Philosophy 101 Unit 1

“If a man shall begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” –Francis Bacon

I think it’s interesting that Descartes pulls us into this hopeless gyre of complete uncertainty, his arguments—meditations if you must—increasing one’s capacity
for doubt at an alarming rate, yet this is the man whom all philosophers conclude to be wrong.  It’s interesting that this is where we start.  We start with the man whose work is about doubt and whom we, apparently, should doubt.  

This is a bit much for me to fathom, considering that Descartes takes so many redundant and poorly phrased sentences to finally conclude that something is certain. And once we find out that we can be sure of the existence of our own minds, it turns out that contemporary philosophers are throwing Cartesian thought right out the window (drastic oversimplification, yes I know).  That’s an upsetting place to leave your Philosophy 101 students in the first three weeks of class.  

But, just like Descartes felt the need to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations,” so do we, as a class, I guess, need to come
to some mutual tabula raza.  Perhaps what we attempt, in that quaint Allen Hall classroom, is to build up a vocabulary of shared understanding in order to reach
our own pinnacle of original (and possibly incorrect) thought?  Or are we merely swallowing and spitting back out what other people have said before?  Does higher education even afford us the opportunity to reach the heights Descartes achieved—i.e. is original thought, although later completely refuted, a greater truth than
complete understanding of someone else’s experiences and realizations?  Can even one original thought stem from a class structured in such a manner (glossing over the questions, what is original? Does originality exist)?  Alas, this metacognition business is a series of winding questions.

I don’t rightly know if this counts as an appropriate post, but I think it would be interesting to apply Descartes’ model of doubting everything—existence, life,
blah blah—and use it to doubt college education.  It something that we generally take for granted, given that for many of us it’s what we’re “supposed” to do.  If it makes sense for Descartes to doubt his senses and the world around him, then it makes sense for us to doubt the institution that teaches us that learning about Descartes is important.  For we cannot start from the beginning, we cannot “raze” and ideas to the ground, if we still accept that education is important.  I pose the idea that the way we blindly accept education is much the same way that fundamentalist religious types blindly accept their religions.  It is
instilled in both from early on, and necessitates some degree of faith.  After all, we are never taught the philosophy/psychology/reasoning behind the multitude
of teaching methods to which we have been subjected.  This is just something we never “need” to know.  But if we can’t question the system from which our lessons stem, how can we go beyond the lessons and seek individual thought?

Just as Descartes questioned existence in order to accept the mind, so must we question education in order to learn.  (I’m pretty sure a reasonably intelligent person poke a million holes in that analogy and in the preceding argument.  Just wanted to make sure you were aware that I am aware.  Because I’m aware.)

Have a lovely day, dear classmates and teacher.  Have a lovely day.

While reading Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” I became slightly bothered by some of the imagery he used, probably because I could not help but relate the allegory more to acquiring a higher level of consciousness than what I think was Plato’s intended comment about trusting a priori knowledge over a posteriori. Whatever Plato’s intention, to me, some parts do not add up.

My first problem with Plato’s allegory is the stark difference he draws between the visible realm and the intelligible realm. To him, either a person breaks free of their chains or does not. At least in my experience, the degrees to which humans attain Plato’s definition of “education” are anything but black and white. In real life, even the most seemingly simple-minded prisoners in the shadows question the validity of what they see and pose epistemological questions often pointing to a deeper existence in the intelligible realm. Just because a person does not undergo a painful transformation “up the rough, steep path” does not mean he or she is completely unaware or in denial of “truth and understanding,” as the prisoners in the cave.

Perhaps we are intended to understand that some people are further along in their journey out of the cave than others, and Plato does address this briefly by acknowledging that a prisoner would “need time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above,” suggesting that enlightenment does not come overnight. However, he undeniably paints an image of two separate groups of people: those who take what they see at face value, and those who pursue truth and goodness through knowledge. I believe the allegory would be both more accurate and easier to apply to daily life if it addressed the gray area between a person trapped in the visible realm and one completely in touch with truth within the intelligible realm.

Secondly, I do not understand why enlightenment obviously ends once the prisoners get out of the cave. Initially, the prisoners “in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.” Since they were wrong once, how can the prisoners be confident after their escape that their new perception of “truth” is errorless? Plato even uses the terms “truer” and “clearer” in descriptions of the intelligible realm, as if to indicate that what is seen there is not necessarily the truest or clearest. It would be logical to assume that these prisoners, instead of being content with a “truer” world outside the cave, would be more skeptical of their perception of the world and explore the potential for an even clearer understanding.

Finally, if all humans have the capacity to break free of their chains, why does Plato describe the original man’s freedom from the cave as though it were something not done of his own accord, but rather, given to him by an outsider who “dragged him away from there by force?” How are the prisoners to know that something exists beyond the walls of their cave before someone breaks them free? The chains metaphor implies that the prisoners are bound until someone else releases them. To me, this portrayal seems inconsistent if Plato believes all humans have the equipment to access the intelligible realm independently.

I am not necessarily asserting that Plato’s allegory is flawed, because applying the a priori/a posteriori concept to the visible and intelligible realm makes understanding the lack of gray area or the enlightenment ending at the cave easier. I think I just read it from the wrong angle and started analyzing the wrong details, but I also thing that it is possible I took an inaccurate approach because the allegory may not be completely right in the first place for what Plato is trying to accomplish.