Another
node your homework attempt. I wrote this for a
Freshman composition class. It won some
prize and I got some
money. This seems to be the way things work.
Somewhere in the chaotic evolution of human civilization the conceptualized path towards enlightenment became a marketing tool. It is used to sell us idealized images of ourselves, post-journey. One can hardly tune in to any flavor of mass media without being pitched some program of self-improvement. The bestseller lists are clogged with self-help titles in genres hardly imagined a decade ago. Existential crisis seems to be the malady that plagues every American. We can hardly bear the ennui of our post-modern world: formless, godless, and with little indication where one should begin or end outside of the mortal inevitabilities. The quest for certainty or at least guiding principles has become an obsessive one for many people. We chant mantras, recite affirmations to our reflections in the mirror, wear magnetized jewelry, and practice pagan rituals while awaiting the big bang of mental clarity that is surely lurking around the next corner. We sit and wait for revelations to come to us in dreams or visions.
This dilemma is not a new one. In Plato's Republic, Socrates discusses a paradigm for improvement over the life course commonly referred to as the Allegory of the Cave. The basic outline is very simple. Socrates envisions humans as endlessly trapped in a cycle of self-delusion. He uses a dark cave where unwitting humans are chained to the wall with no hope of escape or knowledge of their condition. Plato posits that the perceptive capabilities of humans are nearly absent naturally and can only be developed over time.
Humans in their unenlightened beginnings are symbolized as imprisoned at the back of a dark cave. The prisoners face the cave wall and their only impressions of reality are shadows cast by passersby carrying models of the real world objects. The passersby carry toy versions of common objects (which can symbolize concepts in life less literal than their representations) over their heads while traveling a footbridge in front of a roaring fire. The captives see only the shadows cast on the cave wall and take them to be reality. The path towards enlightenment starts with one of the prisoners breaking free and beginning the journey out of the cave. He makes his way to the outside world where a ship is waiting to take him out into the real world.
The trip out of the cave is painful for the escapee. After an entire life spent in darkness and being deceived how can someone not be crushed by the sense of time wasted? The prisoner is assaulted by sunlight, deafened by the sounds of the outside world, and pained by the fulfillment of his never developed senses. Socrates attaches significance to this uncomfortable process of becoming aware. He speaks of the process of leaving the cave as initially motivated by curiosity and continued out of need to leave the lie that he has been living. Socrates also believed that once the process began it was impossible to go back into the cave.
The distinguishing factor between Socrates' conception of becoming enlightened and other systems' is that, ideally, one who is liberated will want to go back into the cave to rescue others. This allegorical journey from the bowels of the cave to the outside (real) world is representative, to Socrates, of the ultimate goal of a person's lifetime. Much like the Buddhist bodhisattva, an awakened person should feel compassion towards his former neighbors in the cave and postpone his own trip to "the promised land" or "nirvana" in the Buddhist canon to bring some of them into the light. In Socrates' view, this desire to save others from a dreary life full of illusion and self-deception correlates naturally with gaining wisdom although it stems more from a sense of love for humanity than a need for self-abnegation (holiness.) In much of their philosophy, both Plato and Socrates stressed internalized need as proper motivation for genuinely good deeds rather than fear of damnation or expectation of divine reward. Socrates characterized the reformed cave dweller as filled with compassion for his fellow humans and disgusted with the life of illusion that he once led. This, of course, follows a period of recovery. Once the first person escapes the cave, he experiences the painful epiphany that his life was a lie and his reality was mostly illusion. Recognizing his former lot as an existence bereft of truth, he realizes that he is morally obligated to rescue his fellow man from an empty existence.
One of the most powerful truths alluded to in this allegory is the difficulty that the freed man will have convincing his fellows to leave the cave. Socrates talks of the former prisoner reentering the darkened cave to tell the people still chained up in the cave about
the real world outside. Accustomed to the outside world full of natural light, the rescuer stumbles in the darkness of the cave and looks (actually sounds) foolish to those inside.
The cave dwellers mock him for his crazy ideas (actually implying that by leaving the cave he has become insane) and insist that they are perfectly happy where they are. The would-be liberator is empathetic; his own trip into the light was unpleasant and disillusioning in the initial steps. He is convinced, however, that captivity in the cave is an evil he must reconcile. So, despite the mockery of those still chained to the wall, he begins the process anew.
The Matrix is a contemporary take on a similar scenario. The human characters in this film are held captive in an artificial world by a tyrannical race of intelligent machines. A renegade group of humans have freed themselves from the illusory world and return to rescue others in the same manner that former captives of Plato's cave are compelled to return to rescue current captives. Although the symbolic cave they emerge from leads to a bleaker existence than the illusion they have been trapped in, only one opts to go back. Plato held that there was no returning to the familiar deception once the spell of belief in a false reality had been broken. In The Matrix, however, there is no nirvana, no promised land to be journeyed to. The reality that the cave dwellers (literally in this sense - captives held in dormitory cocoons) enter is less pleasing to the senses but is real. The awakened sleepers find the concrete world a harsher one but preferable to the artificial one that they inhabited. This preference concurs with Plato's assertion that once something has been proved false to both the sensorimotor and cognitive mind it is impossible for thinking people to revert to falsity. So, after the initial culture shock of
being reborn into reality and taking the first bracing breath of cold air outside of the cave (or in this case, cocoon) the journey out of the cave is irreversible. Plato asserts that the human mind cannot not truly deceive itself despite the relative comfort the lie may have provided. Even children take this conceptual leap when the truth about Santa Claus is revealed to them. Plato finds this hunger for truth innate in human nature.
Despite the fact that the Allegory of the Cave predates the birth of Christ, (or the beginning of the Common Era depending on your perspective) it is still a valid model for the sharpening of the mind. While the Buddhist methods of attaining an enlightened state of consciousness were popularized hundreds of years before the birth of Socrates his methodology differs radically in its proactive approach. Buddhists are supposed to wait with minds emptied until enlightenment reaches them. Socrates spoke of the quest for real knowledge of the world as a bitter battle with the inherent deceptions of human civilization. The Allegory of the Cave admits (and insists) that the process of awakening the mind is a life long process that requires one to sink his teeth into the jugular of reality and that this process is not necessarily a pleasant one.