I, Niall Francis Lambkin, hereby assert and give notice of my right under section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this essay.
Part I
Appearance and Reality, Error and Truth
Gothic Man
Try to imagine the following: in a remote valley deep in the remoteness of remote Germania, there stands a building of unpalatable Gothic design – a building which emphasises, in a pre-Romantic fashion, all the heavy and crude boorishness associated by the Romans with the Goths. It is in every respect a barbaric structure manufactured for no other purpose but to satisfy the dubious aesthetics of Gothic Man. Not quite a Gothic revival mansion, it displays, especially within, an overabundance of heavy dim-lit dreariness – great dark oak panelling and wainscoting, huge stone-carved folding drapery hung precariously and dangerously from cornices, great dusty tapestries absorbing sound and light on the walls supporting preposterously decorated ceilings.
In this slate-grey, oil-lit, leaden place lives a young man. He has lived here all his life, since early childhood. There are other people living here also and they too have lived here since early childhood, and they socialise, tell stories and myths to each other, learn about each other, their great institution and the wide world. The young men and women are fortunate for they have wise teachers who facilitate their progress through life and correct their errors, and share their lives in the community within the Gothic domicile. Neither pupils nor teachers leave the valley for there is no need – they are entirely self-sufficient in terms of power and sustenance. Everyone is content within the frame of human nature; all is secure and comfortable.
Now, conceive this Gothic place as being of planetary size – that is, conceive every part of the planet’s surface and every event occurring upon that surface, as being contained within the great Gothic structure. And now expand on upwards, to the limits of Space and Time!
Brains in Vats
You are feeling good – for various reasons: you are enjoying the ambience of the room you are in, the company you are keeping [your girlfriend has just whispered something remarkable in your ear], the subtle warmth of the whiskey you have just drunk, the content of the paper you are listening to. Everything is fine and the world is good. But all this is illusion. You are in fact a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrients that sits on a marble-topped work surface in the laboratory of the scientist who has performed upon you the operation of disembodiment. He is highly competent; to your brain he has attached a rich array of electrodes, and through these he is feeding you [with the aid of his computer] a stream of electrical impulses which exactly simulates your experiences described above.
It is not important to know why the scientist has done this to you. Perhaps in a benevolent moment he rescued your brain from your hopelessly crushed body wedged beneath the wheels of a juggernaut. What is important is that in rescuing your brain he attached to each carefully severed nerve leading into the brain an electrode attached to a computer that produces a tiny electrical impulse, just as the original nerve did. There are millions of such nerves and their connecting electrodes, all being stimulated in the manner described. So, when you heard your girlfriend whisper that remark in your ear you had absolutely no doubt that this is precisely what happened because the electrodes sent your brain exactly the same nerve impulses that would have come from a real girlfriend whispering in your ear something rather remarkable.
You pick up the paper Education and Mind Fetters in your hands and read the words – you read about brains in vats; you see the words, see your fingers, you look about the room and see the other people, you hear their breathing and sighing, you notice the paling sky outside through the open window, and hear a car go by, smell the faint scent of autumn mixed with the sweet odour of port from the table behind you. All this is illusion – all this is simulation – all this is produced by the scientist judiciously stimulating in the right way the nerve stumps leading into your brain. Can you prove this isn’t so? No. There is no way in which you can demonstrate that this is not the case. So how can you justify your belief in the external world?
Chuang-tzu dreamt he was a butterfly but upon waking he wondered if he were a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
The Allegory of the Cave
Socrates is speaking to Glaucon.
S. Now then…compare our natural condition, so far as education and ignorance is concerned, to a state of things like the following. Imagine a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from their childhood, with their legs and necks so shackled, that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forward, because their chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads around: and imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit their wonders…Also figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other animals, wrought in wood and stone and all kinds of materials, together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and others silent.
G. You are describing a strange scene and strange prisoners.
S. They resemble us. For let me ask you, in the first place, whether such persons so confined could have seen anything of themselves or of each other, beyond the shadows thrown by the fire upon the part of the cavern facing them?
G. Certainly not, if you suppose them to have been compelled all their lifetime to keep their heads unmoved.
S. And is not their knowledge of the things carried past them equally limited?
G. Unquestionably it is.
S. And if they were able to converse with one another, do you not think that they would be in the habit of giving names to the objects which they saw before them?
