Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Hey, hey, Claire. Yeah. Hey, how's it going? It's Alex.

Hey, how's it going? How about it? Where's David? We're supposed to be recording right now.

He's in our bedroom in the dark sleeping and I'm out here. I didn't know he didn't mention anything about a podcast. Can you make it up? Yeah, I can try.

I'm going to go in. Sure. Is he's in a dark cavernous space right now? He needs to be awake in there?

David, if you apparently have podcasts to be recording, did you know that? I just took the light on in the bedroom. Oh, where's my alarm? He's done.

Oh. Hey, what's up? Hey, what's up? I'm a speaker.

Daily there. Very clear. I mean, I didn't know. You know, I just had a phone call.

I tried to watch a documentary. Down in the main space. I've never seen him get up. I mean, usually I have to drag him out of the morning.

We're getting to 31st school. So, I'll be able to get up too quick. That's not good for his week ticker. No, it's not.

It's not. He's seeing in the glass spots right now. He's going in the room. Yeah.

You should be somewhat gladder that he got up that fast. So now he's closing the dining room doors and his eyes are slowly unpeeling and opening and I think he'll be on mine soon. All right. Well, thank you for every appreciation.

Thanks, Claire. Holy anything I can do to help. Happy holidays. Talk to you all soon.

Merry Christmas. Anything. All right. Hey, hey, hey.

Welcome back to the New Thinkery, where we take a humorous look at the sometimes giant, stuffy world of political philosophy. Join us as we laugh our way through the ideas and theories of some of history's greatest minds and explore the lighter side of politics and governance. Whether you're a seasoned scholar or just an old-time d***le doctor, we've got you covered. You sit back and relax and get ready to giggle your way through the world of political philosophy with the New Thinkery.

Wow. Did I read that, actually? I think so. What was that that you guys had me read?

I think, first of all, that's an AI generator. You've been kind of like sleepy. You sound sleepy even now on the podcast. So we thought maybe AI could take your place.

So this was a test run. Even I can't believe it even came up with d***sucker. That's like it really knows your voice. It knows.

Yeah. It's a generator David Barr asked introduction for a political philosophy podcast. It's kind of funny. You know, I asked AI, which podcast political philosophy podcast is better?

A partially example of life for the New Thinkery. And it neglected to answer, which is better, but it clearly said that a partially example of life is more introductory, cursory, and for the layman. Well, the real thoughts, the serious thinking goes on in the New Thinkery. Can you just, Alex, can you explain to the folks at home?

Because this is a big deal for you and me since we're in the world of academics, but David didn't even really know what it was. Like, it's a big deal. It's just launched in like the last couple of weeks. This is December of 2022.

What is this? I mean, it's an AI like S.A. generator generates whatever you want of whatever length and it comes up with kind of so-hless, but, you know, I mean, look, let's be honest. I mean, it's not even A to this.

What's that? Look, it's an artificial intelligence S.A. generator. And I've tried a bunch of different topics and I'm not going to lie.

Like, when I put it in, I'd give a student an A for this. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've always been wary of plagiarism. And so I tend to ask students in ponderables, like things that they can't actually answer.

Things that I don't have, like a full answer on, but just sort of wrestle with a big question. So, but yeah, if you're asking for like your typical philosophy paper, they will generate at least a B plus, I feel like, for most colleges, you know. So soon Alex and I will be out of a job because we can be replaced by computer teachers. Deliver a lecture on Plato's allegory to cave.

Go. We should do an episode like that where we just speak in these things. I mean, this is an appropriate introduction, right? Because AI is sort of like this machine, right?

What's that free that acronym people use for NPCs, right? You know, this phrase? Not playing character. It's like a person.

It's a person in the world, in the political world, like your average citizen who just imitates what's said to them. Like in a video game, you know how like you're walking around, looking around, you just bump into a guy who's just sort of stiffly, that says hello, sir. And like, what moves off like just and it's completely programmed to behave a certain way. In a way, certain people in the world of politics, you know, average citizens have this kind of echo chamber kind of mentality, right?

They just go on to what's the call the next thing and so on. And so it's funny because the AI allows them to become even more so that, right? They just it just reads the internet and then barfs back whatever, you know, it's heard in its own verbiage and, you know, grammatically sound all that. Yeah, it aggregates all these other people's ideas and spits it back to us.

Yeah. Okay. What are we doing today? What are we doing today?

We're doing Plato's allegory of the cave. Why? I don't know, Greg. I just don't know anymore.

Well, I think it's probably the things that we're old enough to remember what a story of the Matrix caused. Remember that, how and what that was. And then the reverberations of that is continued for years as we became philosophy majors or just any philosophy class or semi philosophic conversation. One would have people's hopes or the Matrix, the Matrix problem.

