Plato's big ideas

In the Meno we find one sort of conception of philosophy: rational dissection of common knowledge - common knowledge of what virtue is - revealing confusion and error, and ending in uncertainty and the recognition of ignorance.

Today we turn to what looks like quite a different conception: philosopher as painter of the big picture. It's still about, is this conception, and it may be what you are looking for.

The Myth of the Cave

This is raised by what is one of the most famous of Plato's figures, the 'myth of the cave', which is presented in the Republic, Book VII 514-18.

Socrates is talking with Glaucon:

"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette-players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

That is certain."

Republic, Book vii 514-18

We are to think of a cave in which a number of people - men of course in Plato's scenario - have been imprisoned since birth. So they have never seen the world as it is outside. Actually the cave is an open one. there is a wide entrance from which the path into the cave slopes down until you reach the wall at the back of the cave. The prisoners therefore would be able to see something of the world outside if only they could look up and back through the open entrance.

But they can't. They are chained up, and in such a carefully contrived way that they have to face the rear of the cave, and in such a way that they can't even turn their heads to steal even a glance at the exit behind them.

Then we are to imagine that behind the prisoners is a fire. And between the fire and the chained prisoners runs a wall with a path running along by it. People are walking along the path. If the wall hadn't been there the fire would throw their shadows onto the back wall of the cave, but the wall obscures their bodies. However they are carrying things, and these things poke up above the wall. So shadows of these things do appear on the back wall of the cave. The things carried include images and models of all sorts of things - including models of human beings and of animals in various materials.

Human experience for most of us most of the time is like the experience of the prisoners in their fettered state. All they can see are the shadows. They can't see each other, they can't see anything else for real - only those shadows on the wall. And the things producing the shadows are not real animals and plants and other human beings either - but images and models or mock-ups of real people, real animals.

Then Socrates wants us to imagine the situation of a prisoner who somehow breaks free. They can turn round; and they can make their way towards the light.

The brilliance of the light makes it painful to do so however and we will have to think of the freed prisoner being dragged along almost against their will. But when they get used to the light they see the truly limited state of their former existence when they took shadows of models for reality, and they are able to rejoice in the state of 'enlightenment' they have now achieved, in which they see what is truly real - the sun - the thing that is actually responsible for all the appearances they formerly took for real.

Enlightenment costs - involves intense struggle - but a person who has achieved it is not likely to want to go back, Plato imagines. And should they ever try to go back - perhaps to release the other prisoners and urge them to seek enlightenment themselves, they would be likely to meet with incredulity and even ridicule. Self-diagnosis of ignorance is difficult.

Change

Plato's reasons for thinking there must be a non-physical realm of the Forms appear to be of several. At the bottom perhaps was a preoccupation with coming to terms with change.

Generality

But at least appearing to be quite different there was also a concern to explain how human beings could think - think abstract and general thoughts when the world they appeared to belong to was just a lot of individual physical things. The suggestion that there was a second real but non-physical realm at any rate was used to articulate thinking about change, and to offer an understanding of human thought itself.

How are general thoughts possible?

We can have a thought of a single individual thing because there are single individual things around us. What Plato proposed was we could have general thoughts because there were also 'general things' we could access. The general things were the Forms.

We can think of Dobbin because there he is in front of us. We can think of Dobbin as a horse - an individual thing as a thing of a certain sort - in virtue of the fact that there is a Form Horse in the realm of Forms. The individual thing is a thing of a particular sort in virtue of a relationship between him and the Form.

There are other aspects of the Cave myth I want to point to.

Disregard of the realm of the visible

First, it can be seen to make the point that 'the realm of the visible' as Plato puts it - is rubbish. It gives us precious little indication of what reality is in the round.

Disregard of the 'lower' pleasures

Second, it conveys also what is quite a different point to our understanding: that the Intellectual life is superior to the life of the senses.

Plato's dismissal of some pleasures and elevation of others is still familiar. Is there anything in it? What can be said in favour of the idea that some pleasures are to be preferred to others?

Vindication of Philosophy

Third, it offers an explanation of why Philosophers like Socrates are subject to ridicule.

The Form of the Good creates intelligibility in general

Fourth, it erects the form of the Good as the sort of head Form. Just as it is through the sun that things of the realm of the visible become visible, so it is through the Form of the Good that things of the intellectual realm become intelligible.

This is the link - if only we could understand it! - between morality and knowledge. We can only know through an encounter with intelligible Forms, and we can only have an encounter of that kind in virtue of the head Form, the Form of the Good. Goodness is what makes anything graspable. Whatever that means.

Plato's 'myth' offers a model of philosophy

Plato in the myth of the cave is offering a really big picture. It has the human being in it and it has the world we think we are familiar, the physical universe I suppose we would put it today.

That's already a lot, but it is the lot that often science is thought of as covering.

In Plato's picture however there is more. There is a bigger context, a larger world to which the world we are familiar belongs, another dimension which somehow infuses the little old universe we think we know about with meaning and with such limited reality as it has.

And in that senior world is a very senior thing indeed, the Idea of the Good, which seems to be the source or ground of absolutely everything else.

This picture of Plato's is more than a whimsy. He means it to be an account of reality. He means it to show what there is, and in making clear what the relations are between the various things - the world as it appears to us and the world of Ideas - he means to explain the things that happen and the things that puzzle us. It offers an explanation for example - he thinks - of why philosophers like him are often disregarded, and how there can be different kinds of thing.

This kind of picture-building is one way of doing philosophy, developing a comprehensive story in which everything we know of is given a place, along with other things we probably don't know of, an account which purports to offer a sort of overarching explanation of what is and how things are.

This is philosophy in the grand style. This is maybe what you are looking for.

It contrasts as a conception of philosophy with two others:

- philosophy as bringing reason to bear as best we can on any old deep and deeply resistant question that comes our way and

- philosophy as conceptual hygiene, using the analysis of concepts to don't get confused

- philosophy as a kind of music or painting but with ideas. (I myself take this deeply attractive idea seriously as a result of conversations with Lloyd Strickland)