The Truth of Life

Plato once wrote, “Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another, and he will contemplate him as he is” (68). One would look at that quote and agree with Plato in saying that a person can eventually learn to reconstruct any doubts and misgivings and turn them into truth and reason. In this paper I will attempt to explain how this works, and how in real life we are kept from wonderful experiences only because we are afraid of the unknown. 

In Plato's “Allegory of the Cave”; he tells us a story about a group of people that are chained in a cave for their entire life, they entirely grew up in the cave. They are chained in such a way that they cannot move at all. The only things they know are that there is a fire behind them, and when people walk in front of the fire their shadow is cast onto a large blank wall. The people in chains only see these shadows, and because of the vocal acoustics of the cave, any speaking is bounced around, so that the people perceive the shadows to be a reality. One of the, lets call them prisoners, was dragged up steps and toward the cave entrance to be shoved into the light. The glaring light immediately hurt and burned his eyes, after all, he had never seen the sun his entire life. The prisoner shrinks back and is afraid to go forward, wanting ever so wanting to run back to the safety and darkness that only the cave can offer. But instead of doing this, the prisoner stays and as his eyes grow accustomed to the sunlight different things start to become clearer in his mind. Eventually he figures out that the things that he saw in the cave were not a reality at all, but rather a reflection of what was true. The person accepts the fact that he is in fact human, and that the shadows are not the real thing. How true is that in life? The truth of life states that what people perceive to be true, may not in fact be true after all, unless they take the chance to see the sunlight, as you will, and learn just what exactly is true, and what is false.

“And now... let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened” (Plato 66). So many people in life treat things like technology, other people, fears, and unfamiliar places as scary; scared of the unknown because they think that, but it's not just thinking, in their own mind they perceive that they know. That a person or a thing can only go one way, or be one way, they don't even give something a chance first before they say no to it. Therefore they, in their own minds, know for a fact that their preconceptions are truth and reality.

People who are unfamiliar with technology fear it as much as they would anything else. If you were to ask someone who didn't know how to work a computer what they thought of it, they would say that they didn't like it at all and that it was hard for them to do anything. But ask someone who knows how to work a computer the same thing and they'll say they love it, or that they do not have problems with it. In my own life I have been on both sides of ignorance and enlightenment. The first day I got my Ti-83 calculator I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know how to work any of the functions on it or what it could do. It was a little unnerving because of the ignorance I had with it, but as time went on, things became more clear. I learned how certain functions worked, and with that knowledge the calculator became less and less of an unexplored territory and more of a place where I felt like I was in control of what happening. The same thing happened when I attempted to write programs into it. At first my mind was in Plato's cave. But with knowledge gained by reading the manual on programming and writing the example programs that were given, I was, as Plato put it, “forced into the presence of the sun” (68). I forced myself to find out how the programs worked, I forced myself to stay, when I could have denied reason and run away, and because I stayed and learned how the functions in the programming interacted with each other I was able to write a number of programs that helped me save time in a vast number of situations, times when I would have been forced to write in four or five equations each time, but instead with my knowledge of programming, which I learned from staying in the sun. I was able to make it so I only had to input very few numbers to achieve my answers.

In life many people have preconceptions about new things. Take a shy person and an outgoing person and have both of them move into a new school where everything is completely new to them and they don't know anyone. The outgoing person will immediately start to make friends, he will be the life of parties, school won't seem so bad to him. If you ask him how his school is, he will probably respond to you instantly, even energetically. While if you look at the shy person he will most likely be trying to hide in his classroom, won't like a lot of attention drawn to him, trying to look like a blank spot on a wall, but instead, in his own mind he's a black spot. He will feel lonely. If you ask him the same question of how school is he will most likely tell you that it's horrible and he wished that he never moved. That is the problem with humanity in general. The difference between the outgoing kid and the shy kid is simply that the outgoing kid realized that the new school could be fun, and set out to make it fun. He had a preconception that he would have fun and it would be fine. However the shy kid had a preconception that the new school would be bad, that he wouldn't enjoy himself at all and that it would be horrible. It has been said that our outlook on life affects how we act, and it has also been said that our very thoughts affect how we feel about something and how we react to it. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that a shy person is in effect stuck in Plato's cave, while the outgoing kid has at one point been thrown out into the sunlight and so he has realized that the way he thought before was cause for why he was treated so and acted the way he did.

Books are similar. Everyone is familiar with the phrase, 'Don't judge a book by it's cover'. Have you ever thought about where the phrase really came from? It is my belief that; that phrase is very much tied to the things that have been discussed previously. What is the usual feeling people have when they pick up an unfamiliar book? Is it not a feeling of disgust? Of revulsion? Or could it be thoughts of wasted time that could be used doing other more desirable things. I would submit that those feelings are a result of our own ignorance, of our being once again in Plato's cave. How often are we unwilling to turn the pages of that new book? What factors in life force us from our cave? Usually it is our parents wanting us to read a new book that can, in their eye's really help us. Or is it a teacher, who needs and wants to enlighten his students to the works of unfamiliar authors. He makes it a requirement to read a book by a certain deadline and then assigns a paper describing the dealings within the book. Many ways are devised to attract new readers, the summaries on the back covers, the teasers in the first few pages. The thing about this is that it comes back to the fact that we are still in our cave. But as we're forced up the slope to the cave entrance, by reading the first chapters of the book; we experience a sense of wanting to turn around and head back for the cave. As our pseudo interest in the book begins to wane, we're told that we should just get past the first chapter. In our mind we're being forced into the sunlight of the book, after a time of reading farther in the book and becoming accustomed to the sunlight; we find that we begin to see the world around to be beautiful, we see that the book becomes beautiful. I would submit to you that we, through our parents and instructors, are shone the way to enlightenment and the path to reason.

Again, Plato wrote, “Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another, and he will contemplate him as he is” (68). We, through work, will be able to change our preconceptions and ideas of people, places, and things to enlightenment instead of ignorance; reason instead of unreason; hope instead of dread. If we do this than all things are possible in the world. The world is our stage of enlightenment, we just have to show it that we are ready. We become the person outside the cave, and once we're outside, we don't want to go back.

Citations of Plato from:
Hawkins, Rose and Robert Isaacson, “The Allegory of the Cave”, Uncommon Knowledge, Hughton Mifflin Company, 1996.