So you should get so sick and tired of it. But a lot of that is based off of the allegory of the cave and that the world that one existence is not the real world is an image image world that had a degree or multiple degrees even removed from a truthful existence. And before we talk about that, no, no, no, no, that's it. So I think everybody, whether or not they are, they know Plato, I think they're familiar with this problem.

Right. So this might be the most famous part of the Republic. I don't know. It has to be.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It has to be. Before we dive into it, I just wanted to say this is from Plato's Republic, Book Seven. It's an allegory cave.

We're going to situate here in just a moment. Before we do, I'm going to press Alex on something. This seems to be one of those passages in Plato's that most obviously lends itself there. Others, of course, to sort of this platonism interpretation.

So something David just said is why this triggered in my head. Right. That the real world is not the real world. The world around you that you see is not real.

So I'm putting you on the spot because this is not on the right show. But can you, could you advance for me, Alex? This sort of ordinary understanding of Plato that the world of sensuality is not the real world. Could you articulate that for folks?

No, by the way, I mean, say, no, we don't believe this as far as like speaking for yourself. I believe in it, right. The world is coming as a fraud. Yeah, the idea is that that in sort of ordinary experience, right, things coming to being and then perish and for while they are what they are.

And they have a kind of stability. And that stability comes with a certain appearance or look that leads us to say, oh, hey, this thing that came into being and this is going to perish eventually as a dog, right? We asked what does the word dog refer to refers to the looks of the thing. And that would be kind of ordinary language or ordinary experience of thinking about the look or the form of the thing, the word for form in Greek.

So that's the kind of ordinary and I think sort of not so objectionable way of thinking about the forms in relation to, you know, again, generation of passing away. The difficulty comes when you say, well, these things come to being a pass away and they have a stability and it seems like in different places, the same things, you know, coming to being a pass away. And so they have the same nature. It looks like what is that nature and that nature is this ados or day of this form, which is then posited under certain versions of this theory to exist in a separate realm.

Separate from the realm of perception and experience, yet the things around us come to have that stability by means of what's referred to as participation. They participate in the forms. They have a share of those forms and therefore get the class character, right? They have the character of this general species or class fix.

How participation works is a mystery. It's it's proposed in the Fido and then just pushed aside the whole question. It's treated to thorough critique and examination in Plato's premedities, but it's not solved there. This is an issue for anybody who wants to believe in this dogmatic, separate realm notion of the forms where the forms are out somewhere, if it's even a place and they exist eternally in the realm here.

Come, you know, matter comes to participate in the same, you know, whatever. But if you're going to posit that, you need to come up with some account of the relationship between these two realms and particularly between concrete individual instances of things, this dog here and the form of darkness or what have you. So that's the hot spit and monkey poop. Man, that was fantastic.

I was not expecting you to do such a great job. I wrote a book on the premedities. I can say a thing or two of this off the cuff. All right.

Okay. Good. But just, I mean, that was excellent. And so in layman's terms, like those sort of the vulgarized version of this is the Alex pre-UIC before me is but a sort of semblance of reality and that the real Alex pre-U is some eternally existing being or right.

No, no, no, no, no, no, it gives an individual, right? Sure. But it can therefore lead to kind of a cynicism and a depredation, sort of the body is not very important and that what's really awesome, how this essence that will, right? Yeah.

Right. And so this cop isn't really co-op and it's sort of this really weird, funny business and you did a much better job articulating it, but I was trying to explain it for the folks back home and us connected in New York. Is that a callback to, to our last episode? Yeah, it's a wonderful life.

Isn't there, isn't there's a serious part of the allegory, one which I don't understand. So the metaphor, but then isn't the, isn't it become serious in a way when Plato indicates that whoever is quote unquote, seeing the light, I wonder if that's where we get the, we get that expression from the number of places, but I've ever seen the light comes back to share the quote unquote good news, which is a great news effort as well. So with his, with his brother in a fellowship track practice and learning, don't they rent rent him limb by limb? Isn't he destroyed?

They can kill him. Yeah, they can do they kill him? They can. They killed Socrates, man.

Yeah, he's hacked his man. What do they do? Yeah, they kill him. This is a 517 a and if they were somebody who hold this guy, they'd kill him at no attempts to release him and lead him up when they kill him.

No doubt about it. That's welcome. If they get a hold of him, you might as well, he might as well. You might be very, or he might be very, yeah, might be very clear.

Like a Benny Hill situation on the cave. All right. So we've given the folks know him, right? I mean, people don't turn into the new thinkory for the every man's Wikipedia.

You're every every community college. Not there's any wrong with that philosophy professor version of what's on the cave. They want to know what's going on, right? Like, what's really happening?

So where is this taking place in the Republic? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening dramatically?

Alex is running community. She is like, I'm like, say, not that there's anything wrong with anything you persisted. Yeah, that's right. Well, we need to do it.

Let me find a more fitting note now. Yeah, but you know, there is something wrong. All right. So in the context of the Republic.

