The Life of Kings
The One Suffering You Could Avoid
Shadows on the Wall
Plato writes in book seven of The Republic a description of a cave in which prisoners find themselves since childhood. Arms and legs shackled, necks chained, they cannot move, gazing forward, unable to turn their heads. A fire blazes above and behind them near the place where life passes outside the cave so that they behold the shadows on the wall.
They cannot see one another. They only see their own and others’ shadows. They can speak to one another, but what they hear from beyond arrives as a distorted echo down the cavern walls.
And should prisoners find themselves free, to turn toward the entrance’s light would cause them to suffer sharp pains and feel distressed by the glare, blinded to what resides outside the cave yet also rendering the shadows on the wall to which they had grown accustomed less clear. He then poses the essential question:
Will he not fancy the shadows which he formerly saw as truer than the objects which now reveal themselves to him?
The light blinds whereas the darkness comforts and, moreover, the arduous task of ascending the steep and rugged way to liberation lies before the freed prisoner. Say one of the prisoners makes his way out the cave, though, toward the light. He would only find himself able to behold shadows at first, then reflections, natural objects, the light of the moon and other stars until finally being able to withstand the light of day.
To see, finally, the sun—neither shadows nor reflections—this freed person now ably sees himself in his proper place, contemplating himself as he is, not in the world of illusion, projection, avatar.
What would a person who freed himself of the cave wish to do upon braving the light and discovering the truth of himself?
He turns his eyes back to his fellow man still trapped below in the darkness and illusions and falsehood. Returning to the cave entrance, he shares what he discovers to help free those who once shared his seeming fate. What happens?
The prisoners see only an unfamiliar, monstrous shadow upon the wall whose truth echoes and distorts down the cavern walls, frightening them.
They do not want to hear what he attempts to express, wishing only to gaze upon the familiar facade upon the wall, the shadows of reality, the echoes of truth. Even if they could understand this stranger, why would they wish to leave? It asks much—too much for most, for the shadows and echoes comfort: everything they need to know lies before them. Should that person attempt to free another, the prisoners would only wish to put him to death.
Yet the duty of the freed mind which found a way toward the light fills him so that he returns regardless and wishes to help those still trapped in darkness and fear. What else could define what it means to live the good life than this?
Long Is the Way
Once more, we turn to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as a guide toward the light. I always understood this book to serve as a lens of Plato’s Republic through which America—particularly its education system—finds itself scrutinized. Unfortunately, the book immediately found acclaim and largely for the wrong reasons—in the culture wars between leftism and rightism. The ideologues, enthralled1 by shadows and echoes, failed to grasp what Bloom offered, a book serving as “a meditation on the state of our souls.”
Bloom presents Plato’s cave as allegory for culture. He argues that education should submit the great minds to students because “potential points beyond itself” and remains “the source of the hope … that man is not just a creature of accident, chained to and formed by the particular cave in which he is born.” Young epitomize potential itself and, thus, the source of hope. The canon offers to them the profound ideas worth posing and considering and, in particular, deals with the axiomatic question undergirding all of life and which ought to inform all of education:
The question that every young person asks, “Who am I?,” the powerful urge to follow the Delphic command, “Know thyself,” which is born in each of us, means in the first place “What is man?”
What does it mean to be a human being? To ask who I am turns toward what it means to exist as a human being and ultimately what humanity means. Education ought to equip students with the skills which empower them to seek the answer to this question, to live a philosophical life. Without an introduction to the books and authors who sought before to answer it, the youth will forever reside within their caves.
Bloom neither romanticizes teaching nor rests his argument upon the classroom. He states that teachers understand their task “to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice” and, more relevantly, that real teachers “who in practice … believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech,” recognize that “at the outset of education [it] require[s] extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity,” but that it ultimately finds the “activity [of education] is its own reward and is self-sufficient.” Bloom warns against the teacher whose temptations teeter on the “vanity and desire to propagandize [and proselytize] rather than teach” as this invites “the danger of preferring teaching to knowing.”
