Hansen 1 Kyle Hansen Professor Darley-Vanis English 103 April 24, 2013 Journey Into the Sun Knowledge, that certain indescribable thing that everyone thinks they have a little bit of, is an elusive concept that nearly every philosopher from ancient Greece to the modern day has given at least a nod to. How, after all, can we know that we are right in something if we don't know what knowing is? This question, and the sometimes futile attempt to answer it, is called epistemology. More specifically, it is the study of how we know and what that knowledge actually is. Is knowledge objective, subjective, something else, or even possible? In ancient Greece, a group of men who came to be known as the Sophists sold their knowledge without ever believing absolute knowledge was possible. According to them, the only things that could be known were skills that were subjective to the user. Skepticism of this variety was encountered by one of the great minds of philosophy, Socrates, who spent much of his life, as we know it through Plato, arguing against sophism and its many forms in his pursuit of attempting to actually discover what could be known and if anyone actually did know anything. Knowledge, to Socrates, was a thing called arete' or virtue, and the only thing Socrates knew was that he knew nothing which made him, ironically, the most knowledgeable man in Athens, at least if one is to believe his account of visiting the Oracle at Delphi. Whether Socrates was ever successful in establishing what knowledge is or is not is arguable, but his pupil and follower, Plato, takes up Socrates' cause in The Republic and, with a combination of Socrates' ideas and some of his own, attempts to show in The Allegory of the Cave what different kinds
Hansen 2 of knowledge are possible and how we come about them. Plato's work, The Republic, is primarily a work about politics and the ideal state, but planted nicely within the political rhetoric that Plato lets loose from the mouth of his own fictional Socrates lies The Allegory of the Cave. In Plato's ideal state, the leaders are philosopher kings who have wisdom and knowledge and reluctantly retire from the pursuit of that knowledge to lead those without it. This knowledge and development of kings doesn't come easily in Plato's world. It is an ordeal, a journey, and a painful path that one must undertake with various points of confusion and many reasons to turn back instead of pushing ahead. That journey itself is, to me, what comes across as the reality of the message behind The Allegory and possibly the reality of reality itself. The journey begins the same for everyone; they live in an underground den... and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them (Plato 1). Everything that I experience comes to me only through the senses and my opinions of what those senses are. If I see shadows I give them meaning and call that knowledge, if I hear sounds I give them authors and call that knowledge, and if I speak with my neighbor and share our knowledge, we become wiser. This form of life might not be perfect, but for many it's comfort, it's safe, and it's all they know. But what if, Plato says, the prisoners are set free? Just like learning something new for the first time, the prisoners would be troubled and pained as they stand and walk for, possibly, the first time ever (Plato 2), but this is only the beginning of the quest for knowledge. Once the prisoner finds his or her way out of the cave, the real reality becomes real to the person, not just an opinion. Plato says that [The prisoner] will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the seasons and the years and is the guardian of all that is in the visible word, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold (Plato 4). Throughout each person's journey, there will be the
Hansen 3 pain of new experience and the light of new understanding, until finally the prisoner escapes the cave and finds him or herself in the land of the real, absolute knowledge that everything else is based upon. Plato's journey of discovery of the real makes a lot of sense, but I find that his conclusion of the sun being the ultimate subject of knowledge and the real to be a problem within his system. Plato links together and sums up his allegory in the following statement Socrates makes to Glaucon: The prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world...but, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort...(plato 5) Throughout The Allegory, Plato shows the juxtaposition of the physical, opinionated world to the absolute, archetypal, intellectual world. The problem, as I see it expressed by the above quote, is that there really can be no telling when the opinion stops and the knowledge begins. In each phase of understanding while moving through the cave, there is an assumption or opinion that is created to understand the newly encountered thing, but once a more advanced thing is understood, the previous one becomes seen in a new light. There is nothing within that argument to suggest that the sun is the ultimate source of knowledge, or even the source of knowledge in this world. And, of course, this all hinges on Plato's opinion, as Socrates says, which may as well be a fire to the sun. Somewhere between Plato's dark cavern-like recesses of knowledge and the brilliant light of the all-knowing sun, people spend their time on their own personal journeys for truth and