And we've talked a lot about this. I'm going to presume a tiny bit of knowledge, but in books to do for Socrates and brothers. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, who's Socrates with folks in them? And what translation are you using?

You asked that too soon. You got to wait like 30 minutes. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So books to do for us, Socrates with the brothers, Plato's brothers, I mean, it's the glaucon build a best city, right? Best regime, but specifically with a focus to a morally formative education, right?

They've got this fever city that's got all these errant desires. And so the poets need to give them the proper models for conduct to follow. Okay. Now, a crucial premise of this city for its survival is that it can't be too big or too small.

And Socrates mentions in passing, again, just briefly in book four, that they need women and children to be held in common, or it must be according to the, as much as possible to the proverb, the things of friends are common. I demand is just like whatever they move on. Right. Now, at the beginning of five, Socrates moves on to the defective regimes, thinking he's finished with his best regime.

Not thinking, but acting at least as though. I think he's trying to build this objective. He's baiting him. But polar markets objects via itemantis and says that Socrates needs to go into the whole thing about women and children being held in common.

Right. So now this amounts to asking how the city can maintain its size over time. Right. So there's now the city, which has a kind of structures put into time, but also the question of how it's going to come into being arises.

So Genesis in both senses, continuing in time, right, becoming, but while maintaining some stability, we're also coming into being. Now, on the heels of this, Socrates lays out three controversial measures. And he's of these elicits, what he calls a wave of laughter. Right.

And the first two waves of laughter concern the abolition of private property and then the abolition of the family. Right. The first wave I thought was about the equality of women in the second wave. Sorry, I'm getting back to it.

Okay. Sorry. President Plato, scholar Alex, for you. Sorry.

I'm here to check you. No, no, you're the one to do it. I love you. Thank you.

All right. So now the second, the abolition of Alex conveniently forgets about the equality of women is one of the main tenants of the public. Sorry. It's because I see them as so equal.

I don't even see them as women. Trans women are women Greg. Oh, jeez. You can't say that.

That's good. I can't say that. You can't say that. I can't say that.

But you're saying it with that face, the face that face. That's his normal face. Greg. That's his normal face.

I'm just as God, maybe. That's a line in spinal tap that always baby laugh. Yeah. The guy calls the band's like manager calls this hotel manager looks like crazy.

And he calls him a twisted through and he goes, I'm just as God, maybe sir. All right. So the three waves. Okay.

Three waves. You call the women sexual communism and third wave is philosopher Kings. Everybody's favorite wave. Yeah.

So, but the second culminates in discussion of war. It's really long. But in that discussion, Socrates argues in effect that if the city and speech came into being, it would essentially solve all the sort of inter Greek fighting during the Peloponnesian war. And this, I think, gets glaucomers ears to pick up any and he confirms that this is the case when he introduces that third controversial measure, which he says is by father most ridiculous and that's either philosophers become kings or kings are genuinely philosophized.

Right. And that's the only way they'll be an end to the oath of this world. Right. So the philosopher potential philosophy is where the cave starts to become important must ascend then from his prior moral education that was described in two to three years.

That was described in two to three involves questioning all the things that would be noble and in that process embark on a philosophic education that's described in increasingly more unrealistic forms from the end of five after he introduces them to the grand education that's outlined at the end of book seven. And the allegory of the key introduces this most ridiculous form or most extreme form of philosophic education coming as it does at the beginning of seven. And now let me just add a little bit there. So at the end of the end of book six, maybe you're about to say this.

They've moved from a talk about the flosser kings and talk about the educational flosser kings and the study of the good we move to the good. And so there's this ascent that you're talking about and there's this weird thing where the sun is said to be like the offspring of the God or something like this. So it's a couple steps removed, you get this divided line analogy talking about the education again and then there seems to be to me like a pretty big shifting of gears in the beginning of seven. I don't know if you're gonna.

Okay. Yeah, I think that's right. I just, and let's get into that. I think you're going to go into the details of the next but I just want to lay all this out because I want to recognize the Socrates identifies this measure as the one thing that can't be dispensed with.

There's a lot of things you'd have to do, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to focus on this. There's other things you have to do, but this is the biggest, the most essential thing. It's great for glaucon because it just requires one person to come up with a philosopher and then to seize power. Now it's also when I think to recognize that this all this turns on this one man, right, receiving and completing this education, and that's what will save the Greeks from this sort of ugliness of the help in Asia war.

And I think that's what glaucon really wants to do. That's really well suited to his character. So I say all this to say that the character of what you get in the cave, I think is very much informed and it's crafted to meet glaucon's hopes and ambition, right, for a sort of moral redemption. To go back to the beginning of the book to glaucon is troubled.

He hasn't heard anybody defend justice. He wants Socrates to do it. Everybody else talks his ears off. So he's obviously attracted to the argument from justice, but he's got serious moral qualms.

