From the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, discovering how to distinguish what is true from what is false, what is good from what is bad and, therefore, learning how best to live, has regularly been described in terms of improved vision. Ignorance, wickedness, and wrongdoing are associated with darkness, whereas truth, goodness and justice are associated with light. If I combine this long-standing metaphor – knowing as seeing – with the metaphor I referred to in my previous text – life as a journey – then we might say that the passage from a state of blindness to a state of clear-sightedness, that is, life as a voyage towards ever greater enlightenment, is something that is desirable in-itself.
Perhaps the most famous example of these entwined metaphors is found in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates describes the myth of the cave. This myth expresses an underlying assumption found in almost all Western philosophical thought, that the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is an uphill struggle, but one that is worth undertaking despite the effort involved. It should be remembered that the context for this myth is Socrates’s argument that the ideal state would be justified in requiring those who had become enlightened to give up their time and energy to serve others in the community, by devoting themselves to good governance and education. Enlightenment, Socrates suggests, brings to its beneficiaries duties as well as pleasures. Access to truth is not just for the few, but for all.
The myth tells of a deep cave in which some people are held captive, chained so that they cannot move their bodies including their heads. Behind and above them, a fire blazes, and in between them and the fire there is a raised pathway, along which other people walk carrying objects. The shadows cast by these objects are visible on the wall of the cave directly in front of the prisoners, the only direction in which their eyes can face. These moving shadows constitute the sum total of their experience of objects in the world. What the captives see – and therefore what they know – is not the real, but merely a by-product of some other activity, some other reality that is taking place behind their backs.
Socrates imagines one of the prisoners being released from her chains. Her limbs are stiff, and her eyes are not accustomed to bright light, so when she is helped to walk upwards towards the fire, she finds the movement difficult at first and the brightness disorientating. She struggles to see and therefore to understand what is going on around her. During this process she gradually comes to understand that what she had previously believed to be real objects were in fact merely the shadows of real objects that were moving around outside her limited field of vision, and that the glow on the cave wall was not a source of light but only a poor reflection of the light produced by the hidden fire. That is, she gradually comes to understand that what she previously believed was mistaken, an error caused by her lack of understanding of the limitations of her position in the world. Once freed from the chains that constrained her, she has become enlightened.
Except that she is still stuck in a deep cave. Socrates now imagines her being helped to climb upwards, out of the cave, a demanding physical challenge for her weak, under-developed muscles, culminating in a sharp shock to her senses, for outside the cave the light is so bright that at first all she can look at are shadows and reflections. It takes time for her eyes to adjust, for her to be able to see clearly the objects that make up the natural world in full daylight. Now she understands that what she saw in the cave, when first unchained, was only a limited and partial reality, that is, she understands that enlightenment is a process of discovery, not a stable state of knowledge. Her final challenge is to look directly at the sun itself, the most powerful source of light on earth, symbolic of the distant, final source of truth.
For all its tendentiousness, I like this story. In my experience, the process of enlightenment does feel much like the process of moving from confinement to liberty, from darkness to light, from below to above. The journey can be exhausting, requiring the application of considerable time and energy, but it also includes moments of exhilaration as we discover that not only have we come to understand more about the world, but also we have come to see why we were previously deceived. Then, just as we start to become comfortable with our new insights and our new capacity for intellectual effort, we discover that our first steps were just that, simply the preliminary exercises to prepare us for a much harder challenge, the foothills that we must walk up before we are able to climb the higher mountains, into much brighter light. When we think we have understood what life is about and have become acclimatized to our place within it, that is the very moment we discover that there is another step upwards, to a higher plane of seeing.
The myth of the cave is around two-thousand five-hundred years old. What should we make of it today? One of the curiosities of Western philosophy as an academic subject is that for much of the time since Plato one of its dominant themes has been the difficulty – or, at the extreme, the impossibility – of discovering knowledge about reality. Western thinking has been obsessed for centuries with the worry that there is almost no knowledge about which we can be completely confident, that we are condemned always to seeing only shadows. There has been a widely held assumption that either the truth about the world is accessible only to gods, upon whom we depend for whatever guarantees they might choose to make available to us about the reliability of our senses and reasoning; or that it is simply not possible for us to know anything with any certainty, except for some rather circular propositions in logic, mathematics, and other artificial languages. Despite this, outside of philosophy lecture and seminar rooms, humanity has colonized the planet, pushing up our average daily calorific intakes and our average lifespans, while building vast depositories of knowledge. For all our epistemological insecurities about what we could know with absolute certainty, we have constructed some impressively large libraries and databases containing documents that show how much we already know about the world, and which for all practical purposes seems to work.