Hansen 4 knowledge of the real. One of these many people was Sir Francis Bacon, one of the most prominent of the renaissance philosophers, and a literary artist of such great power that he was accused of writing Shakespeare's plays. Bacon most certainly was aware of Plato's works. In fact, one of the idols that he presents in his Novum Organum is called the idol of the cave, a direct reference to the philosopher who predated him by nearly a millennium. However, Bacon also made his attempt at piercing the veil of illusion and understanding the reality of knowledge in his work Of Studies. To me, the message that Bacon offers to his audience about what is real is that reality is a little bit of opinion, a little bit of intellect, and a little bit of experience. Bacon says things come best from those that are learned (Bacon 7). To my read, Bacon is explaining that a learned man is one who does more than study, for to spend too much time in studies, is sloth (Bacon 7). To have real understanding knowledge there must be a balance imposed other than just reading and thinking. For this, Bacon proposes reading, discourse, and writing in equal measure. Reading to give us the opinion of knowledge, discourse to cause us to think about and reflect upon that opinion, and writing to hone that opinion into something that can be universally agreed upon, or, as Bacon puts it, reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man (Bacon 8). Bacon, in this work, approaches the idea of studies in a very arbitrary manner, and that, to me, creates a feeling of instability in his argument. Bacon says, in effect, that people should read, just not too much; however, he places a caveat on what we should be reading: some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested (Bacon 8), but he doesn't specify which ones. While Plato moves slowly and painfully through his cave of opinions in search of the real that might not exist, Bacon attempts to quicken his journey by limiting the choices of opinions he has to choose from. I can't help but wonder if Bacon was condemning
Hansen 5 certain thinkers and authors while attempting to show favoritism to others who might equally embrace his line of thinking. The Novum Organum, for example, was an attempt to re-do Aristotle's Organum in a way which Bacon thought made more logical sense; but, if by the above quote, Bacon is advising his audience to read casually instead of thoroughly, then all he really is serving to do is limit the opinions that a person could obtain through studies and possibly limit their knowledge as well. Reading Bacon is not reading Aristotle, and, even though their works have similarities, reading one but not the other might be the difference between exiting the cave and getting lost in the darkness. A third philosopher who found his way working through Plato's cave in the mid-20th century was Albert Camus who wrote, among other things, The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay based on the eponymous story of the mythical Sisyphus who was punished by the gods to roll a rock up a mountain for eternity. Camus' idea of real is, out of the three thinkers presented in this paper, the most subjective. That is to say that Camus seems to be saying that reality is only what we make of it, and in that way, I can't help but find a strain of common thoughts between him and myself. Camus says, relating the human condition and Sisyphus to Oedipus, Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl (Camus 13), and later, It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. 'I conclude that all is well,' says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred (Camus 14). Camus is claiming that Sisyphus, like Oedipus, is happy because he understands and owns the absurdity of his punishment through the realization of his tragic situation; his world is his only because it is given to him through his senses and his thoughts. Even if the gods are laughing at him as an eternal spectacle for their amusement, they aren't real
Hansen 6 to him he has no knowledge of them, so why should they be a concern in his life? This might not be the absolute knowledge of Plato, or the studious and well rounded opinions of Bacon, but I see it as a certain type of undeniable personal truth. We are all, like Sisyphus, the centers of our own, private, worlds. However, Camus' work itself is slightly absurd in its proposition that reality is what we make of it. If reality is subjective to each and every person, then who sets the standards by which everyone would live? Sisyphus would realize, as he reaches the apex of the mountain and his rock returns in expected fashion to the bottom, that [h]is fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing (Camus 14), and with that realization in mind, that ownership of fate and present circumstance regardless of how miserable it might appear to the outside observer, Sisyphus must think that all is well (Camus 14) as he returns to the bottom of the mountain to begin, again, his eternal, repetitive task. This, to me, reads like relativistic complacence accept what you've been given and you'll be happy but it doesn't take into account any motivation to do more. Embrace the burden, make it yours, and everything will be OK. Knowledge isn't necessary, reality can be subjective, and acceptance of these things brings truth which, ironically, becomes knowledge subjectively. Three thinkers separated by nearly 2500 years from start to finish Plato, Sir Francis Bacon, and Albert Camus and all three are still struggling with the same problems. What is real? What is knowledge? Can we know? I don't know, but the important part, to me, is the journey towards the sun itself, not the knowledge, not the real. Even if I find a subjective sun in Camus' world, or I find that it's bad to stay in the sun too long in Bacon's world, or even if the pains of finding the sun are too great in Plato's world, each one of these worlds provides a journey of discovery for me to approach a sun, if not the sun. Like they have, I started with
Hansen 7 something, a desire, and, being freed from my chains, I painstakingly made my way through my own cave in search of whatever I could call real. Whether or not there is a universal real becomes unimportant because at the end of the day, it's all about the seemingly unending journey itself and, like Camus, an appreciation that the journey is mine to make what I will of it.
Hansen 8 Works Cited Neuleib, Janice, Kathleen Shine Cain, and Stephen Ruffus, eds. The Mercury Reader: Advancing Composition, English 103. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Print. Bacon, Francis. Of Studies. Neuleib, Cain, and Ruffus 7-10. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Neulieb, Cain, and Ruffus 11-15. Plato. The Allegory of the Cave. Neulieb, Cain, and Ruffus 1-6.