[The following was a posting for a psychology course I'm taking this summer.]
I first read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in an undergrad philosophy course and have never forgotten it. I’ve used it many times in my own teaching, usually in the conventional way of prompting my students to think about ways of knowing, looking at things in a new way, and so on. Personally, though, I’ve focused upon a different aspect of the story over the last several years, that being the difficulty of bringing new knowledge (or, in Plato’s terms, knowledge itself) to the prisoners. I’ve always like the last sentence of the second-to-last paragraph:
Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
Of course, we all know what eventually happens to Socrates, but many people who “see things differently” know the frustration of trying to communicate those visions to others, sometimes suffering, like Plato’s philosopher, ridicule and worse. But I don’t want to dwell too much on the price one pays; rather, I’m interested in the challenge of making understandable that which is only partially or vaguely grasped by others.
A key element herein is, I think, pain. The philosopher feels pain when “compelled to look straight at the light” that creates the shadows. Being forced out of the cave into the sunlight is even more painful. Upon returning to the cave hoping to liberate the prisoners, he/she again feels pain, this time of the loss of the more perfect sight, followed by the pain of rejection by those who refuse to even listen. Pain, then, is an integral part of experiencing a more…(advanced? complete? inclusive? holistic?) understanding of…(the world? reality?).
We’ve all, I’m sure, experienced the pain of letting go of old ways of thinking and behaving as we grew into new and better ones. We probably have also felt the desire to share these new ways with others. As in the Allegory, part of coming to new ways of understanding seems to be the need to make others aware of these ways and, in doing so, hopefully change their understandings as well. But too often we forget about the pain that is apparently part of the process, and the very human desire to avoid pain (suggestions here of hedonism & the Pleasure Principle). If one truly wants to teach new understandings, it seems to me that that person must do so with compassion and tolerance. It is hard to let go of beliefs and values, biases and habits, that one has had for years, even decades, particularly if those form the basis of that person’s world-view. The philosopher-cum-teacher’s role is to help the person transition from understanding to understanding in stages, acknowledging the difficulty of the process.
All of this seems fairly well understood in counseling circles where goals relate to overcoming internal & external pathologies to achieve a more functional, hopefully happy, life. I think it’s also well understood by some of those who counsel & teach others towards Maslow’s “self-actualization” (or, in more religious terms, “enlightenment” or “grace”). One of the reasons I’ve been drawn to transpersonal psychology (& ITP specifically) has been its ability to bridge the established understandings with more progressive ones: more directly, with being able to speak of transcendent experiences and insights in the vocabulary, style, & syntax of an empirical, materialist world. Plato’s philosopher doesn’t necessarily have to fail.