G. Doubtless they would
S. Again; if their prison-house returned an echo from the part facing them, whenever one of the passers-by opened his lips, to what, let me ask you, could they refer to the voices, if not to the shadow which was passing?
G. Unquestionably they would refer it to that.
S. Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of these manufactured articles to be the only realities.
G. Without a doubt they would.
S. Now consider what would happen if the course of nature brought them release from their fetters, and a remedy for their foolishness, in the following manner. Let us suppose that one of them has been released, and compelled suddenly to stand up, and turn his neck around and walk with open eyes towards the light; and let us suppose that he goes through all these actions with pain, and that the dazzling splendour renders him incapable of discerning those objects of which he used formerly to see the shadows. What answer would you expect him to make, if someone were to tell him that in those days he was watching foolish phantoms, but that now he is somewhat nearer to reality, and is turned towards things more real, and sees more correctly; above all, if we were to point out to him the several objects that are passing by, and question him, and compel him to answer what they are? Should you not expect him to be puzzled, and to regard his old visions as truer than the objects now forced upon his notice?
G. Yes, much truer.
S. And if he were further compelled to gaze at the light itself, would not his eyes, think you, be distressed, and would he not shrink and turn away to the things which he could see distinctly, and consider them to be really clearer than the things pointed out to him?
G. Just so.
S. And if someone were to drag him violently up the rough and steep ascent from the cavern, and refuse to let him go till he had drawn him out into the light of the sun, would he not, think you, be vexed and indignant at such treatment, and on reaching the light, would he not find his eyes so dazzled by the glare as to be incapable of making out so much as one of the objects that are now called true?
G. Yes, he would find it so at first.
S. Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men and other things in water, and afterwards the realities; and after this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and the heaven itself by night, then the sun and the sun’s light by day.
G. Doubtless.
S. Last of all, I imagine, he will be able to observe and contemplate the nature of the sun, not as it appears in water or on alien ground, but as it is in its own territory.
G. Of course.
S. His next step will be to draw the conclusion, that the sun is the author of the seasons and years, and the guardian of all things in the visible world, and in a manner the cause of all these things which he and his companions used to see.
G. Obviously, this will be his next step.
S. What then? When he recalls to mind his first habitation, and the wisdom of the place, and his old fellow prisoners, do you not think he will congratulate himself on the change, and pity them?
G. Assuredly he will.
Part II
Theory and Practice
Education is a profoundly political and confused thing. It is political because it claims to have transformational power, and governments are fundamentally interested in anything that may have such power, in order to exercise control over it. It is confused because even now, after at least two and a half thousand years of deliberation, it is not at all clear what precisely education is supposed to be. For the purposes of this paper I shall argue that education is necessarily political and that it must be distinguished from ‘training’. My contention shall be that what passes for education – at least in this country – is more correctly defined as training, and that therefore there is not much education actually taking place.
What goes on in schools and universities and how schools and universities are organised is rightly the concern of everyone. Within these institutions there is public expression of moral and political values as well as the operation of academic values. To a great extent the society in which these institutions operate is formed by these institutions insofar as what subjects are taught, how and where they are taught, how many of them are taught and to whom and for how long – all have a characteristically creative effect upon society. For this reason then, we should all have a healthy and intelligent interest in schooling and we should all formulate a coherent theory of education in order to justify its provision.
