Essays
Snapshots from the Cave: Life, the Road, and the Liberal Arts (2003) David B. Lovekin
Photoplay
Three pictures of his youth are before him on the wall. A dramatic 3/4 side shot in high contrast black and white of a college freshman is flanked on the left by an eight-year-old boy, all ears, a ready smile, facing nearly full front, wearing a white collar over a black sport coat; to the right is a 21-year-old groom and his bride cutting a very white 5-tiered wedding cake. The groom smiles at the cake; the bride smiles at the camera. The college freshman does not smile, apparently, although he could be about to smile, or he could be in the fade of a smile. A play of light above the right corner of the mouth makes its intention ambiguous – a spread of 13 years, matter in light transformed.
I am sixty years old, and I am looking at a picture of me at 12 years of age, and now I look in the mirror and think: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy. Seeing is certainly more direct than hearing. Seeing is what is before you at this moment. By contrast, hearing surrounds you, and it is often difficult to pinpoint. Hearing breeds hearsay. But, at this moment, I am seeing what I am and what I am not at the same time, a logical impossibility that sight does not like.
We can choose to ignore our various sides, our places in time, our rising and falling expectations, but in so doing we deny what makes us fully and fruitfully human on this path. I am and have been many things: a photographer, a musician, a philosopher, a biology major, an athlete, a motorcyclist, an essayist. These are items I could put on a strange vitae that might cause concern. In 1961, they drove the Dean of Men at West Aurora High School to distraction; he found it very difficult to believe that, given my grades, I would ever succeed in college. How could I have all of these facets to my personality? I have been angry, sad, desperate, kind, small-minded, spiteful, philanthropic, and these emotional states often accompany my professional side. There is also a social dimension to who I am – for example, the various economic traces of rising from poor to well off, to whatever the future may hold for me. Around another corner are the views held by others who know me and mark my path with praise and/or blame. We all lead divided lives if we know how to witness them, and if we work free of the various denials that surround them.
I believe my photography, my stories, and my essays all bear witness to the various divisions in my life. To echo Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), I make in order to have in order to be. Being, as a number of modern philosophers have argued, is a process. It is not, as the ancients believed, some enduring and underlying substance. Being is a product of the projects and creations that express it. My "makings" are not always clear and coherent, especially when I try to add them up. I have lately turned to photography – after a twenty-five-year hiatus – to try to rejoin my concern over the image and the word. Currently images have supplanted words, but I believe that words are required and seek images. I offer one of these images on page 29 as evidence of the need for all domains to conjoin: here is a road stretching out toward a dim horizon. Where is this road? What is the time of day? Where does it begin and end?
I use photography to capture at the moment what I do not understand; I use my photos to witness mystery, which I do not wish to deny but hope to turn to my advantage. I intend to provide images that overflow and point beyond. I write about what I do not understand as well, hoping for moments of clarity in the face of paradox. At this moment that sums up my life: nothing is tidy, nothing is certainly clear – I really am not sure where I am going or where I have been, but I am having a whacking good time of it. And I have made some headway in what I could call, echoing Plato (428-347 BCE), "transcendental spelunking," cave exploration.
My father was a tool and die maker, a weekend deputy sheriff, and a magician who performed throughout the state of Illinois. He was also a Golden Gloves boxer. My mother was a concert violinist, a poet, and a school teacher. She read to me, when I was four, Beowulf, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and loads of stories about Uncle Wiggly. I particularly remember Uncle Wiggly and His Airship. My father taught me to box, and my mother saw to it that I had piano lessons.
My father, employed by All-Steel Equipment of Aurora, had a machine shop in our basement where he would make things well into the night. I could hear grinding and wheels turning while my mother practiced Brahms. Bach's Unaccompanied Violin Sonata would often lull me to sleep at night.
Music in my home was something people played. I was in high school before we ever acquired a television and a stereo. Music was a way of life: I often awoke on Saturday mornings to my mother's string trio practicing in the living room. When my mother played to me in my crib, she said I danced, danced like crazy. Once I asked her what music was and she said that every time a person picked up an instrument and played it the gods sang, and that was what you heard. The gods sang often in our home. When I asked my father how he made things, he showed me his micrometer and his lathe, and he said that if you could measure and then guide materials properly, anything was possible. One could even make something so small that no one could pick it up, or something so heavy that not even God could lift it. In my home, absolute limits were defined in terms of human culture, that is, in terms of the natural sciences and the humanities, what we call the liberal arts.