The best city in a way offers him a moral alternative and perhaps a way to save Athens from this moral decay that he's noticed. He's turned into, I think, by the end of book four, a kind of potential revolutionary. And that's dangerous, right? And Socrates has to then temper his ambitions.

And I think creating this sort of increasingly impossible and sort of impossible education is part of tempering glaucon's hopes. And I think that includes the cave. And so I'll be frank, you know, the cave is like a first statement of like political enlightenment or philosophical enlightenment. Like you live in a caveman, you're in the dark and the shadows.

You don't know what's going to be controlled by the puppet masters, me and all that kind of stuff. And then you've got to get out there and think for yourself and see the light and get woke and call us like it's an enlightenment reading. And that's what glaucon wants and needs. And for me, the problem is this is not, and I think Greg, David, you both agree to this, right?

This is not Socrates or this is not Socratic philosophy, which is far more uncertain in its sense, right? And his far more, I would say maybe not at home in the city, but it's in the city, right? It's not sort of escaping out to the natural world and pondering this theory of well on its own. So I don't know where you guys want to go with this episode, but I certainly want to push back a little bit against this sort of enlightenment reading because I think it's easy to misunderstand it.

Because it's so famous and taken out of context, we lose this, this, I think, important context for understanding the bastards right away. Have other philosophers subsequent to Plato understood it in the correct way, Alex, that you're describing or have even famous philosophers kind of bastardized this scene in the Republic? I mean, certainly the latter. I don't know, Greg, I can get the details about the medievals.

Yeah, the medievals get it. Especially the Muslims, I think. Yeah, but no, I think the bastardized version is what I tried to get obsolete at the beginning, which is this fantastic account of eternal beings. And I think that it's what Pope Smith's is what Alex was alluding to is that this is a particular image that's meant for a glaucon and an amantis.

I'll just amplify and maybe modify a little bit of what Alex said. I think the big part is also religious and character that what glaucon wants, he's in that amantis as well. They're both sort of dissatisfied with conventional accounts of justice and morality. They're also dissatisfied with conventional accounts of the gods and they really don't like the idea that gods can be imperfect in these things.

And so as we move to this idea of the good, what Socrates is presenting them with, I think, is a rationalized and apparently rationalized religion. It's not imperfect. You have this perfect idea of the good that's out there. And the sun is like the offspring of the god.

And so I think this has a deep psychological appeal that they want something perfect, perfectly just. And so the most obvious examples would be the Greek gods are obviously not perfect. They have these problems. And so I think you go all the way back to book one, whereas Socrates says the whole reason they went to the Pyreus was because Socrates wanted to see the introduction of these new divinities.

Here, I think in book seven, or the end of book six and end of book seven is where he's actually doing this. He's introducing new divinities. I realize I'm speaking a little bit metaphorically here, but in that he is the sort of philosopher who's inventing these, he'll be the kind of high priest of these divinities. That's not, I'm not really happy with how I said that, but right.

And so like, which will be a better cover or make philosophy more attractive to other folks. And it's been extremely successful in attracting people to what people think Platoic philosophy is. Yeah. And I'm playing around with this notion that if you read Plato's dialogue, according to Socrates life, I don't think he's presented the forms in a religious context before the public.

Here it is. This is where he's developing. I think this notion is, I'm agree with you. I mean, there were, there were public begins with a earnest defender of Justice Kepilis, who's also a piezomian.

He's not Athenian. He all of his friends who are non-medics, presumably these sort of native Athenians are all old and decadent. Right? There's a long tradition of sort of impiety in Athens stretching back probably the themistically.

But he's a medic. He's still has a little bit of the sort of old school religion. And he goes away and then it seems like, oh, we've got rid of piety. But it's looking in the background because Glaucon is asking, initially, but really throughout the Republic, Socrates can philosophy give us support to justice, to my attachment to justice, an attachment that was earlier supported by traditional religion.

And so obviously it's got to take on somewhat religious tone and lo and behold, right? Book five, it shifts to the temporal realm. How do you make it come into being? And this eventually glaucon realizes, I'm not going to be the guy.

And he hopes that if he lives justly in the next life, he'll get a better life. And maybe then he could be the guy, right? And there's this sort of, it's pushed off and so it ends with an afterlife. So the religiosity Kepilis never goes away.

He's lurking there and he comes back with the vengeance. And the forms basically just replace the gods. It's kind of dependent. So at the end of book six, Socrates has sort of given the glimpse of something he says is an image of the offspring of the good, which is the sun.

He then gives us this divided line to help us understand the world. But the real world is only the parent world. There's this whole other world besides the one which we see. At the top of these forms or ideas, the idea of ideas is the idea of the good.

By the way, the good has replaced the just as the thing that Socrates is trying to direct glaucon's attention to. So just as the sun is responsible for the existence of all the things in the visible world, so to the idea of the good is responsible for all being. This is at least on the surface of things. So great.