Rousseau’s Emile was (and indeed still is) extremely influential, appealing as it does to the effete post-modernist mind. His theory was that a child would blossom if allowed to grow freely in his own way and in his own time; too much teaching would be tantamount to straight-jacketing. It was a philosophy of back-to-nature and through John Dewey’s philosophy of education had a major influence on the primary teaching of the 1960s. However, in Rousseau’s day ‘education was a luxury, limited to a few and theorising about what precisely education was was also a luxury. The 19th century saw a change in how education was conceived; it was seen to be desirable in itself and attention drifted away from theory to the question of who should receive it. The utilitarians took the lead in this and were indeed enthusiastic educationalists. Their belief [not unreasonable though unrealistic] was that all people could be taught to take pleasure in the right things [meaning things which would spread social advantage widely through society] and that these things would improve them by generally raising their moral and material standards. J.S. Mill thought that an ‘educated man’ would never want to return to the simple pleasures of the ‘uneducated man’ ; in fact all one had to do was introduce a child to the infinite resources of reading and learning and all else would follow – his sensibility and understanding of true political goals would all, inevitably, be elevated; he wouldn’t be able to help himself, as it were – education would necessarily lead to more education and precision of character. In this scheme a specific curriculum did not seem to matter. What did matter was the ability to read and the domino effect would follow. As a result Mill advocated a form of universal education. He argued that the State should require all children to be educated but not itself provide that education. Children should be taught as a minimum to read, write and calculate. Mill’s logic is impeccable: he says that if it were illegal to allow a child to go uneducated [in the limited sense specified], demand for education would produce schools which could then be inspected for efficiency by agents of government and pupils could then be publicly examined. In addition governments could subsidise the poor. Universal literacy could be assured in this way as an absolute minimum and then the educational wheel would be set in motion and gather its own inevitable momentum. Indeed this system would assure freedom to conduct educational experiments.
Truly universal education in the UK has only been a reality since the 1970s and now, after ‘The Great Debate’ of the late 70s and the curriculum review of the 1980s, education (schooling) has become a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. All children are now legally entitled to education (schooling), not just so that they might obtain decent employment (for many will not) but more idealistically so that they can live more worthwhile lives – lives of a certain quality. One can clearly hear the echo of the utilitarian ideal in this, argued for by Mill almost a century and a half ago. We now see education as having quite distinct but general goals; for example, to increase understanding, to bring about independence, to foster pleasure in pupils. These are sincerely held aims and all obstacles to their achievement must be removed. So, the all-important educational question has become "What does this child need if he is to receive his entitlement?" [It is at this stage that governments become sensitive to standards and initiate breeding programmes for zealous inspectors.]
Amongst other things what a child needs is a coherent, relevant, stimulating and pleasurable curriculum. But beyond that there is the question of whether this curriculum is accessible – that is to say, the curriculum in itself may be of excellent quality but rendered useless if pupils cannot understand it or focus upon it because the school environment is inimical to peaceful learning. Hence, in addition to the well-formed-curriculum a child also needs what might be called a ‘good school’ meaning one in which learning is possible – and note here the emphasis on the term ‘possible’, for it is not enough to simply provide the right learning environment; a child must choose, in a fundamental way, to participate in the process of learning. But even this is not enough; in addition to the well-formed-curriculum and good learning environment a child needs to absorb, by osmosis, a coherent and responsible ‘hidden curriculum’, meaning an ethos – a system of values; moral, political and academic – which informs every aspect of the school’s activity. It should be noted here that what constitutes a ‘good’ ethos will be highly contentious and cannot mean merely what is dictated by received wisdom. Clearly, therefore, if the philosophy of needs is accepted [and it is difficult to dispute its relevance], then what we precisely believe constitutes good or bad education is in fact a complex matter – and alas it is all too often dealt with superficially by government agencies. It is not enough simply to debate whether education is distributed in a just manner or whether the curriculum conforms to epistemological expectations; the dominant question for governments has become entirely pragmatic: does it work?
Part III
Critique
It is upon this question of pragmatism that I wish to base my critique of what we like to call education in the Western World. I said in Part II that education was a mixture of pragmatism and idealism and I want to suggest now that this mixture is not an emulsion but more like a water-oil mix and the ‘mix’ is something laboured as when after shaking we get something forced, something which only looks like a mix but in reality is only a confusion of atomised discrete substances. Pragmatism and idealism are therefore discrete; pragmatism in the sphere of education has little to do with the theories of meaning and truth developed by Peirce and James – it has more to do with a kind of instrumentalism by which we set ourselves practical targets, such as – ‘within 5 years we must increase the number of literate people in the country by 25%’ and then look at our method of production and ask ‘does it work?’ i.e. will this method bring about the effect we wish? Pragmatism is all about cause and effect and in the sphere of our education system it is designed to bring about practical effects which satisfy certain needs of the State; that is, there is a subtle shift of argument from need of the child to need of the State.
