Are we living under illusions?
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Imagine yourself trapped in a cave. Back to the sun. You have never seen daylight because only a faint ray of light reaches you. All you can know about things and yourself is the shadows cast on the cave walls and the sound of echoes…
I’m Azilise Le Coret, I’m a journalist for Le Figaro and in this episode of Le Moment Philo I’m going to talk to you about the famous allegory of Plato’s cave. The Republic.
This cave we’re all trapped in, you and me. The cave symbolizes illusion. We all live in illusions.
Plato imagines that we have been captives of this cave since childhood. We naively believe that this abyss is real life. No! The shadows cast on the cave walls are the handiwork of puppeteers who manipulate the prisoners to keep them in an illusion. You meet these puppeteers every day. it is the sophists, the pretenders, the deceivers with hollow or even dishonest speeches.
These shadows are just reflections… And yet the prisoners believe they are real because they have seen them all their lives. Plato thus means to us that we are captives of our judgments, the ideas we receive, and our beliefs. And all this prevents us from living in truth because what we think we know is a lie.
But how to get out of this cave?
The prisoners will meet… The character of the philosopher. The philosopher will make them question themselves and thus cast doubt on their certainty. He then forces the prisoners to stand up, face the light, and exit the cave.
But is it that easy? No! Because the prisoners, being used to the comfort and warmth of the cave, are afraid to leave it. They fear the unknown… I mean knowledge.
Wouldn’t you be tempted to turn away to find a familiar and comfortable reality? However, when the prisoners realize the deception and lies, they no longer allow themselves to be put to sleep and run out of the cave.
The knowledge of the true, the good, the beautiful cannot be kept for oneself. Those who escaped the world of illusions will descend back into the cave to seek out their prisoners.
Would you dare risk going down again? For Plato, once you have been able to get out of the cave, once you have encountered knowledge, it is impossible to return to ignorance, because knowledge is the source of happiness for man.
More profoundly, Plato uses the allegory of the cave to tell us that we have two ways of perceiving the world: the sensible approach and the intelligible approach.
But the sensitive does not allow science. Knowledge is not in our opinions, our feelings or emotions, but in intelligible truth, which Plato calls Ideas… This is what we are trying to do, modestly, in the philosophical moment…
Source: Le Figaro