My mother often tried to dissuade my father from teaching me to box, afraid that I would hurt my hands, which she saw as obviously made for making music. My father did not want me to be soft, unable to grapple with and handle the world. Their divide nicely mirrored the tensions that often accompany the traditional divisions in the liberal arts, though they were agreed on the importance of making, and on the importance of culture for forming an individual.
Movies were the wallpaper of my cultural room which was open to both a light and dark side. My father directed traffic at a local drive-in, and I would often go with him on weekends to help. There I saw many films that deeply affected me, like The Wolf Man and The Thing from Another World (1951). From The Thing I still remember the flying saucer viewed as a round shape embedded in the Arctic ice, and remember how the ship was measured by men joining hands around its mysterious perimeter. The Thing, of course, always remained just out of sight; it was never seen directly, but always intimated as frighteningly close. From The Wolf Man I learned that humans could transform themselves beyond all control and measure, and that otherness could all too easily, and without much warning, disrupt the illusory safety of the familiar. My father was killed at the drive-in when I was eleven, by a drunk driver. Somehow I was not there that night.
In the 1950's the drive-in provided affordable family entertainment and for a time showed first-run feature films. But after my father's death I went to the movies in town. Fortunately I saw most of these at the Paramount, the magnificent art deco theater on the Fox River in Aurora. In those days, movies were seen in the dark before a huge screen that overwhelmed the audience. It certainly overwhelmed me. These were not films reduced to the television screen. Later I would read of studies suggesting that looking at film images in a darkened theater induces in the viewer a near REM state, the state of dreaming. "Movies are dreams we can have while we're awake," I would tell my mother.
Perhaps the most influential film I saw on the big screen was The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) in which people in a small California town begin to appear strange to their friends and family members. As in The Wolf Man, the familiar and the ordinary are transformed: people are suddenly without independent wills and passions. When they sleep at night, pods from outer space are placed next to them and the sleepers are replicated. The imposters then assume the lives of the originals, who somehow disappear. The most terrifying image in this film has remained with me for over forty-five years. The doctor-hero stares into the eyes of his lover as they hide in a mine shaft, away from the pod people who are trying to co-opt them. The doctor then leaves the woman alone in the tunnel, telling her not to go to sleep while he reconnoiters. He returns and bends down to kiss her. Her eyes are momentarily closed, but then, in glorious black and white, they open and go to glaze; she screams, "He's in here, he's in here. Get him, get him."
In the late 1950's American national security was pursuing goals established by the Russian satellite, Sputnik, which proved, according to many, that science and technology were the only salvation for modern humanity. My mother, the humanist, hoped I would go the way of science in the interests of the common good. I do know that I could not decide: I played football, wrestled, discovered Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, started playing jazz, and studied biology with a certain passion.
When I went to college in 1961 on a football-wrestling scholarship, I immersed myself in the natural sciences and played jazz bass on weekends. However, I received two books that year that would become my Golden Bough. When I asked a popular and very approachable philosophy professor what philosophy was, he gave me Plato's Republic and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason. I could not understand either one of them, but for some reason I thought that it would be good if I did. I transferred to another college and become a philosophy major. Soon I realized that I was the kind of person who was driven by mystery, by the depths beneath appearances, and by the notions of singing gods and opposing monsters. I was intrigued by the infinitely small and the infinitely large, and the beyond that exceeds all limits and measurements. And I have learned that I am not alone. All the arts pursue mystery, although some do it more openly and, perhaps, with less shame and guilt.
My decision to study philosophy meant that I would have to give up what had been safe and familiar: I had planned on being a biologist and a wrestling coach. And, to compound my problem, Plato's Republic was nothing but a confusing mystery. I recall being taken by "the myth of the cave" in my first reading, and by its account of a curious confinement, but beyond that the book did not speak to me.
Many already know the story of the cave, which seems familiar even before it is told. Here Socrates claims to offer up a parable of human education and ignorance that requires an act of imagination. He asks us to
[i]magine human beings living in an underground cave-like dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They've been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets (lines 514a-b).