A vanity exists in presenting oneself as a knower, of glamorizing oneself as an arbiter of truth to the impressionable. This desire to act as sage reflects the shallowness which pervades the eternal image-concerned youth whose concern with finding place and self by reducing the infinite complexity of the world as something easily “known” and, in turn, solved or saved. It feeds and, in my opinion, preys upon the “adolescent’s egocentrism [which arrives] in a sort of Messianic form such that the theories used to represent the world center on the role of reformer that the adolescent”2 will feel called toward such amelioration and activism: a savior, an anointed one.
This misleads youth from humility and neglects the one worthwhile reform they might undertake and reaves the opportunity to save oneself in favor of saving a world which cannot and needs no saving. It dismisses the vigor required to arrive at understanding feigned by the teacher and the ardor one finds upon undertaking the clamber out the cave. It values image over substance.
As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.
The guides exist for us to find our way toward the light, awaiting us in those manmade mountains, the great books, and as John Milton writes from his mountain, Paradise Lost, “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.”
liberalia igitur studia vocamus, quae sunt homine libero digna
This Very Holding Back
A paradoxical epiphany overcame me one day at my studies when I felt that the more I read, the less I believed I knew. The more I attempt to clamber from the cave and absolve my ignorance, the more ignorant I believe myself to be.
Who am I to teach another person? I seldom lecture. I will deliver skills and offer criticism, but I always identified as one who wished to know, not one who knows. I never aspired to teach and, in fact, actually began teaching literature after losing a bet to my last roommate in graduate school.
Like the majority of my classmates, he worked as a teacher at a prestigious private school. Unlike everyone else, I worked menial jobs by choice to avail myself as much possible free time to devote to reading the canon3 and experiments with writing literature. It bothered him that classmates sought my advice about literature to include in their curricula, feeling my intellectual gifts went unused. I spent the majority of the semester declining his encouragement toward teaching but finally relented, expressing to him that I would apply to the first position listed online and commit to whatever transpired on the condition that he never broached the subject again. He agreed. I applied to the first opening that appeared in my search of private schools—a military academy—only to find myself contacted the next day. I conducted my interview on a pay phone on a dirt road in the green hill mountains and still somehow found myself offered a position. The rest, as they say, is history.
I possessed no background in education except my own and what disappointments and disillusionments burnt into my memory. I decided I would do my utmost to teach the skills necessary to develop a foundation for becoming a thinking individual: how to read, speak, listen, and write carefully—in that order. I would not assign “busy work” and would set high standards. It meant that I needed to develop a philosophy of grading that belonged to me. I never wished to plant my beliefs in my students’ minds but instead encouraged them to cultivate a philosophy of the world that they earned. I declared I would do everything that I wished my teachers had done for me and dismiss everything I wish they had not.
I only wanted to teach them how to think, not what to think4.
Bloom writes about his own experience, not unlike my own with teachers and professors alike, when he expresses how he “once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology [who] said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students.” Bloom’s immediate thought mirrored my own regarding those who stand before eternity with a priggish stance on culture and belief:
I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with. He did not seem to have much of an idea of what the opposite of a prejudice might be. He reminded me of the little boy who gravely informed me when I was four that there is no Santa Claus, who wanted me to bathe in the brilliant light of truth. Did this professor know what those prejudices meant for the students and what effect being deprived of them would have? Did he believe that there are truths that could guide their lives as did their prejudices? Had he considered how to give students the love of the truth necessary to seek unprejudiced beliefs, or would he render them passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself, or the best of contemporary thought? My informant about Santa Claus was just showing off, proving his superiority to me. He had not created the Santa Claus that had to be there in order to be refuted. Think of all we learn about the world from men’s belief in Santa Clauses, and all that we learn about the soul from those who believe in them. By contrast, merely methodological excision from the soul of the imagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall of the cave does not promote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers.
I feel fortunate to find myself in the position not to lead students toward my truths but the wherewithal to find their own, to grapple with the great ideas and minds that came before, to see what questions these minds posed at the world, to witness how it might inform us with the world as we know it now. I work in a field which ushers young people toward vocational training, i.e., college, and trounces them with obsession over statistical worth5, heaving significant demands upon them with little to no soulful merit or reward—only the continuation to the next phase of that journey6.
