The reason for the cave existence

Plato said that between the fully ‘illuminating’, ‘intelligible’ sunlit world and humans’ ‘cave’ existence stands a ‘brightly burning fire’ that prevents the prisoners from leaving the cave. Understanding what the sun and fire represent we can understand why humans were virtual prisoners in a cave. As we have seen, the ‘sun’ and the ‘brightly burning fire’ represent the cooperative, integrative ideals of life, the confronting heat and glare of which were so searing and so bright—soPage 95 of
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Integrative meaning, the sun and fire, caused humans’ insecure state, which is the human condition. So intense was ‘the power’ of the exposing and condemning ‘sun’/ ‘fire’ that humans could not face it, let alone approach it, and they were so held in bondage by the human condition, so ‘chained’ up, as even to be estranged—alienated—from each other, to the extent that they ‘cannot see one another.’

Fire has been used in a number of mythologies as a metaphor for the integrative ideals of life, the condemning implications of which prevented humanity’s ‘escape’ from its ‘restricted’, alienated condition. In the Zoroastrian religion, ‘Fire is the representative of God…His physical manifestation…Fire is bright, always points upward, is always pure’ (Eastern Definitions, Edward Rice, 1978, p.138 of 433). In Christian mythology, in the story of Genesis, there was ‘a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life’ (Genesis 3:24). The Bible also recorded that the Israelites said, ‘Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire any more, or we will die’ (Deut. 18:16). In the biblical account, Job pleaded for relief from confrontation with the issue of the human condition when he lamented, ‘Why then did you [God] bring me out of the womb?…Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and deep shadow, to the land of deepest night’ (Job 10:18, 20-22). Job’s ‘land of gloom and deep shadow…land of deepest night’, the state of deepest and darkest depression that resulted from trying to confront the issue of the human condition, equates perfectly with life in Plato’s cave. Only by facing away from the sun/ fire, living psychologically in denial of the integrative meaning of life, could humans avoid the terrible—even suicidal—depression.

Facing away from the fire, living in denial of the human condition and all the truths that related to it, may have saved humans from the glare, the condemning criticism of these truths, but such a strategy necessitated living in a false, unreal world. As was mentioned, all thinking in that world was coming off a false base, it was a flawed view of the world, a world of delusions and illusions, a dishonest, ugly, limited existence. Scottish psychiatrist and denial-free thinker Page 96 of
Print Edition or prophet, R.D. Laing, offers this honest description of just how fraudulent humans’ alienated world of denial has been: ‘[In the world today] there is little conjunction of truth and social “reality”. Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.11 of 156).

Humans’ world of denial, of ‘exiled truth’, was a world of lies and thus of delusions and illusions. Plato’s shadows on the back wall of the cave symbolise this world of appearances. Bound in such a way that they face the back wall, Plato’s ‘prisoners’ cannot see anything ‘except the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them…And so they would believe that the shadows of the objects…were in all respects real’ (p.279).