Archive for August, 2010

It is in my opinion that Plato would have been a great movie director or script writer and God knows with the ideas he had, he probably almost went insane just like all the director we have now days. The allegory of the cave as Plato may have seen it, could have looked something like the movie Inception.

Inception Preview.

(The Allegory of the cave states that everything is always viewed dimly and that there is always a greater truth meaning that you are in a cave that is inside of another cave that is also inside another cave and so on for eternity.)See last paragraph. Like i said Plato was probably insane at some point in his life. Every person it seems is doomed to be stuck in an endless cycle of not knowing very much like being in a world we don’t know whether is real or not. So we turn to Socrates who offered up the only solution for the problem. “The greatest knowledge you could have is that you don’t know.” It makes you wonder though how a man who believes that there is always a greater truth and we will never really know, could spend his whole life searching for answers or at least asking questions. Even at the time that Plato wrote this theory he could have been second guessing his ideas about it, knowing that there was a greater truth than it. Truly, “the most resilient parasite is an idea!”

On another note about the allagory of the cave the priciple is based solely on falsification as it is so vague that it can not be disproven. The theory stands on a leg that has but to say that the one who questions the theory has not yet come to the greater truth and the principle is restored. I guess its like most theology, maddening.

After reading other peoples comments I realize i specifically said something that is not in the theory of the Allegory of the Cave. The idea i was explaining was more my own on how i view Plato and how he could have view his own theory if he believed everything he stood for. Ill explain, Plato believed that there is always a greater truth and we never really have full knowledge, he also has his theory of the Allegory of the Cave which states that you leave the Cave and see more clear and have gained knowledge and enlightenment, but if there is always a greater truth then you would find yourself right back in another cave on the dim side of knowledge. I hope that clears things up, thanks everyone for the Comments!

In my understanding of the allegory of the cave, it is interesting to think on one hand how enlightened of a society that we have become, how through science and global research we have universal truths and yet on the other hand how we can still reject a idea because it clashes with an emotional “truth”. Hearing the story of the cave I would like to think to myself that I would never be the person who tried to break my bonds to kill the messenger because I have enlightenment and reason on my side. However, there is constant evidence showcasing the rejection of a truth despite evidence to the contrary. For example, a Pew poll that was taken back in August 2010 shows that President Obama is still widely thought of as a Muslim.

1 in 5 Americans (18%) Think he’s a Muslim
1/3 of Adults (34%) think he’s a christian
43% say that they don’t know what his religious status

There is a large correlation between his political opponents and the belief that he is indeed Muslim, showing that this is a negative assumption. President Obama has stated many times, publicly and written, that he is a practicing christian. Then why is this, (somewhat simple belief, and by simple I mean if he was Muslim would it have that great of an impact on his ability to effectively hold the office of the president) hold so much sway and the rejection that he is christian so great? There is a large % of American troops that are healthy, safe practicing Muslim’s. Why then would it be different to have a President who was a practicing Muslim? Ultimately it seems that the simple truth that he is a christian is rejected, just like in the allegory of the cave, by those who reject President Obama as a whole. So even a simple truth, one that shouldn’t determine his presidency is rejected.

Bradley Campbell

When I was a freshman in high school this album was the cornerstone of my record collection and thus, to a great extent, helped define my identity. I thought Liz Phair was above reproach and that by being a fan her irrefutable coolness gave me a similar luster. I thought I was so cool. Or more accurately, I thought I was so uncool that I came around the block back to cool. You see, Liz Phair was an artist. She played guitar, she wrote all her own songs, she had indie cred and she was a critical darling. Listening to her made it easy to feel superior to all the music they played on the radio, which I thought to be vapid and devoid of any true artistic merit.

Thank Madonna that’s over. Not that I don’t like Liz Phair anymore, quite the contrary, she’s still one of my favorites, but I couldn’t be more thrilled that that attitude isn’t around anymore. Unfortunately I still know people with that attitude, people who center their tastes around some notion of artistry and authenticity; they listen to “real music.” Here’s the thing though, what does artistry change? If one listens to a song and withholds judgment until they can check the liner notes to see who wrote it and who played what instruments then it becomes clear that said person doesn’t actually like music. They’ve heard the song and decided to judge it, not on the merits of how it sounds, but how it was created and then taken it into their own hands to determine if that process was “respectable” or not. Suddenly, aesthetics play no role in their opinion of music, and what is music if not aesthetics? No, they don’t like music, they like the baggage that comes with taste; they like to be “authentic.” In short, they’ve fetishized authenticity.

