You Must Leave the Cave to See the Cave
Issue No. 52
In Book 7 of Plato’s Republic,1 prisoners are chained inside a cave, forced since childhood to stare at a wall. Behind them, a fire casts shadows of moving objects. It’s all they ever see. They’ll occasionally hear voices and assume the shadows are producing them.
One day, a prisoner wakes up and finds himself unshackled. He turns around, catches a glimpse of the fire, and immediately looks away. His eyes aren’t used to the light. He stares up at the shadows, then out at the world beyond the cave. He doesn’t yet know it, but he’s beginning to put things together.
He steps outside, barely able to lift his gaze, given how bright everything is and how foreign this new world feels.
Eventually, silhouettes take shape and turn into people. He tilts his head back and can see the moon and the stars. He sees reflections in water. He holds out his hand and a shadow stretches across the wall next to him. Ah, a familiar sight. Finally, he looks up and sees the sun. He has figured things out.
“I know,” he thinks. I’ll go back and tell the others about the world. About how their conception of it bears little resemblance to the actual thing.
He climbs down into the cave. His eyes struggle to readjust to the dim light. By the time he gets to the prisoners, what they see is their erstwhile inmate stumbling in, half-blind, going on about how the shadows on the wall aren’t actually alive. That it’s all a ruse by living, breathing people like them, to control and contain everyone in that cave.
A prisoner leans over to the one next to him and goes, “Can you believe this guy?”
Their lot might be bad, being chained in a cave and all, made to interpret the world by looking at shadows on a wall. However, they conclude, it can’t be as bad as going blind and losing one’s mind.2 Not only would the prisoners in that cave believe that going outside makes a person mad, we’re told, but were the enlightened prisoner to try to free the others, they’d fight him to the death for attempting such an unreasonable thing.
You can read a chapter or a book ten times and take something different away from it each time. For this week, I want to leave you with two thoughts from this one.
One. You have to leave the cave to see the cave for what it is.
Two. We’d like to think that if we were in that cave, we’d be the enlightened prisoner. What if we’re wrong?
The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it… If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world.*
—James Baldwin
Until next time.
Be well,
Ali
*This week was one of the few times in my life when I considered the futility of writing as a means of effecting change. Decisions made by those in power plunged many hometowns, including mine, into pain and chaos, and I’ve been up for days following the news and checking in on people.
P.S. Some past issues to read through in case you missed them.
The Republic, https://ia802802.us.archive.org/20/items/PlatoTheRepublicCambridgeTomGriffith/Plato%20The%20Republic%20(Cambridge%2C%20Tom%20Griffith).pdf
Related: I liked season 1 of the TV show Silo. It’s based on a series of books.
"You have to leave the cave to see the cave for what it is." IOW, to understand a thing you have to see the context in which it lives.
Please don't give up writing. Writing and other art is MOST important when the world is at is now.