Within the context of educational theory and practice the shift of emphasis is deceitful but understandable; the state needs certain types of individuals to ‘run the machinery’ and if the machinery does not run efficiently then the citizen suffers. So, both the State and the citizen have a legitimate interest in pragmatism. This form of pragmatism is about training people to master certain skills required by the State so that the State can manage the economic machine. At the very basic level this training involves learning to read, to write, to do arithmetic and then applying these basic skills to second order skills such as being able to solve problems, design artefacts, manage people, manage objects, make money, sell insurance etc. Now, if we are to enjoy a certain material standard of living then all this pragmatism, all this training is necessary and desirable; but we must not believe that it is education. Education is more closely concerned with idealism – with the vision we have of what kind of creatures we are and what kind of creatures we wish to become, in an entirely abstract sense; the ideal is what we aspire to and we measure our progress against it.
I said earlier that bringing about independence of body and mind, of improving understanding and generating a greater capacity for pleasure are ideals of education – and indeed they are. But we can clearly see that training people in the manner I have described does not necessarily entail that well-trained individuals are going to be autonomous, capable of deeper understanding or of experiencing deeper pleasure. So, for this reason I want to separate out the constituents of what we now call education and call what actually goes on in schools, colleges and universities ‘schooling’, which consists of the laboured mix of training and education. Education, under this more specific and narrow definition, is to do with the soul of man; training is to do with his material nature.
Let me specify more precisely what I mean by ‘education’. It is the process whereby we come to participate fully and to the best of our abilities, in civilisation, the latter being the intellectual, moral, emotional and material inheritance that is present to us. And we participate in the following way: by recognising the different ‘voices’ of that inheritance and in Oakshott’s words, enter into the conversation. The conversation is a dynamic correspondence between the distinctive voices of science, of poetry, history, moral philosophy and aesthetics – and the conversation is something we wish to participate in because it is so enormously interesting and transforming. In our universities the conversation should be loud and buoyant, blazing with an exuberant fury, and in our sixth forms it should be well underway; in our secondary schools it should be just sparking into life, whispering, but audible. One has only to open one’s ears and listen to find out whether education is alive and well in any given institution!
I believe we are good at training but poor at educating and part of the problem is that we have forgotten what it is to be a whole being. Our economic enthusiasms blind us to our spiritual needs and as a result we create our philistine cultures and scratch our heads; it is because we are not all there, in the right way. If we take a pragmatic view we may look at what happens in our schools and ask, whilst keeping in mind the narrow sense of education, does it work? – that is, are we successful at producing young people able and willing to enter into the conversation of civilisation?
In this conversation we should not be concerned with means and ends – means and ends is for training; in the conversation we pursue its dialogue for its own sake and welcome its conclusions – it is an inter-vocal, interdisciplinary dialectic, perpetually throwing up theses, antitheses and syntheses and each synthesis becomes a new thesis and the whole marvellous adventure of ideas goes spiralling on into the spiritual future of the species. At the root – the batholithic core of this dialectic - is human imagination and the question now becomes: "is human imagination fostered in the right way in our institutions of schooling?"
What I mean by ‘imagination’ is this: the universal capacity of human beings who think and perceive to notice and emotionally engage in what is presented to the mind. In this sense imagination is at the core of all perception and produces meaning in what we perceive and thereby prompts us to further emotional and intellectual curiosity and thence to deeper understanding. In this imaginative state of mind we ask: ‘why is this hideous?’, ‘why is this beautiful?’, ‘why is this strange but desirable?’, ‘why is this familiar but vacuous?’ etc.
Imagination has also to do with forming images-in-the-mind and our capacity to understand the past and project the future depends very much upon our ability to organise our memories and anticipations – to ‘see’ both in the mind. An unimaginative person is one who is imprisoned in the present – for the present can have meaning and significance only with respect to the past and future of the individual and the past and future exist only in the imagination. So, noticing more detail, reflecting more deeply, thinking more coherently, feeling more profoundly – these are capacities we can cultivate – cultivate in institutions of learning – and we should do so because these capacities combine to produce infinitely more profound significance in life. There is life and there is the perception of life and not all perceptions are equally valid or have equal depth. Imagination is about composing and then ‘seeing’ the larger, universal picture. The ability to do this can be taught and this ability lies at the heart of the educated man.