This all seems so irrelevant, I know, but here’s the point: I feel that there’s a huge movement in our culture that is actively fethshizing authenticity and that this movement is exemplified by Plato’s theory about the cave. In the same way that many snobs seem to make music about everything except the music, many people have made life about everything except life. There’s constant pressure to find your “real self,” live free of society’s expectations and belligerently not care about what other people think because we’re individuals for crying out loud. Instead of this convoluted process and line of thought I propose this: we are exactly the way we are acting and to change ourselves we need simply to change the way we act, not get in touch with some true self that’s buried deep within us or dwelling outside some cave.

I believe that our actions and beliefs really do define us to a great extent. We are all living in this world, we are all different and anyone who says that they’ve found this world to be fake, and on top of that, found a way for us to shed the fake identity we’ve been living with and exchange it for a real one has fundamentally misunderstood people. There seems to be this contrarian impulse among people that grows larger every day. If the majority of people believe something then we become immediately suspicious of it and begin to take pride in ourselves for simply not being part of something we probably haven’t evaluated properly. One ACU relevant example is the contempt I often hear in the voices of people who don’t like social clubs. They accuse them of brainwashing people and their members of trying to buy friends. The tone in their voice suggests that they fancy themselves to have wandered out of the cave and found the real world, and it did not include social clubs.

The point of all this is that I don’t believe authenticity to be this independently existing entity that we all should strive toward. We become inauthentic when we believe something or feel something and then purposefully act against it, which I don’t want to characterize as inherently wrong, there a lot of potential murderers out there whom I’m glad have decided against authenticity. Our actions make up our authenticity or lack thereof and as such I believe the majority of people to be authentic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t make it known that I hardly consider authentic to be the greatest of compliments.

Kind of tying in to the Allegory of the Cave, more particularly about how those still in the cave were willing to kill the ones that had broken free and tried to show them the world outside, I feel that’s a concept that might apply to us, even today. In the same way that people still enslaved in the cave were so threatened by the idea of something so different or foreign from what they had become so accustomed to, you could say we as people tend to react when question on issues that are close to us, such as religion and politics. As far as I know, there isn’t much in competition when it comes to subjects that tend to rile people up, and for good reason when you consider how close to their identity those values usually lie. So when something that significant is questioned, it doesn’t really surprise us when people respond that aggressively, or when we respond in a similar manner ourselves.

I guess you could think of it as, we’re the ones in the cave with a fixed mind to what we believe is the reality, and when someone comes along to question them, while we don’t exactly jump to the idea of killing them, it seems there is some similarity in the intensity of the reaction.

If you wanted to draw this out to an extreme, you might even say terrorist extremist are providing an excellent example of killing people who challenge what you believe to be the indisputable truth. Though, again, that might be a rather extreme example, and the similarity lies in the reaction, not necessarily in the principle being questioned.

[youtube N50NRQB99Sw]

This is an interesting video that examines the movie the Matrix as a modern allegory with essentially the same message as that of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.  The question raised is about the limits of knowledge, of what we can be sure of.  Can we trust what our senses and our perceptions tell us?  Plato obviously thought that it was only in the realm of pure reason that one could discern truth, or more precisely “remember” the pure forms or ideas among which the immortal soul lived before being implanted in the body.

I found Cornel West commentary particularly interesting that “one ought to be suspicious of all forms of authority” which demand obedience, since truth is elusive and relative.  Presumably Plato’s point was that absolute truth–or pure forms (“ideas” would be our understanding of that term)–does exist and that it is our senses (experience) that keep us in the cave, while reason leads us out of the cave to recover truth.  And in fact, most religious and scientific authorities, who are equally concerned with absolute truth, the former via revelation and the latter via methodology, become rather dogmatic about truth and demand “obedience” if you will.  In terms of papal authority, Dawkins among his followers might rival Benedict among his, no?

Plato himself thought that it was kings and philosophers who were capable of leading through reason, they were the corollaries of today’s priests and scientists.  So, while the allegory of the cave finds itself quite current and at home in our post-modern world with its questioning of the reality of the world “as we see it”, the implications of the allegory might differ dramatically.  The movie The Matrix seems to point to heroic individualism as the way out of the cave.  An idea we owe to the Enlightement, but perhaps not quite the utopian Kallipolis that Plato had in mind?  Or maybe Neo is a philosopher… albeit an action hero philosopher…  Did Plato believe in Warrior-Philosophers?

David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation