The Week That Was

The first week of school is always a hectic one, and this just past was no exception. Class meetings, class preparation, meetings with students and such filled the weekdays since last Tuesday (when I last wrote here). Here's a basic recap of what went on. I'll get caught up and then hopefully move forward without many more such lapses.

Wednesday the 30th -- The Quest class met today in its usual time slot, 10:25-11:45. We focused on two dialogues written by ancient Greek philosopher Plato. The first was from a book called The Republic, an excerpt commonly called "The Allegory of the Cave." The gist of it is that we are asked to imagine that a group of people sits in a cave. They face a wall and by some means or another are unable to rise up or even to turn their heads from side to side. This is all they've ever known. Somewhere behind them, unseen, a fire burns, casting its light on the wall. Between the fire and the back of the group a troop of beings carries figures of animals and such back and forth, and these figures create shadows on the wall. To the cave dwellers who know nothing of what's behind them, these shadows and the echoes of voices and movements make up the world for the people in the cave.

We are then asked to imagine that one of the people is set free so that he can stand and look around. He can move. He sees the fire and the figures and realizes that the reality he has always known is false. Then he is made to leave the cave and see the world as it is, to see the sun and all other things that have been at most only partially represented by the fire and figures below. It's a painful experience. On the physical level, the light of the sun hurts his eyes; on the intellectual and spiritual level he's hurt by the loss of all he once held to be true and stable. But once he becomes accustomed to the light, he revels in new knowledge and understanding and wants to stay in that world forever.

Ultimately, however, this gift of sight demands that he return to the cave and try to show others that what they see and believe is false. They, of course, do not like hearing this, and they're just as likely to put him to death as not. Despite this danger, Plato believes that the philosopher must act in this way, because all he has learned is of no use without action.

The final suggestion is that our leaders are supposed to be those who have escaped the cave and seen the light and returned to save us from our ignorance and our restrictive conditions.

So what happened to this idea? Do we have any leaders who fit this description of something like a philosopher king? If not, why not?

In "Euthyphro," Socrates (one of the characters in Plato's dialogue) tries to get Euthyphro, a self-proclaimed expert on what is pious, to identify the essential feature or characteristic of piety (or, if you wish, the good). Euthyphro begins by saying a thing is pious because it is loved by the gods. But Socrates points out that the gods that fill the Greek heavens are a contentious bunch and that a thing might be loved by some of them and hated by others. So, that definition doesn't work. What Socrates wants Euthyphro to do is come to the understanding that the gods' loving a thing doesn't make it good but that they love it because it is already good. If the good or piety of a thing can be separated from the love of the gods, then a study can be made to find out what essence of good is in the thing itself. Euthyphro fails to provide any answers; Socrates provides some clarification but in the end raises more questions than he answers.

I'm of the firm belief that the Underworld didn't become Hell until Socrates arrived with his endless questions.

It's late. . . . (to be continued)