How can I love someone – I mean really love them – unless I can imagine their inner life – imagine it in a way which makes it objective – makes it part of me, combines it to me – so that two become one? Without imagination this is not possible; it cannot even be conceived.
I believe that there should be a union between deep thought and deep feeling, a la Coleridge, so that circumstances can be transformed – and the machinery of transformation is imagination – that is, imagination creates reality. The reality inhabited by the individual is bounded by the imagination of that individual; his ability to combine deep thought with deep feeling; that is to say, reality as perceived is a function of the imagination. Educating a child’s imagination will therefore initiate him into a previously unseen world that will be more profound and interesting than anything hitherto experienced and allow him to enter into the Conversation.
Whilst exercising imagination the individual will see the range of possibilities in any given situation – see beyond the immediate, see the boundlessness of all that lies beyond, the complexities of what previously appeared so simple, so facile, to see the subtleties of what previously appeared gross. The imagination is something that must play upon whatever it touches, like a searchlight sweeping across the surface of unknown territory. ‘Educational establishments’ ought to teach this facility – but they do not; it is left to the individual inspirational character of individual teachers; and that is not enough! To rectify the situation schools must allow student minds to land upon specific subjects for some considerable time and let them mine at considerable depth – then the imagination can make significant sense of what the mind takes on, in the sense that the imagination is given the opportunity to unify what falls within its beam. Any subject, studied at sufficient depth, will inevitably lead into every other subject, will spread out into every other area of knowledge, will converse with every other voice in the Conversation.
What we have now pre-16 is a system of systematic superficial knowledge in which children (young people) are forced to study subjects at a relatively superficial level whether they find these subjects congenial or not. My objection to this system is this: that it does nothing to foster imagination (except in the highly intelligent) and has the general effect of stultifying the need to expand the mind’s horizons. It places the pupil also at the mercy of the teacher’s imaginative limits because the pupil is never in a position to challenge the teacher’s understanding of the voice. The pupil has no option but to take on the understanding that the teacher possesses and does so in an entirely uncritical fashion for no other reason than that the curriculum is designed to give a broad, superficial understanding of subject matter – there is no time to consider depth, to really get to the core of the subjects. So, the risks of dogmatism, of misunderstanding on the part of the teacher, the passing on of outmoded knowledge, in a completely uncritical manner, becomes greater with every increase in curriculum breadth. At pre-16 we have at least 9 subjects [forms of knowledge] for children to digest and now with Curriculum 2000 we have a broadening of the curriculum which necessarily entails a watering-down of depth because of time restriction. And the result is often alienation – boredom, a failure to see the relevance or point of things. In this sense the modern curriculum is anti-imagination and therefore anti-education. It is only by considering a subject deeply and for its own sake that the individual can come to enjoy it and properly understand it. Without depth there is confusion, frustration, boredom and finally alienation. Clearly then, along with imagination, individual choice lies at the root of successful education.
‘Mindlessness’ is a state of mind in which nothing of any great note is occurring; it stems from ignorance and a lack of interest in the Conversation of civilisation and is encouraged by a generalist approach to curriculum content. Intellectual coherence comes from specialising and studying at depth. It will then be found that all subjects spread out at their bases into all other subjects. It is the superficial/broad curriculum that militates against coherence by encouraging the perception of discrete, mutually exclusive voices; each voice having its own logical form, and each voice believing that it cannot be adequately heard or understood by the other voices – constrained as they are by their characteristic logical structures. This is a mistake – and a profound one – for this idea is presently guiding our ‘education system’. At root there is civilisation which is uni-vocal; the Conversation is between the forms of knowledge which recognise the common root – the simple batholithic voice. So, if studied at sufficient depth Physics, say, spreads out into and includes all the other sciences, spreads out and into mathematics, history, philosophy and art. Art, if studied at sufficient depth spreads out into and includes all other forms of knowledge. People who see that this is the case have a coherence of knowledge lacking in others and this makes their participation in the Conversation valuable. Mindlessness is an expression of a lack of coherence and in this sense we can see it everywhere. Superficiality manifests itself in this form of mindlessness and our curriculum has precisely this attention to superficiality at its core. The end result for most individuals (not all) is that the imagination is left unfired – it sits there, switched off, latent, in the mental background. The danger is that it might become atrophied and the individual thereafter be condemned to a relatively impoverished intellectual and moral existence.
