Out of the Cave

It seems like whenever anyone reads Plato's Allegory of the Cave from the Republic, they always see themselves as in the light and anyone who disagrees with them as in the cave.

Here's a simple claymation rendering of the allegory.

Plato used this as an illustration of how his Forms exist on a higher level of reality than what we experience in our day-to-day lives.

Here's a longer (nine and a half minute) explanation of the allegory.

Basically, what Tim Wilson is pointing out in the video is that, although most people just read the Allegory of the Cave by itself, it helps to read the context in which it appears in the Republic. We need to know something about the Analogy of the Sun, and the Analogy of the Divided Line. This broader discussion is not what I'm interested in here, so I'll just let you read the Wikipedia articles on them if you want.

Wittgenstein and the problem of getting out of the cave

The problem of getting outside of the cave is similar to the problem of the blind men and the elephant. Both stories rely on some perspective outside of human possibility. For example, if the blind men and the elephant are used to show us that reality is different from what we each experience in our limited capacities, then that is assuming that there is a perspective outside of human experience. This perspective could only come from a super-human vantage point; a God's eye view. In the story, the king can see the whole elephant so the blind men look ridiculous with their limited experience. But we don't have that view, so all we can know is the limited experience of collective humanity. We can get outside of our individual perspective, but we cannot get outside of the experiences of the human race. (Lesslie Newbigin makes this same point.)

Wittgenstein does not tackle these things explicitly, but his thinking shows us the same thing. He uses the term "Form of Life," by which he could be taken to mean two different things, but for our purposes I appeal to his use as shared human behavior. The human form of life is the grounds by which we can speak to each other and learn from each other. This human form of life is based in what it means biologically to be a human being, but also socially in what he means to be embedded in a human culture using human languages to communicate. As he says,

"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" -- It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 241) 

In this section, Wittgenstein imagines someone questioning his philosophy, to which he answers that, in the wider sense that I take him, humans come to agreement within their form of life. This form of life is common to all humans since it is based on our biological makeup, but can differ some in terms of social and cultural embeddedness.

So Plato's cave is an allegory based on the presupposition that we can transcend the human form of life in which we are all trapped. There is no perspective outside the cave. It turns out the the king and his courtiers are also blind.

Just a couple thoughts on why I take Wittgenstein to mean biological makeup. There's one line in Wittgenstein where he says that if a lion could talk we could not understand it. Here's an entertaining discussion of that every same quote:

And here is a rather funny, if not informative, comic about Wittgenstein's lion.