So let's just learn about the good, right? So this is you expect maybe book seven will just be about the good. Of course, the problem is, is inquiring into the good isn't easy. It's painful.

It's difficult. Looking at the sun can be painful. And so instead of giving us an account of the good, what Socrates gives us instead is what we have in the beginning of book seven. This very famous account of our education as it currently stands.

Right. So the, the allegory, the key, what people, you know, know or don't know is it's meant to be an image of our education, the nature of our education. So it's showing us how human beings are generally speaking. I can, I'd like to give a very basic overview of literally what's going on and then we can think about what it means.

So the allegory, the key begins at the very beginning of book seven and only goes for about five Stephanos pages as I outline it. Alex, correct me. I think it goes from 514 A to 519 Bish and it consists of two main parts. The first is the description of the cave and it's inhabitants.

And the second is the description of an escapee like someone who gets out of the cave. So those are the two main parts. So I'll describe the cave first and it's inhabitants and I'll try to describe how one escapes the cave. First off, we're all in caves, all human beings are all in caves and we're chained in these caves from childhood on, not from birth, by the way, but from childhoods.

And we have chains on our legs and our necks that are, are a compel us to look at the cave, the wild cave. So that's all we can see is the wall of the cave. Behind us, there's a kind of wall. And on the other side of the wall, there's some folks who are carrying things, artifacts of various sorts, making various sounds, by the way, behind them further is a fire.

And so there's the fire, there's the guys carrying objects behind a wall and then us and in the cave. And so what we see, looking away from them toward the cave, is we see the images, the shadows of the things that they're carrying along the wall. And as they're carrying them, making sounds, we're identifying these things. That's important.

And so we mistake these shadows on the wall of the cave for the things that really are. That seems to be important. That I think is a description of all of us. I mean, there's all kinds of questions you could raise.

Who are these folks who are carrying things? Where the fire come from? But just at its basic level, at the simplest level, all human beings are prisoners in a cave, chained there from childhood. And we have somebody distorting reality for us in a very intentional manner, and we mistake these distortions for reality itself.

So that's the cave. There's any important detail I've left out, Alex, you feel free to jump in. Okay, so then the next question is, how does one get out of the cave? How does one become released from the cave?

And here I'll point out, the first problem is there seems to be an infinite regress, as there's no mention made of how the first person escapes the cave. The only escapees who are described are those who have been sort of tapped by another. So someone kind of comes down and taps them on the shoulder and says, hey, you're living in the cave, dude. And so that's how it all begins.

So how does it begin? I mean, like, someone is coming. Here's how it happens. You were David or Alex or I were all in the cave and we're sort of looking at the wall and we're very excited about the wall.

And somebody has to come and compel us to start turning around. In other words, we don't do it ever. We don't do it ever on volition. You know, aerosol says the beginning of the metaphysics that all humans desire to know, but this would seem to cut against that a little bit, because we don't want to know.

We have to be compelled to sort of understand things that they really are. It's painful. It hurts our eyes. We don't enjoy it.

We have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the cave. Very, very, very, very few people will ever get out of the cave. It's a painful process. Once we're out of the cave, it's painful to be out of the cave.

The sun blinds us. And because of some compulsion or necessity, we have to return to the cave. We can't live apparently outside in the real world. We have to come back down into the cave.

And there's this double blinding effect. We're blinded when we get out of the cave. The sun blinds us. But if you've ever gone from light to dark, you know that you're blinded again as you come back in.

And so there's this double blinding. You're blinded. You're blinded. You're blinded.

You're blinded. You come back down. When you come back down, if you try to tell other people about what you saw, they get really angry with you. They've already mentioned this before.

They get really angry. And in the worst case scenario, they'll even try to kill you. And that's very important. Now, a couple of other small parts.

We're not going to connect this probably with the divided line story that he gives in the previous book, but Socrates insists that this must be connected with the divided line passage. The other thing, of course, I mean, not to get too dramatic, but the book begins, the entire book begins. But one, with I went down to the Pyreus and here, you have this ascent and descent. So clearly, there's something going on with the ascent and descent.

That's a very cursory account of or description of the cave and the description of the escapees. You guys should feel free to add details that I may have admitted. I just finished reading, speaking about being in cave. That was really code check.

Okay. Yeah, it is weird. There are so many questions. I wonder if Playgo, you'd like to be able to explain everything in the Republic, but there are questions I've always had about this.

The whole thing seems structured, who sets up the shackles, they're chained by their necks, I think, facing forward. You have people carrying images that are at an elevated level behind them, but in front of the fire. That's how the shadows are cast upon a wall. They're not shackled.

They leave. At least they have some inclination that they are the image makers. Now, they're still in the cave, but I don't know if we understand that they are. And they're carrying artifacts, by the way.

We're not even seeing shadows of real things. We're seeing shadows of artifacts of things. Right. Statues of men and animals.

