Development of my Philosophical Concept - Essay Example

My Philosophy As a child, I spent a great deal of time on my own and made it a habit to fill my time with the fantasy stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey and others who opened an entire world of magic and possibility to me that didn’t seem available in my real life. I’m not just talking about the world of dragons and elves, but the entire different approach to life that these books suggested was possible – where people were valued because of their inborn talents and their dedication to the ideas of honor, truth and justice. The world I grew up in didn’t seem to have a lot of these things available. In my world, it was more a question of survival of the fittest and he who has the most toys wins, doesn’t really matter what he had to do to get them. I never stopped to really consider whether the thinking of the people around me was right or wrong, I just knew that they valued different things from what I valued and assumed that I was mostly crazy. That was until the day I went to hear a lecture at the university about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. After a lifetime of self-doubt and questioning my own sanity, at the age of 20 I reached an epiphany when I was dragged along with a friend to a lecture I didn’t think I had any interest in. The lecture was held in an impressive lecture hall that immediately made me feel more studious and serious. It was presented by the professors of the humanities department in conjunction with the drama department which perhaps is why it affected me so much. As the lecturers told us about the story of the cave, the room was darkened to where we couldn’t even really see our neighbor while members of the drama department walked behind the projector screen carrying objects to illustrate Plato’s ideas. Toward the end of the lecture, when the professors were talking about the enlightened being, the lights were brought up more and the drama students came out from behind the screen so that we could see that the shapes we had been so sure of were not what we thought they were. It was at this moment that I realized my way of thinking was not necessarily wrong just because it didn’t agree with the thinking of other people. I just saw things according to a different light. As Socrates, Plato’s teacher, demonstrated, I was now questioning my habits of mind as I had earlier questioned my habits of action. Essentially, Plato’s allegory starts with the assumption that all humans are born locked up in a deep, dark cave. In this cave, they are positioned in a way that only enables them to see what the controllers want them to see. He indicates that they are locked into position with chains around them so that they can’t move around and can’t turn their heads to look at anything but a screen at the front of the cave (Kreis, 2004). All they understand of the world is what they see on this screen, which is lit from behind by a fire. Just like in the lecture hall, people walk on the other side of the screen carrying objects that cast a shadow on the screen. These shadows are all that the people trapped understand of the world. They don’t know what causes the light and they don’t understand things like texture, color or the third dimension. As a result, they have no real conception of shades of grey, see no reason to make fine distinctions and are not required to make any drastic decisions unless they suddenly found themselves free of their constraints. As I sat there watching the presentation, it was impossible not to understand that I was one of these people trapped within a single worldview. It was at that moment that I dedicated myself to seeking the truth about life and about myself. As the allegory continued, Plato indicates that if one of these people finds themselves free of their chains, they will be very confused and not really know what to do. If he is lucky, he will have someone there ready to lead him out of the cave and into the larger world, but it is also possible that he can grope his way up the slope on his own. However, whether it is day or night, the natural light of the real world and the wealth of new impressions hitting him will cause him pain and distress. He will want to crawl back into the cave where things are safe and familiar (Kreis, 2004). If they are kept from crawling back into the cave, they have a chance of getting to know a higher reality. This can only be done if they are kept in the real world long enough to understand that this is the actual reality rather than the shadows they had known before. Once they accept this reality, they will have a desire to help other captives in the cave escape their bonds and come learn the reality for themselves. If they have had a chance to learn more about the real world, he will be sure of what he knows and the cave dwellers will consider him a prophet. This will make him feel guilty because he is aware that he was simply the first one to encounter the new knowledge and he will try not to accept this position. However, if he is dragged back in the cave before he becomes confident in his new knowledge, the cave dwellers will consider him crazy and will ridicule his ideas. Again I saw myself in this description. I felt I had found a higher truth in all of my reading and this truth made perfect sense to me, but I had no one in my life who really supported me in these ideas and so I had lacked the confidence I needed to really dedicate my life to the ideas that I felt were important. When I left the lecture hall, I was certain that I was among the enlightened and I had only to accept the new truths I had learned. I drifted about in a fog as I allowed myself to realize that I was not alone in my thinking. All those authors I had read were aware of the ideas I had because they were the ones who conveyed them to me. They had led me out of the cave. Just because they weren’t with me to continue to support me all the time and I had to live among the cave dweller mentality whenever I wasn’t reading didn’t mean that the ideas I had were wrong. As the brilliance of my epiphany dulled enough for me to see things better, I slowly began to realize that just because my thinking was different from the thinking of my family and others around me didn’t mean that I was the enlightened one and they were in the cave. From that time in the lecture hall to now, I have continued to study and try to figure out which one of us is in the dark and which is enlightened, following Socrates’ method of trying to use reason and logic without excessive passion or emotion to find the truth. Sometimes I wonder if it even matters. Is there a right answer and a wrong answer? Is it possible that there are many different ways of rightly understanding the world? People who place all their value on earning money have it right that in this time and place, money is the key to living the kind of life they want to live. However, to me, it seems they are missing out on something far more precious and difficult to attain which is an understanding of love and togetherness, the importance of experience and a deep inner knowledge of the self. In my experience, though, concentration on these concepts doesn’t usually provide one with the money they need to attain the leisure to pursue these things. I have learned a lot on my journey, but I don’t consider myself to have achieved the ‘correct’ answer yet. Maybe I never will. Works Cited Kreis, Steven. “Plato: The Allegory of the Cave.” May 13, 2004. The History Guide. October 6, 2009 Read More