These prisoners – we do not know how or why they are there – see only what is before them, shadows of objects projected by the light of the fire. There are people on a wall behind them carrying artifacts and providing a constant "shadow show" for the captives. We are asked to imagine, further, that a prisoner is released from the confinement of the wall to face the fact that what he had thought was the real world – i.e., the moving images – was really only an appearance, a copy of an original. If he were forced to face the light, Socrates says, "he'd be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he'd seen before" (515d). The released prisoner would then have to acquire a new "cave vision," which would be against his inclination. "[I]f we pointed to each of the things passing by," Socrates continues, "asked him what each of them is, and compelled him to answer, don't you think he'd be at a loss and that he'd believe that the things he saw earlier were truer than the ones he was now being shown?" (515e). At this stage in the prisoner's development, the copy would appear truer than the original. Rather than face the blinding truth, the prisoner would likely turn to the familiar and comforting shadows. How does he eventually make the turn from these illusions to the source of projection? No solution to this dilemma is offered. Socrates merely goes on with his story.
The prisoner is then dragged by force farther up the rough steep path into the sunlight beyond the firelight. Here he must accommodate his eyes which are blinded all the more by the natural glare. To do this, he has to proceed gradually, first looking at shadows and reflections of objects, and then at the stars and the moon. Only later can he make a cautious move to the light of the sun itself. There is no more mention of dragging or forcing. At this point, Socrates says, the prisoner might "infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see" (516b, my emphasis).
With the basic outline of the analogy before us, we are asked to consider whether the prisoner is more satisfied above ground than in the cave where prizes and praise are given to those "sharpest at identifying the shadows"(516d). The consensus is that the prisoner would surely choose to endure any suffering rather than return to the life of illusion he once led. What has happened? How can we explain the change? Socrates distinguishes between the realm of vision, on the one hand, where contradictions inevitably arise, and the realm of knowledge, on the other, which lies beyond that which is merely seen. The latter is where a person encounters consistent truth:
In the knowable realm, the form of the good is the last thing seen, and it is reached only with great difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it (517b-c).
The prisoner, unchained and above ground, is now able to see appearances as appearances. The prisoner is a metaphor for the soul that now seeks the reality behind appearance – beauty itself behind the beautiful object, goodness itself behind the act done out of self-gratification.
Education, according to Plato, is the training which enables one to see the world outside the cave, the real world of light and truth. This can be achieved by various means: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and ultimately through something called "dialectic." Through physical acts of calculation like counting fingers, one learns about number, which is really no one thing but is that toward which all countable things point. The "1" on the page is not the number itself but is its meaningful appearance. By measuring the earth – the literal definition of the term geo-metry -Ð we take yet another step toward grasping the notions of points, lines, planes, and solids. But these forms are not essentially real in and of themselves; the house the architect conceives as an idea, for instance, is a reality that lies beyond the form that the contractor builds. Plato's "house" – the ideal state, the Republic – is even further removed. In short, all manner of measurement can be related to some standard, which is the reality behind the appearance. Putting this another way, once what is before us appears as appearance (like a shadow on the wall), we should begin to look toward the standard, toward "the light," in an attempt to understand what is truly before us. This is the way laid out by the liberal arts which are concerned with the totality of what is and can be known. But more specifically it is the way laid out by philosophy, whose principal tool, according to Plato, is "dialectic."
In the Middle Ages, "dialectic" would have referred primarily to logic and Aristotelian disputation, but Plato's dialectic was much less doctrinaire and perhaps more mystical. It was what the business of arguing was all about. Socratic dialectic appeared within the give and take of dialogue with the purpose of igniting sparks in the reader to suggest that the goal of argument was not argument itself. Socrates indicated that this dialectical art is higher than mathematics and all the other arts because they make unexamined assumptions. Dialectic is different:
[It] is the only inquiry that travels this road, doing away with hypotheses and proceeding to the first principle itself, so as to be secure. And when the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it upwards, using the crafts we described to help it and cooperate with it in turning the soul around (533d).
While learning to count the soul presumes that things and number are the same. To go from counting oranges to algebraic equations, however, the soul needs to face its previously held assumptions and see physical numbers not as things but as signs. This is how our knowledge of the world grows, by questioning assumptions. Advances in nineteenth-century geometry required questioning the Euclidean assumption that space is a plane and essentially flat. The dialectal move toward curved space allowed parallel lines to intersect and ushered in twentieth-century physics and mathematics. Einstein was indeed moving out of the cave of classical physics when he proposed his theory of relativity.
The Republic begins with the question, "What is justice?" Socrates and his friends reveal that this question, and so many others, is really dependent on a prior consideration: "What is knowledge?" This moves us to a deeper concern over the making and representation of knowledge. At the heart of education, clearly exemplified in the myth of the cave, is the soul's realization that it is lacking and that this lack can be represented. The soul must learn to take charge of representations with its ability to distinguish between the literal and the figurative, the metaphorical (378 d-e), and to develop imagination, opinion, understanding and reason, the stages of the soul's development as expressed in the story of the cave.