Naturally, the majority of people within this field march forth, lockstep, parents either in tandem or playing the music to which all march. I understand: They want to ensure the well-being of their children and their futures. But what life feels purposeful if the standard course resides in defining oneself largely by career and whatever pop culture and contemporary mores with which we find mass media awash? Is this the same life compelling people to work toward others’ dreams and look forward solely to the weekend? Is this the life full of binge-watching programming or using substances to cope with the anxiety and stress and loathing by failing to pursue what calls, by failing to actualize? Is this the life we want for ourselves and for those we love?
These parents and those who tell the young not to take a risk, not to pursue a dream, not to find their own way, resemble those who Bloom states “can shop around for a psychologist just as some Catholics used to shop for a confessor” and that when “these students arrive at the university, they are not only reeling from the destructive effects of the overturning of faith and the ambiguity of loyalty that result from divorce, but deafened by self-serving lies and hypocrisies expressed in a pseudoscientific jargon.” He then distinguishes the role that psychology takes over treating not merely existential but, I would argue, meaning crises facing modern societies around the world:
Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of the soul. It has no place for the natural superiority of the philosophic life, and no understanding of education. So children who are impregnated with that psychology live in a sub-basement and have a long climb just to get back up to the cave, or the world of common sense, which is the proper beginning for their ascent toward wisdom. They do not have confidence in what they feel or what they see, and they have an ideology that provides not a reason but a rationalization for their timidity.”
It appears a vicious cycle. This fear permeates and paralyzes us, beginning with those who only know the cave and imparted upon those whom we ought to awaken from the cave. This negligence and selfish worry steals what otherwise potentially proves most enriching and meaningful, as Bloom states, the world of ideas being “freedom, truth, and the greatest pleasure” and what the cave means:
[This] presentation is meant to show that we begin from deceptions, or myths, but that it is possible to aspire to a nonconventional world, to nature, by the use of reason. The false opinions can be corrected, and their inner contradictions impel thoughtful men to seek the truth. Education is the movement from darkness to light. Reason projected onto the beings about which at first we only darkly opine produces enlightenment.
Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upwards that the “human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo—even when it’s not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.” We see this in the prisoners in the cave and in the fear of venturing into that unknown or encouraging ourselves—and those we love—to take a risk or to place our mind, or scarier yet our souls, on display by offering our thoughts or creations to the world. Instead, “[w]e all become [a] well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly … [A]ttacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.” Perhaps this explains the nature of the statement of “those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.”
And considering aphorisms, as a child, I always disliked hearing “wherever you go, there you are.” But, more and more, I recognize its profundity. We can prescribe as many pills and take as many vacations and distract ourselves as much as we can, but when that fix fades and reality returns, “there you are,” back in your respective cave.
What is to be done?
οὔτε γὰρ πίπτοντός ἐστιν ὀρθοῦν οὔτε διδάσκειν ἀγνοοῦντος
The Lost Hosts Awaken
When the American journalist H.L. Mencken corresponded about the time spent in his life in journalism, he reflected, “[A]s I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” He pursued the facts, the truth, and conveyed it to those otherwise left in the darkness of their caves.
Plato’s cave certainly represents our culture. But I wonder if we, ourselves, after a time, no longer even wear the shackles that once hindered us, much like the circus elephant that, staked and chained to a position, conditions only to move this distance, that direction, long after the stake and chain have been removed. Is that us?
Bloom keenly defines the human condition in that a “hostile relationship between the prevailing passions of the philosopher and those of the dēmos7 was taken by the philosophers to be permanent, for human nature is unchanging,” elaborating further that “[a]s long as there are men, they will be motivated by fear of death.” This death may very well be literal or figurative in the death of the former self. Yet this “passion is primarily what constitutes the cave, a horizon within which hope seems justified” and to serve “the community that lives in the cave, risking one’s life for what preserves life, is honored.” Perhaps those who would heave safety and stillness onto the youth, onto their fellow citizens, portray what Bloom calls the “[v]ulgar morality [which] is the code of this selfish collectivity, and whatever steps outside its circle is the object of moral indignation. And moral indignation, not ordinary selfishness or sensuality, is the greatest danger to the thinker.” What thoughts bind and which self-imposed limitations hem you, consuming the you who otherwise could flower into being?