And that's really so many steps removed. Yeah. And that's one of the problems I have with it is that you take a simple account of the forms. The things you see, like the realm of shadows, like physical things around you, is directly related, right?

To the things themselves, right? There is when I see a dog, I am noticing dogness or the form of dog, even though I might be confused. And you know, because I've only seen tiny dogs, like I don't think, you know, they're larger, like more ferocious dogs, right? So there's something weird about the two sources of light that maybe I think play with them.

That maybe I think plays them into the hands of the sort of education he's trying to set up. That's very extreme. Like it's a big gap. It seems like most people are on an ordinary level, somewhat aware of certain difficulties in their opinions, right?

Like they'll get into conversations with their friends and they'll appreciate that maybe the questions are bigger than them. It's not this full enlightenment versus full darkness vision that you get. It seems to be a way to put this in some kind of a sense of credit terms. It separates opinion and knowledge by a massive gulf that seems not accurate to the spirit of sporadic philosophy.

But I think a common misconception, like when I teach this and David alluded to the Matrix and stuff, like people will be like, well, this is marketing or this is capitalism or... And I feel like people think that it's this very obvious, superficial, everyday level that we're being deceived. Like clearly people are intentionally deceiving us. What I struggle to get them to see is that, no, no, this is a much, much deeper level than trying to get you to buy this brand of toothpaste or that brand of soda.

It's everything. The shadows in the wall are probably images of the just the good and noble, the pious, God. And so what you're seeing on the wall are actually some of your most deeply held opinions about reality, about what the world is. And that's harder for people to see.

Maybe this is obvious for folks at home, but the cave is probably the title of the book. Each individual cave is probably like a regime. It's a comprehensive... The government in which you...

And the government even that sounds too sinister and intentional and it's like the FBI doing something or something like this. It's the whole model of life. It shapes everything about you, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you sneeze. What you laugh at, what you eat, what you find funny, with whom you populate.

All these things are shaped by the regime in which... Who man what? And what? I know when people...

This is where the Matrix, right, movies laughable for me, but the conceit is that there's some superstructure running the show. The FBI would be in the cave, along with you. Yes, exactly. The secret rulers that control the world, you know, because there's no people in the world.

Everybody is in the cave, right? Don't keep yourself that your third eye has been open. You've made it out. I think so often of my monitor, this nice description of lightning flashes, that's for prophecy or you get these kinds of insights, but it's as quick as lightning and not so again.

No, I think that's right. I think there's a danger of... The question is, I think one way to put it is what are the alternatives that you're positing in your mind, right? The government says, drink Pepsi.

No man, I drink Coke. I'm out of the cave, right? No, these are silly alternatives, right? Even the capitalism and then you become a communist, but you realize you're still under some sort of unarticulated unexamined ones you're not even aware of, right?

Primacy of history and modernity and stuff like that. Not even realizing the communism is just a variant of a different, a different modernity, for example. Yeah. I sometimes, I baffle students and maybe some of my colleagues when I say, oh, yeah, I think medieval Islamic thought is the most important thing that young engineers could read because they're confronted with an alternative to science on the most fundamental level.

Right. Like, okay, yeah, you can refute like an incorrect physical theory. Can you refute that the Quran is the true revelation? That Muhammad is the highest prophet?

No. You don't have that argument. And these are alternatives that expose the limitedness, right? And this is one of the things where I think enlightenment philosophy is sort of is parasitic on the cave, right?

It lends us to think, oh, yeah, the cave is super familiar. Like you get out into the light and then you see the light, man, and all that's ourself. By the way, just to amplify what you're saying, like the enlightenment seems, I mean, it's self-consciously using this image, right? I would assume.

Yeah. I think I think it's inspired by it. Yeah. But the idea, as I stress a moment ago, like nobody gets out of the cave or played up.

Whereas the idea of enlightenment is like everybody can get out of the cave or maybe the idea is we can take a light and bring it down in the cave, but everybody gets light. Right. And we're going to sort of break the chains of muckus superstition. We're going to educate everybody.

And that's wrong. And I think this is why some of the people we study with are to think, find enlightenment and modern philosophy so dangerous because now you begin to think that you actually are getting out of the cave and this perversion of enlightenment actually leads to a false sense of competence in your own capacity. You're not even going to realize you're still in there two or three layers down. Yeah.

I often think of Greg, I hadn't considered the double blindness aspect of this story, but we've seen it with close friends of ours. Oh, yeah. They get a glimpse of some eternal truth that's deeply unsettling. They try to return to their normal operating procedures, right?

To live the life as the father. They want to, you know, they've always been, but they've unsettled themselves. Yeah. So philosophy can be your disorienting.

There are dangerous truths and it's a serious thing. And people, I mean, you know, that's a flatter myself. But the few glimpses I've had, like people get really angry with you. Can in any way identify something that is shadow and wall the cave?

