Plato’s Cave

Title: Plato’s Cave
Date: September 22, 2010
Class: Theory of Knowledge
Category: In Class

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            In class, we illustrated Plato’s idea of the realm of being vs. empirical world. A few students (who were supposed to be locked up in a cave since they were born) had to try and figure out what was happening as they saw silhouettes of movements on the cave wall. Some of them were able to move around in order to gain a deeper understanding of what was going on. Some are led to see the sunlight as they explore. When they come to share what they’ve seen with the others, the others deny this as being true. This is because they grew up only knowing the cave, and nothing else. The thought of another world existing outside a cave was way beyond their thoughts and so they thought it was better to consider this nonsense. They are practicing pragmatic theory because they think they will benefit if they don’t think this is true, and so they don’t believe that there is another world beyond the cave.

            This simulation relates to Plato’s idea of the realm of being and the empirical world. The realm of being was represented by the sunlight, the world outside the cave, the reality. Plato considered the realm of being to be eternal, everlasting and unchanging. Plato also thought that we were all fooled by our senses and in reality, things are always changing. Sometimes I agree with Plato, ‘What if we are fooled by our senses?’ What if the keyboard I am typing on right now, is not really there? I could just be thinking that it is there, and I think hard enough that I believe it’s there and so I believe I am touching it and typing on it right now. This is possible, but how will we know if this is the case? Or could my senses just be limited? What if this keyboard was just a tiny bit of something enormous? What if I was one of the blind men in “The Six Blind Men and the Elephant” story? This again, is possible. Like Plato, we could think that our world is concrete, and eternal, but like the movie “Inception”, our world could be just one level of our dreams, and we are just being fooled by our senses. Perhaps, but because we believe this world is real, and unchanging, we try to make the best of it and I fear that if we believe that our world is always changing, we will all give up. Does this mean I’m practicing pragmatic theory and denying reality? Or does my thinking correspond to reality? Can we ever know and how do we know if this is the case?