To know many things is of course a desirable thing – but by ‘knowing’ I mean to have an understanding of something insofar as I can see how it fits into the larger picture. This kind of ‘general’ knowledge comes after radical specialist knowledge – comes after the realisation that at depth there is simply a single epistemological edifice – a unified epistemological field. To see how all the different logical forms of knowledge fit together is to see something which has aesthetic quality and the capacity to enjoy this aesthetic needs to be taught. It is not to be supposed that schools or even universities can deliver this end – but they must constitute the means to this end and so it is imperative that our institutions of schooling teach their pupils, their students to see, to listen to, to understand the underlying logical structure of the Conversation; in other words, teach them to realise their potential imaginative power that expresses itself in aesthetic pleasure; not to do so is to keep them securely bound in Plato’s cave. To split asunder his chains the individual must perceive with thought – there must be thoughtful perception so that what is presented to the perceiving mind is understood at depth and with enormous pleasure.
Cultivation of the imagination, therefore, is fundamental to the journey out of the cave and by cultivation I mean ensuring the complete digestion of the imaginative mental state. I am not talking about the simple creative activity of people within schooling; rather I am referring to the mental state that transforms everything presented to the mind so that it is placed coherently in the Conversation. This digestion cannot occur, it seems to me, in the frenetic culture of the 21st century; a kind of spiritual isolation is required for the mind to quietly and almost secretly manufacture the end state – the thoughtful perception. "Being alone" is a sine qua non – and it is a measure of our society’s lack of comprehension that being alone – to deliberately seek solitude – is viewed as aberrant behaviour, as being anti-social, as being not quite right.
Perceiving thoughtfully, which is the same thing as participating intelligently in the Conversation, is an expression of freedom. I mentioned earlier that one of the ideals of education is to produce autonomous individuals able to think independently, see alternatives and have the power to choose and take personal responsibility for the consequences of choice. Such an individual is walking out of the cave, his chains split asunder. But the freedom he now enjoys is bound paradoxically by the depth of the imagination and that dictates the depth at which he can converse with all the voices of civilisation. The new bonds are self-imposed and not really bonds at all; they are expressions of true autonomy, of more perfect freedom. With the cleaving of fetters comes sense, comes meaning, comes a coherence that points towards the unified voice. Freedom, therefore, is of this sort: the ability to hear the Conversation and participate in its dynamic dialectic and this is what education is fundamentally all about.
Conclusion
Education is about promoting degrees of freedom and the extent to which an individual is ‘educated’ can be gauged according to that individual’s degree of autonomy, understood in the special sense used in this paper. My general contention has been that the enterprise of ‘education’ is not properly understood in the Western World and is therefore given a relatively minor role in the enterprise of ‘schooling’. We are good at training – that is we are good at producing individuals skilful in the activities required by the State to keep the machine running efficiently (relatively) and economically (relatively). Our examination systems would suggest that this observation is true – that the State, for pragmatic reasons, demands a breadth of learning which is superficial but functional and I am tempted to suggest that what is really demanded of individuals (in a gross sense) is inability; inability makes one teachable, whereas the truly able person is always a threat to received wisdom. Hence, we do not allow people time to specialise and thereby develop an imaginatively coherent understanding of the unity of knowledge; instead we place them on a treadmill of examinations that steals time and promotes incoherence.
On the whole, therefore, we succeed in training and fail in educating and as a result the majority of us remain fettered before the shadows in our subterranean caves. Being uneducated, according to this thesis, is rather like being in a room filled with conversing people and scratching one’s head, being unable to figure out what the conversation is about. The effect is alienation and boredom – and in the intellectually pretentious and infirm, relativism.