Plato disliked the incoherence of the myths of Homer and Hesiod and the falsehoods they represented. When he has Socrates say that the new gods are not to be represented as liars or shape-shifters, or as doing malicious deeds, he is at the same time teaching logic. It is a simple argument: if the gods are good, then they must not be characterized as being bad, that is, as having human features. Humans are humans and gods are gods. The other virtues, truth and beauty, should also be exemplified by the gods. A logic of imitation is thus set forth that presumes a distinction between copy and original. As Socrates says, our guardians must be kept away from all other crafts so as to be the craftsmen of the city's freedom, and be exclusively that, and do nothing at all except what contributes to it, they must neither do nor imitate anything else. If they do imitate, they must imitate from childhood what is appropriate for them, namely people who are courageous, self-controlled, pious, and free, and their actions (395c).
Imitation is understood here as a form of making that is not merely repetition. The good bed-maker, Socrates points out, is the one who does not merely imitate other bed-makers but makes beds in which the gods would choose to lie (597-599). The philosophical ruler of the ideal Republic, knowing the Good, would construe and construct a state, and therefore a soul, that would garner support from the gods. One should be wary of souls "spoiled and cramped by the mechanical nature of their work" (495d). This statement, however, should not be read as an attack on the mechanical arts, after all, Socrates was most likely a stone cutter himself, or some other kind of craftsman. Rather, it is a rejoinder that a coherent soul cannot be all things to all people and must only strive for excellence as beyond the mundane and trivial. The soul must strive for beauty itself, and those things that exemplify it, rather than for merely beautiful things. Plato thought that guardians of the state should be wary of actors who were slippery slopes and smooth surfaces, "teflon people" we might call them today. He was no simple critic of poets, as is often supposed; being a poet himself, he opted for philosophical poetry beyond the traditional myths of his age.
Here I must leave any claim for the true doctrine of Plato. Did he believe in eternal truths that were unchanging and that caused our adequate ideas of them in a way sensory objects never could? Some claim that his whole philosophy culminated in a theory of Forms, eternal truths above the fray of sensory conflict. In the famous "Seventh Letter" Plato declares that the truth cannot be written down, that it is a spark that ignites (or not) between listener and word, reader and page, teacher and student (241a-d). In other words, the truth cannot be known as substance but as appearance, and this happens through dialogue; it cannot be known apart from an other with whom we share our perceptions, even if that "other" is ourselves. And herein lies the irony: the truth which offers freedom from inconsistency and contradiction – i.e., the separations that plague our lives – cannot be known without relying on the very otherness that we are trying to overcome. Ultimately overcoming the separation cannot be our life's vocation; rather, always seeking to overcome the separation should be. And in this the liberal arts are our guide.
The Republic is a story that reminds us of the limitations of knowledge that come with our embodied condition (whether this be our literal body or the more figurative cave of our language and culture). And it also reminds us of the profound anxiety produced by these limits that can be met through dialectic and the ecstatic kinds of making – glimpses of the Good – that it can inspire. Like Plato's prisoner, we are currently confined by the myriad images played out by the mass media, and in this the soul suffers a decided cramp. Like citizens of fifth-century Athens, we are pulled by desires for pleasure and for knowledge that are often at odds, so we settle instead for insipid entertainment in which our pleasure is constrained and our reason circumscribed. In our world, knowledge is often reduced to fact, to information that no one knows or understands, but which is readily available on the Internet or some other super highway. We are migrant identities driven by the clock and other technical machinations along the paths and grids that link our hopes to corporate America, to those malls and other sacred spaces where buying and selling offer the empty promise of substance. The television has become our cave wall with the media as the artifact movers who are further commanded by a handful of corporate/political interests. Likely there are other interests as well.
Essentially, we have the same problems the ancients had: we must convince someone that we are intelligent, reasonable, and rational, and that we can measure up according to the objective standards that still dog the modern world, problems that require the liberal arts as a whole. But we should realize that what most concerns us – love, beauty, truth, life (and the death that surrounds it) – resists measurement, even though our concerns require it, regardless of time and place.
As Schiller somewhere said, "Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain." Our stupidity lies not in an absence of fact or information but rather in an excess of it. Our stupidity is a fact of separation, of our American post-Sputnik push toward ever more specialization. Our enlightenment should lie, however, along a much different path, a road more worthy of Kerouac than Kruschev, both of whom, ironically, were preaching their respective gospels in 1957. Kerouac's road was a "holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?" (251). It was this road I sought in my photograph of the road aiming at roadness itself, the reality behind the appearance.
