The Virtue In Finding The Truth
There’s a famous allegory by Plato known as The Allegory of the Cave. It’s a fairly short passage in Plato’s Republic. I highly recommend finding a free PDF of it online and reading it for yourself, and hope that I can inspire you to do so through my paraphrase of the allegory and the lesson I think we can afford to learn from it. Bear with me, I’m no scholar of Plato, but I do have a special place in my heart for this story.
The Gist
In this famous classic, Plato paints an image of a group of people chained facing a wall in a dark cave. They were born and raised in the cave, facing the wall, unable to turn and look around them, so they’re forced to stare at a wall, all the time. Far behind this group of people is a fire; in the space between this group (let’s call them the Wall Eyes) and the fire is the space where free people walk. The only objects and activities the Wall Eyes ever saw were the shadows created by themselves and the passersby behind them. To the Wall Eyes, the truth can only be the shadows they saw because that’s all they’ve ever known. They don’t know people are making the shadows, or a fire lighting up the wall for people to be able to make the shadows. To them, the shadows are stone-cold reality.
After the Wall Eyes, there are the people who we’re going to call the Part I Escapees. These Escapees make their journey out of the chains of the shadowlands. They see more than just the shadows now; they see the real people, and their hair, the color of their eyes, and the shape of their noses, not just the shadows of people. They see the real fire with all its blazing heat and glory, not just the shadow of the fire and the shadows created as a byproduct. The fire and the people making the shadows are the newfound truth for the Part I Escapees. They escape the 1-D world and now have a deeper, more real understanding of the world than the Wall Eyes.
So far, we’ve established the Wall Eyes and the Part I Escapees. After the Part, I Escapees are who we’re gonna call (and this one might feel like it’s coming out of the left-field,) are the Part II Escapees. The Part II Escapees don’t just make their way out of their chains into the open cave, they make their way out of the cave into the open world where the sun and grass and trees and everything else reside. The life of the real world: the fresh air, the blue sky, the green grass, the colors more than grey, darker grey, orange fire colors, blue fire colors, become reality and truth for the Part II Escapees. They escaped the cave, they have the most accurate perception of the truth of the real world, relative to the Wall Eyes and Part I Escapees at least.
The Reason it Matters
Let’s quickly try something with this metaphor: put yourself in the shoes of the Wall Eyes. You’re imprisoned and that prison is all you’ve ever known. You believe what you’ve been told since you were born by whoever, and part of the reason, maybe the whole reason why you believe it is because it’s all you’ve ever known. You don’t know that anything else is out there. You don’t know people are making the shadows on the wall, you don’t know there’s a fire lighting up the wall, to you, the shadows are as real as your flesh and blood. You believe
That truth is a lie, and you have none of the tools to think otherwise. That sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it?
Many of us reside in the Part I Escapees camp, and some of us probably live in the Wall Eyes camp. I don’t think anybody is truly and wholly a Part II Escape, though that’s the goal, that’s a conversation for another day. Escaping the cave is a difficult and painful process, Plato expands on this better than I can. Just imagine, it’s like when you’re watching a movie in third grade and the lights are out, and without warning, your teacher turns on the lights. That hurts your eyes! Firstly, you didn’t see it coming, secondly, the contrast is so jarring it causes pain. Escaping the cave is like that, but even more painful because it’s not your physical environment that’s changing, it’s the ideas and views you hold to be true.
Despite the pain of the process of obtaining Truth, we are without excuse in this. We have endless resources at our fingertips, in the form of books, YouTube videos, and Google, to ask any question we have and do a deep dive search to discover what we without a doubt hold to be True. Nobody has a perfect ideology, nobody has a perfect philosophy, but we all have the tools to discover how we are still living in the cave and the tools to get us out of it. We don’t have to stay in the cave. We can research and think for ourselves, and from that, we can find what is wholly True. Let’s not shy away from being virtuous, let’s fight to find what is true because we have the privilege of being able to.
Image obtained from Squarespace
