime numbers are infinite, and that changed my life. Before this I thought there were only practical, concrete truths, such as a carburetor mixes air and gasoline for combustion. Through the study of Euclid, especially Books V, VI, and VII, I acquired the habit of seeking the universal and the timeless. Let me give an example from Homer on how a Great Book is read for the universal and timeless.

At the opening of the Iliad, Achilles is angered because Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, has taken for himself Briseis, a beautiful and clever woman captured by Achilles. Since Achilles thinks he is the greatest warrior amongst the Greeks, he feels dishonored by Agamemnon, retires to his ship, and refuses to join in the battle against the Trojans. Blinded by his anger, Achilles allows his best friend, Patroclus, to use his armor and to do battle against the Trojans. Patroclus, masquerading as Achilles, is killed by Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior. Achilles goes berserk—enters battle, kills every Trojan in sight, including Hector, and in his rage attacks a river, the height of madness. 

From Achilles’ immense suffering, a new person emerges. He sees that he has been exactly like other men—foolish, caught up in winning prizes, striving for eternal glory. The new Achilles is compassionate and even smiles at the foibles of his fellow warriors. Eva Brann, classics scholar and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is surprised that “with the unaccountable suddenness of a divinity, Achilles is another being: the courtly, peace-keeping, tactful, and generous host at Patroclus’ funeral games.”[17]

Homer shows us in the Iliad that suffering can destroy a person’s ego, correct his misunderstanding of himself, and join him in a more profound way to others. Suffering can move a person from a narrow self-love to an expansive love of others. 

Most of us are children of unhappy marriages, so we knew from suffering in early life, say by the age of seven or eight, that the human relations around us were failed marriages, parents abandoning their children, and the betrayal of friendships. We saw that material prosperity and career advancement were not the path to happiness as promised. We knew what we wanted most of all, unconditional love, although we may not have had the vocabulary to express this universal desire. Later in life, most of us settled for the earned love that good grades, an excellent career, and wealth bring about, although we wanted to be loved for who we are, not for what we possess.

The first need of a child is unconditional love. If a mother showers the baby with unconditional love, the infant feels, “I am wonderful just because I am.” The child learns to love himself the way the mother loves him. The young child then extends this self-love to love of the world. The child feels, “It’s good to be alive; it’s good to be surrounded by such good things.” Many a child’s life has been saved from ruin by the sustained, unconditional love of a grandmother, an aunt, or a nanny.

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm observes that “unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child but of every human being.”[18] Billy Joel captures the adult desire for unconditional love in his “Just the Way You Are.”

One powerful way to begin to escape from the Cave is to strive to love others without seeking a reward, that is, to love others the way God loves us.

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Notes:

[1] For the Parable of the Cave, see Plato, Republic, Bk. VII, 514a–520a. The translation used here is by Allan Bloom. For a detailed, scholarly discussion of The Parable of the Cave, see Eva Brann, “Socrates on Education in the Cave.”

[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Collier Books, 1980 [1925]), p. 182.

[3] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1999), Bk. XI, p. 489.

[4] Emma Green, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?” The New Yorker (March 11, 2024).

[5] Eva Brann, “Socrates on Education in the Cave.”

[6] Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Hackett Souter, “Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania versus Casey” in Constitutional Law: 1995 Supplement, ed. Geoffrey R. Stone, et al. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 955.

[7] Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century.”

[8] Jules Henry, Culture Against Man (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 295-296.

[9] Henry does not report on Boris’ subsequent life. The rest of his story given here is a possibility I en-visaged.

[10] Henry, Culture Against Man, p. 296.

[11] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955 [1856]), p. 96.

[12] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 544.

[13] H. Allen Orr, “Awaiting a New Darwin,” The New York Review of Books, 60, No. 2 (February 7, 2013).

[14] Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B (2004) 359: 1781.

[15] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), p. 24.

[16] Richard, Dawkins, “Let’s All Stop Beating Basil’s Car.”

[17] Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2002), p. 68.

[18] Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 1956), p.3.

The featured image, uploaded by 4edges, is “An Illustration of The Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.