Greg, don't like me up. Don't like me up. Don't like me up. No, but I think the enlightenment appeal, I think, is massive, right?

And then from there, at least to a story, in fact, I think it's important to note as you did, Greg, that you can't bring the light into the cave. Very few people with any actually right get out of there. But it makes it doubly hard to really understand what's going on. I mean, so one way to think about this is to draw attention to the person who gets out of there, right?

Are they ever bound in the first place? Right? There's a kind of natural hierarchy that's built to do. They seem to just be able to get up and go if they so desire.

But I think it's important to realize, and this is a thing of unfortunate feature of Plato's teaching is very different, I think, from aerosols in that aerosols sort of concede. But the philosopher wants to live a solitary life out of a foreigner among a city, right? Whereas Plato does present, at least on the surface, a kind of enlightenment, right, that goes on in this process. Well, but then there's the other image and another passage of the philosopher to try and take shelter under an awning during the storm, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And even here, it's like, I do think you're right that one could interpret the allegory, the cave is very much in line with enlightenment. There's also the idea that this guy who gets out, he's not trying to enlighten everybody.

He's trying to find one or two people. And that for me is like, he's just trying to find a friend, somebody to talk to you. Because he can't quite live in a solitary man. I don't know.

Like, so that was a health and combat down. I have a quick question. Which is the dialogue that is that Plato talks most about a writing or the art of writing? That's the phagors.

That's the phagors. So I always interpreted the cave. One interpretation, obviously, is what to do after you've seen the light. Once you've understood that people won't accept what you've seen or this, your description of these new businesses.

And so that's to write carefully for that one or two select people that this friend you want to make. While perhaps keeping it obfuscated from other people in the cave who wouldn't be so understanding. So I always connected the cave with, I just so obviously I apologize. But no, it's not obvious.

Writing carefully. And so in the Phagors, are there any other stories that parallel the cave or that link? That's a good question. I mean, I should say.

Are there any linkages? I don't know. I was just thinking about it. I just had that question for a few months now.

That's a great question. There are clear linkages in terms of the phagors also present the souls being consisting of parts. So that's one of the clearest places where you see the Phagors and the Republic coming together. So you get the tripart division soul and the Republic.

And you get something like the tripart division of the soul and the Phagors, but it's like the horse guy. He's holding on to both the brains with two different horses. So you seem to get something similar there, but anything else else between the Phagors? I mean, I think that interesting corollary is in the Fido where the cave was just supposed to be the city.

Right? And we should clear the puppeteers seem to be the poets. Now, let me ask something we didn't say. One of the questions that David said at one point, you mentioned these folks and then we all said, well, everyone's the cave.

But there seem to be these people who are independent of the cave or who are conscious of the cave-like character. What they're doing. And that's these puppeteers that people seem to be orchestrating the carrying of artifacts. And they're still the whole of images of cutouts of the things outside the cave.

The question I always have is, what do they get that? Right? They must have been out of there. And they must have been out of there.

Or somebody outside came down and said, of course, that's what's held out for the poets and books too. Right? And three is, here are the models, make sure whatever you make is in accordance with my model, which would imply that the person who gets out of the cave and who realizes he's been lied to all his life. Yeah, we should probably keep lying to these people.

Right? And that's the task of the philosopher's keys. They're there to really preserve the education. Right?

We're also making sure that they have the right size of the city. So there's this whole sort of oce sort of educational transformation where they realize they've been lied to. They might be angry. They go and they seem to like they adjust.

And then they have to be compelled to be brought down. But when they're brought down, they're not running around like a madman. Like Nietzsche's madman saying, God is dead. God is dead.

Didn't anyone tell you? It's not like that. Right? They're actually saying, yeah, poets, maybe adjust this a little bit.

Don't you say my most people? I went on that tangent. I just totally forgot. Well, maybe this will jog.

I mean, I'm most fearful that I inhabit the place of the poets, right? Because you read a little bit of philosophy or many years ago, I think you're like the philosophy like the two of you. And it's very easy, I think, to fall into this that you're out. I'm out of the cave that you're out or you saw the light, you know, but really it's this plateau of the poets that seems to be the most comfortable because there's the self satisfaction of thinking you know something.

So in a way, they're more deluded than just the people looking at the shadows. That's pretty good. Yeah, I think that's really good. It can give you a false sense of self satisfaction for sure.

By the way, a friend of mine, another Shrausian, so apparently, maybe Alex knows this another apparently, Strauss would say that decline all the time. God is dead. God is dead when they were out at the bar. So it's just a sort of me.

Yeah. No, he would scream. Yeah. It would embarrass.

All right. That brings me back to the point, which is so the key is the city in the way the cave is taken by the body and the veto. And that's where you get even more ascetic version, right, where again, they're trying to escape the body with only way to escape the bodies to die. And so it's not an education that saves you, but death, right?