I still wonder about the pictures on my mother's wall, and continue to search among these for the "real me." Certainly there is an author, a maker, and there are images. The camera, like the story of the cave, however, reminds me that what I see (indeed, the eye itself is a kind of camera) is never wholly real, or rather reality consists of intersecting planes, circles and other figures both raised and lowered to the being of matter and wave. On this level, all is matter that vibrates, and photographs are witnesses to this vibrating light. And then there is the act of witnessing itself without which being would have no appearance, or without which appearance would have no being. I am not certain about the absolute existence of eternal truths, but I cannot deny their appearances. All the pictures of me are to some degree me. At each stage I remember struggle and verges of enlightenment, each present a past anticipating a future: the youth, the college freshman, the husband, and now the sixty year old. I know the me is in there, in those three shadows, but also the me, the evanescent "I,"is in here and in whatever moments might come.
The gods need our struggles I think; it's why they bothered making us in the first place, and why we must take making seriously. At each moment I attempt to write down the truth, to say something universally true, but I am left with words and images that are simply "nows" that both mean and do not mean what I want to say. They are particulars rather than universals. But particulars add up: "nows" remain "nows" until I witness them as "thens." The witnessing and expressing are required, and the liberal arts provide the media for this.
When I moved to Hastings in 1987, I reread On the Road and learned that the sheriff of Shelton, Nebraska, asked Kerouac and Eddie, his traveling companion, "You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" To this, Kerouac responded, "I don't know. I'm going as fast as I can and I don't think I have the time" (22-23). Instead of having the time, he was too busy writing and remembering. And that's all the time we need, all the time we have, and the nature of time itself. Or so it seems right now at this moment of enlightenment, with this degree of transcendental cave vision.
WORKS CITED
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Viking Critical Edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.
Plato. "Seventh Letter." Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Revised by C.C.C. Reeve. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.
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Snapshots from the Cave: Life, the Road, and the Liberal Arts (2003) David B. Lovekin
Photoplay
Three pictures of his youth are before him on the wall. A dramatic 3/4 side shot in high contrast black and white of a college freshman is flanked on the left by an eight-year-old boy, all ears, a ready smile, facing nearly full front, wearing a white collar over a black sport coat; to the right is a 21-year-old groom and his bride cutting a very white 5-tiered wedding cake. The groom smiles at the cake; the bride smiles at the camera. The college freshman does not smile, apparently, although he could be about to smile, or he could be in the fade of a smile. A play of light above the right corner of the mouth makes its intention ambiguous – a spread of 13 years, matter in light transformed.
I am sixty years old, and I am looking at a picture of me at 12 years of age, and now I look in the mirror and think: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy. Seeing is certainly more direct than hearing. Seeing is what is before you at this moment. By contrast, hearing surrounds you, and it is often difficult to pinpoint. Hearing breeds hearsay. But, at this moment, I am seeing what I am and what I am not at the same time, a logical impossibility that sight does not like.
We can choose to ignore our various sides, our places in time, our rising and falling expectations, but in so doing we deny what makes us fully and fruitfully human on this path. I am and have been many things: a photographer, a musician, a philosopher, a biology major, an athlete, a motorcyclist, an essayist. These are items I could put on a strange vitae that might cause concern. In 1961, they drove the Dean of Men at West Aurora High School to distraction; he found it very difficult to believe that, given my grades, I would ever succeed in college. How could I have all of these facets to my personality? I have been angry, sad, desperate, kind, small-minded, spiteful, philanthropic, and these emotional states often accompany my professional side. There is also a social dimension to who I am – for example, the various economic traces of rising from poor to well off, to whatever the future may hold for me. Around another corner are the views held by others who know me and mark my path with praise and/or blame. We all lead divided lives if we know how to witness them, and if we work free of the various denials that surround them.
I believe my photography, my stories, and my essays all bear witness to the various divisions in my life. To echo Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), I make in order to have in order to be. Being, as a number of modern philosophers have argued, is a process. It is not, as the ancients believed, some enduring and underlying substance. Being is a product of the projects and creations that express it. My "makings" are not always clear and coherent, especially when I try to add them up. I have lately turned to photography – after a twenty-five-year hiatus – to try to rejoin my concern over the image and the word. Currently images have supplanted words, but I believe that words are required and seek images. I offer one of these images on page 29 as evidence of the need for all domains to conjoin: here is a road stretching out toward a dim horizon. Where is this road? What is the time of day? Where does it begin and end?