Of course, if one knows that there is a conversation in progress one tends to endeavour to participate so that one belongs through contribution. But the more normal situation for the uneducated man is to enter the room of conversation and simply not notice that a conversation is going on – or perhaps notice that something is going on but not perceive it thoughtfully and therefore not perceive it as a conversation at all; for him it is merely noise and verbiage. The effect of this is complacency and the tyranny of ignorance; it is to live thoughtlessly in the ‘light’ of someone else’s perception; it is truly to be shackled head and foot in the cave; it is to be living a prima facie contented life in a prison cell and not see the bars on the windows or the lock in the door – to simply not see that one is in detention. And meanwhile the Conversation carries on unheard by the majority in the silence of the high mountains, listened to and generated by only a few waking and wide awake individuals – those who can breathe the high altitude air of civilisation.
Education and Mind fetters
Appendix
The Allegory of the Cave
The purpose of the Allegory is to illustrate the four ‘states of mind’ [the world of images, objects of sense, mathematical/scientific objects, the Forms], the two degrees of belief [perception of physical objects and perception of mental objects] and the two degrees of knowledge [of Goodness and the Forms].
The cave in Plato’s simile represents the realm of belief and the world of daylight represents knowledge. The sun represents the Form of Goodness from which all else is derived. Note that at each stage the prisoner experiences pain as he progresses from the lower reaches of the cave to the outside but clearly the progress is in the right direction. Interestingly, the man who sees the daylight and the objects ‘as they are’, that is to say, the man who steps into knowledge will appear foolish to those who remain in the realm of belief.
According to Plato the progress of the prisoner through the chambers of the cave towards the light of the sun, corresponds to the training that must be given to the philosopher kings – the rulers of the Ideal State (the Republic). The rulers of the Ideal State must be educated to recognise the Forms and finally Goodness itself.
As the enlightened prisoner returns to the cave to tell his erstwhile fellows what it is he has learned, so too the philosopher/ruler must not be merely an intellectual – he must share with his fellow men the knowledge he has gained. The ruler must therefore go back into the realm of ignorance and belief – of shadows – for now he will have a better understanding of the shadows themselves; he will see them for what they are and he will be able to teach and guide his fellows in the right way.
Glaucon objects that this is hard on the philosopher king and Socrates agrees; yes, the philosopher king would be happier if he spent his time merely contemplating the Form of Goodness – but such contemplation is not his task; his raison d’etre is to bring greater enlightenment and happiness to the whole community. So, if they are to be good rulers the philosopher kings must be made responsible for the welfare of society as a whole – therefore they must get their hands dirty in the ordinary world of politics.
Allegory Interpretation
1. Shadows on the wall 1. Shadows, images, reflections
Cave: Realm of Belief
2. Roadway and fire 2. Ordinary visible objects
1. Shadows & reflections 1. Mathematical objects
2. Trees, mountains etc. 2. The Forms
Daylight World Realm of Knowledge
3. Sun 3. Goodness
Plato does not say what corresponds to the first things the prisoner sees when first he experiences sunlight –but such things as triangles and squares (mathematical objects) were objects of knowledge, not merely objects of belief, lower than the Forms. Perhaps Plato saw that ordinary real objects (as opposed to mere shadows of objects) participated in basic mathematical forms/structure. Plato’s view was that he considered mathematics to be the first stage in the intellectual education of the philosopher kings.
Nota Bene:
Plato’s belief is that all knowledge is connected. That is, when his prisoner is freed – his chains split asunder – and he turns around and sees the roadway and the fire, and sees the objects carried by, he does not just learn something new but comes to see how these things caused the previous objects of belief, or are connected to what he saw before (shadows). In other words, what he now sees helps him understand what he saw before. Now he knows the shadows are shadows, not real things. When he moves into the sunlight he sees shadows and then turns to see trees and mountains and he understands how they are related.
Plato’s message is therefore this: without knowledge of the Forms we do not really know the objects of our immediate perception i.e. the realm of appearance – the mere shadows of the Forms. When we know the Forms then we shall recognise the world of appearance as appearance. And we cannot know the world of Forms unless we have knowledge of Goodness. If Goodness is known then we shall know everything that depends upon it, for Goodness is the source of all truth.
There is, therefore, only one voice – the voice of the unified epistemological field – which Plato calls Goodness. Plato is not entirely clear about what Goodness actually is; it is because to achieve knowledge of Goodness one must journey through the cave and the journey is deeply painful; and for one who has not so travelled the idea of the Sun can be nothing but obscure. But, the Sun is recognisable when it is perceived!