Plato does this a lot where he uses parallel images in different dialogues, depending on the dialects of oral context. And that's hugely, hugely helpful for starting to think through what is actual teaching is to compare these images and try to see what actual overlap there really is. And you work through it also just in the different principles in the premedities, they're concerned with the one, right? In the statement, the precise itself in the republic, the good, right?

And all these different dialogues, a different principle or like highest thing is posited that's supposed to solve everything. It's always more problematic than it seems, right? Much more problematic than it seems. But similarly, these are all different views of whatever is highest based on the angle that they're coming from.

So I'm sure there are many more substantive other cave that just, you know, what we've outlined in the features of the panel. Can I now take your task on something we can maybe leave some profit from a disagreeing here. Oh, don't take it all the way to cave. I like my shadows.

Don't do it. Oh, fair enough. Hey, here's just fine. Yeah.

This is not going to take me outside of the cave and I came out of his basement and it was just in the backyard. He just f***ed some cheese. I was like, OK, Greg, you're free. Then Alex, who ran right back into the cave after watching.

I was like, this is the, I didn't even cheese. Oh, by the way, RIP. RIP to Mrs. Cheese Bar and Mr.

Cheese Bar. They died two days apart. That's fishy, Greg. Grandpa and Grandma Cheese Bar and just that's Discovery Channel.

Sorry, before Greg takes me to the table. This is a great, this is a great occasion. Every now and then you read these articles that are like, this couple married 70 years died hours apart and like, and it's like such a beautiful thing because one can and this was seemed to be the case. Grandpa Cheese Bar.

Grandpa and Grandma Cheese Bar. You know, I got a sentimental side and so one time I fled these articles. They're like, they died just hours apart holding hands. Turns out they've been a car accident together.

So they've both just an ankle. And I was like, this is a, this is the feel good story I want is just, you know, two people died because they were at or if it's a car accident. It was great to get away. Right.

Sorry. So what I was going to say was, so you said a little while ago that I'm trying to take this allegory task that it's not really an image of Socratic velocity. And so let me just press back here. I'll say, I'll try and make the case that it is a good image of Socratic velocity.

Then here's I'll try to put tax at this. First, education is not putting of knowledge into somebody. So this is an exposing right. It's not me taking my knowledge and filling you with it.

Well, that's just not what education is rather education is kind of a turning around. So the prisoner in the cave, it's trying to get him to turn his head around and look the other way. And so education is not what most of us think education is a, you know, the professor or the teacher of filling up student with knowledge. That's just not what it is.

It's just sort of trying to get the student to look at the right things. I thought they couldn't, they were totally prevented from turning their heads because the shackles have them face. Right. So the idea I think is that you're trying to compel them to turn around and look at stuff.

And so that's why it's painful, I guess, because you have this neck on. So you're, I don't know what you're doing. I don't know if you're releasing the bonds or you're trying to, but the protractic is the Greek word. It's literally just trying to turn them around and look at the right thing.

Okay. So that's one way. The second way I'll say is, at least when I teach it, I'm always, again, this is an image. So it's not literally shadows.

But if I'm right that these shadows involve the cave are people's opinions about the jostin noble, the beautiful, the good, the pious, the courageous, the moderate. It's, I think what Socrates is doing is trying to get people to look at, we all this stuff, so by the way, all of us have been using our hands a lot more than unusual episodes. And it's completely useless for audience, but yeah. So, so like when Socrates, I think that part of the credit electics is trying to get people to recognize that the shadows they're looking at are shadows.

So like, Hey, okay, that isn't, why does it do this? Why does it, you know, trying to sort of stress or press this allegory, right? So it's breaking point. Like if that's the shadow making the sound, why does it sound behind you?

But like, it's trying to get people to see that the thing that they think is real is not real. And so there's at least two ways in which I think it is kind of, it is kind of an apt allegory for a society. And then by the way, those opinions, those shadows are given to you politically. And so it is a political examination of people's moral and political opinion.

Is that, what do you mean they're given to politically? Like if the cave, if each cave is a kind of, I think, I suspect that the cave is a metaphor or an allegory for the political community. It's the regime, the Palatea. And so that Palatea forms all of your opinions and all of your opinions are based on these shadows that you're seeing on the wall of the cave.

And so all of us, I mean, this is one version of Man is political by nature. Like we, by nature, we inhabit these cave-like dwellings, which give us conventional counsel with the real world is like. And so all of our, all of our light is conventional. All of the light by which we see the world is, is supplied by some sort of poets or something like this.

I mean, think about, you know, like, like, even the language we use, the words we use, right? I mean, we don't, I don't think we're, in most of us are simply not. And most of us are simply not aware of how much our understanding of the world is shaped by the language we use. Like English, English, English, shape, or mind.

Yeah, and language, especially in our age, right, is informed by, you know, the prior history, right? Just the idea of what does it mean? What is the meaning of a work of art, right? Is it a creative expression of the artist?