Don’t you want to know that other you whom you leave chained within the cave?
Bloom’s final mention of the cave specifically explores how each great mind possessed “a different beginning point, a different cave, from which he had to ascend to the light and to which he had to return,” for the philosophers who exist in eternity “appeared to be ‘relevant’ without forming their minds to the prejudices of the day” and “[t]his protected them from the necessity or the temptation to conform to what is most powerful.” The fear of mere being in the face of the mob silences and sterilizes if not outright crushes the individual. One occasionally slips free and comes to rescue us.
How difficult a deed to free oneself from the shadows you do not even know exist.
The shadows appear to us as the culture and myths which fool us. Those with good fortune who manage to escape the cave through education might find light reflected in the water. Yet these forms, too, exist as reflections of the light, not the light itself. Those who manage to escape the cave might find themselves aligning with ideologues who exist as reflections of another light. The grand undertaking and leap resides in exiting the cave and ultimately finding the capacity to look toward that light which blinds. It enters us and must be held with our own eyes, neither as shadow nor as reflection.
You are not the ideas in your head. You do not need to be the prisoner afraid of the unfamiliar beyond the cave or distorted echoes down the cavern walls. Carl Jung once wrote how everyone “knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’” and how what “is not well known … is that complexes can have us.” This works with ideas too—and in the way that people confuse themselves with the ideologies they carry, or that carry them—and toward what destination, who knows. This might resonate with what Dostoevsky meant in Demons when he states that “[i]t was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.” To be free is to form your own thoughts.
The opportunity to save ourselves exists in each of our unsummoned selves who call to us from the unknown, potential future by turning toward the light and stepping into becoming. It would seem the fear that we experience in regard to the uncertainty surely holds nothing against the suffering that comes with never acting on the only thing you ever ought to have done.
Kafka speaks directly on this when he writes, “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world—that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature—but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”
I heard him say this to me as I read it. He writes to you too.
If you enjoyed the read, please like this and share with those who might value it.
Etymology: Middle English, “enslaved”
“The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on the Construction of Formal Operational Structures,” by Bärbel Inhelder & Jean Piaget
I wanted to know what constituted great literature and what the great authors created. I needed to know the dialogue that unfolded over millennia if I hoped to contribute an iota of response to it.
One of the more heartening gestures I received from a student was a note of gratitude tucked into the final assigned reading selection, a simple note which echoed what I stated at the opening of the course was my purpose with the class for the year:
How thoughtful is that?
I am not saying that GPA or standardized test scores hold no place in education or distinguishing proper fits within educational communities. They serve an important role. What I am saying is that a genuine education that upholds the capacity to read, discuss, listen, and write well matters as much if not more. These skills inform a person for life and beyond the halls of academia, well into living what might constitute a meaningful and well-lived life. The benchmark stands with churning numerical quotients and predictable formats for doing the aforementioned skills with little to no zest and almost wholly in the fashion of automatons.
This is one of my favorite videos to incorporate when teaching Four Quartets and to offer perspective, an alternate lens to consider life and how it might be lived. Some of the private reactions I receive seem as though it were that no other way of viewing or living life is presented to youth.
dēmos: the common people
Your words always cause me to reflect on past milestones and my thought process at those times.Thank you for sharing your deep research and analysis. For me you offer a structure which helps me to dive deeper into my questions and understanding of my life and society as a whole. What jumped into my mind, among so many situations, was a time when I decided to teach debate...a subject I had never learned. Along with learning the rules to competing with a supported aurgument, I needed to teach and learn how to listen. I asked each student to argue for the team that held the opposite of their current beliefs. Wondering and thinking about what makes good and intelligent people feel so strongly in opposing beliefs than my own is a practice that continues to support my desire to remain open minded and compassionate towards others. Thank you for your words, Shotgun. You give, pause, permission, and value to consideration.