In Socrates’s myth the prisoners in the cave are wholly passive: they sit and watch the shadows and play some guessing games about them, but they have nothing to do, no tasks to complete, no challenges that test them, and no opportunity to undertake experiments that might improve their understanding of their rather limited place in the world. They know nothing but then they have no need to know anything. Even the prisoner who discovers that the shadows are not real objects and, later, that the fire in the cave is not the only source of light, does not make these discoveries for herself as part of a determined effort to flee her captivity. Rather, she is released from her chains and guided out of the cave by others. Ignorance is her fate: she is not a seeker after truth, but it is shown to her.
The actual history of human discovery is quite unlike the myth, for it is the story of our self-education as a species, in which individuals and communities were spurred on through their confrontation with puzzles that needed to be solved. How do we distinguish berries that are poisonous from those that are safe? How do we track and catch an animal to kill for food? How do we predict the weather by looking at the stars? How do we cultivate crops for food? How do we navigate across rivers and seas? How can we develop vaccines to protect against viral diseases? How can we send digital information from one wireless mobile device to another, using compressed files formats? To solve these problems required the contribution of many people, each of whom was able to pass on to others details of the progress they had made in their search for solutions. We are active and collaborative learners.
One of the great virtues of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy has been to make clear the practical nature of knowledge. Truth, the pragmatists argued, is not some independent property of objects, or of statements in language, waiting to be discovered and cherished. The truth is what works, what is useful, what makes sense, what solves the problem at hand, what we come to agreement about after due consideration of all the relevant evidence. Writing around one hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Saunders Peirce, the leading theoretician of the first generation of pragmatist thinkers, made clear the connection between thinking and living: If I am asked to what the wonderful success of modern science is due, I shall suggest that to gain the secret of that, it is necessary to consider science as living, and therefore not as knowledge already acquired but as the concrete life of those who are working to find out the truth. (Scientific Method).
Peirce stresses not just that the search for truth is an active process but also that it is a communal process. What we determine to be true is what we all come to agreement upon, given the absence of time constraints. Truth, for the pragmatists, is not that which works for me, but that which works for us. And, in principle at least, Peirce judged that this meant that the entire universe could be known in full. His forecast of our species’ vast capacity for knowledge-acquisition is well captured in a review he made of a new collected edition of the writings of George Berkeley, which I quote here at length:
Let any human being have enough information and exert enough thought upon any question, and the result will be that he will arrive at a definite conclusion, which is the same that any other mind will reach under sufficiently favourable circumstances, … There is, then, to every question a true answer, a final conclusion, to which the opinion of every man is constantly gravitating. He may for a time recede from it, but give him more experience and time for consideration, and he will finally approach it. The individual may not live to reach the truth, there is a residuum of error in every individual’s opinions. No matter, it remains that there is a definite opinion to which the mind of man is, on the whole and in the long run, tending. On many questions the final agreement is already reached, on all it will be reached if time enough is given.
Peirce’s epistemological utopianism might seem implausible today, not least because the world remains deeply divided about what counts as truth. Well-established scientific knowledge – about vaccines, to take a topical example – is rejected by a recalcitrant minority. In the case of scientific evidence about changes to the earth’s climate due to human activity, the lazy majority appears content simply to avert their attention, as if there were not a serious problem that needed resolution. In other areas of human thought, less amenable to objective testing, disagreement remains widespread: there is no settled view about the optimum role of the state in the economy, nor the likely consequences of too little or too much state activity; there is no agreement, irrespective of vast accumulations of anthropological evidence, about the existence or not of distinct races within our species, nor what the basis of such distinctions might be; and there remains no consensus on the truth or otherwise of a wide range of religious claims about what happens to us after we die. Peirce’s idea of a “definite opinion to which the mind of man is, on the whole and in the long run, tending” seems as elusive today as it ever was.
One reason why progress towards a shared understanding of truth is so slow – and perhaps, from time to time, non-existent – is that it is a hard task. Remember the myth of the cave: to come to understand the limitations of our view of the world we need to be freed (or to free ourselves) from our chains, we need to clamber uphill out of the cave, we need to allow our senses, long attuned to operating only in dark, confined, underground spaces, to become accustomed to the bright light, the sounds and smells, the wide-open spaces of the world. But, unlike in the myth, in reality this moment of enlightenment cannot be given to us by others, only grasped by ourselves. Acquiring knowledge is not easy work: it takes time and effort, it uses energy, it removes us from a place of security and familiarity and leads us somewhere new and unfamiliar. Ignorance, by comparison, is often comfortable and comforting: there is nothing to do all day but watch meaningless shadows flickering upon a cave wall (or a television screen).