I use photography to capture at the moment what I do not understand; I use my photos to witness mystery, which I do not wish to deny but hope to turn to my advantage. I intend to provide images that overflow and point beyond. I write about what I do not understand as well, hoping for moments of clarity in the face of paradox. At this moment that sums up my life: nothing is tidy, nothing is certainly clear – I really am not sure where I am going or where I have been, but I am having a whacking good time of it. And I have made some headway in what I could call, echoing Plato (428-347 BCE), "transcendental spelunking," cave exploration.
My father was a tool and die maker, a weekend deputy sheriff, and a magician who performed throughout the state of Illinois. He was also a Golden Gloves boxer. My mother was a concert violinist, a poet, and a school teacher. She read to me, when I was four, Beowulf, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and loads of stories about Uncle Wiggly. I particularly remember Uncle Wiggly and His Airship. My father taught me to box, and my mother saw to it that I had piano lessons.
My father, employed by All-Steel Equipment of Aurora, had a machine shop in our basement where he would make things well into the night. I could hear grinding and wheels turning while my mother practiced Brahms. Bach's Unaccompanied Violin Sonata would often lull me to sleep at night.
Music in my home was something people played. I was in high school before we ever acquired a television and a stereo. Music was a way of life: I often awoke on Saturday mornings to my mother's string trio practicing in the living room. When my mother played to me in my crib, she said I danced, danced like crazy. Once I asked her what music was and she said that every time a person picked up an instrument and played it the gods sang, and that was what you heard. The gods sang often in our home. When I asked my father how he made things, he showed me his micrometer and his lathe, and he said that if you could measure and then guide materials properly, anything was possible. One could even make something so small that no one could pick it up, or something so heavy that not even God could lift it. In my home, absolute limits were defined in terms of human culture, that is, in terms of the natural sciences and the humanities, what we call the liberal arts.
My mother often tried to dissuade my father from teaching me to box, afraid that I would hurt my hands, which she saw as obviously made for making music. My father did not want me to be soft, unable to grapple with and handle the world. Their divide nicely mirrored the tensions that often accompany the traditional divisions in the liberal arts, though they were agreed on the importance of making, and on the importance of culture for forming an individual.
Movies were the wallpaper of my cultural room which was open to both a light and dark side. My father directed traffic at a local drive-in, and I would often go with him on weekends to help. There I saw many films that deeply affected me, like The Wolf Man and The Thing from Another World (1951). From The Thing I still remember the flying saucer viewed as a round shape embedded in the Arctic ice, and remember how the ship was measured by men joining hands around its mysterious perimeter. The Thing, of course, always remained just out of sight; it was never seen directly, but always intimated as frighteningly close. From The Wolf Man I learned that humans could transform themselves beyond all control and measure, and that otherness could all too easily, and without much warning, disrupt the illusory safety of the familiar. My father was killed at the drive-in when I was eleven, by a drunk driver. Somehow I was not there that night.
In the 1950's the drive-in provided affordable family entertainment and for a time showed first-run feature films. But after my father's death I went to the movies in town. Fortunately I saw most of these at the Paramount, the magnificent art deco theater on the Fox River in Aurora. In those days, movies were seen in the dark before a huge screen that overwhelmed the audience. It certainly overwhelmed me. These were not films reduced to the television screen. Later I would read of studies suggesting that looking at film images in a darkened theater induces in the viewer a near REM state, the state of dreaming. "Movies are dreams we can have while we're awake," I would tell my mother.
Perhaps the most influential film I saw on the big screen was The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) in which people in a small California town begin to appear strange to their friends and family members. As in The Wolf Man, the familiar and the ordinary are transformed: people are suddenly without independent wills and passions. When they sleep at night, pods from outer space are placed next to them and the sleepers are replicated. The imposters then assume the lives of the originals, who somehow disappear. The most terrifying image in this film has remained with me for over forty-five years. The doctor-hero stares into the eyes of his lover as they hide in a mine shaft, away from the pod people who are trying to co-opt them. The doctor then leaves the woman alone in the tunnel, telling her not to go to sleep while he reconnoiters. He returns and bends down to kiss her. Her eyes are momentarily closed, but then, in glorious black and white, they open and go to glaze; she screams, "He's in here, he's in here. Get him, get him."
In the late 1950's American national security was pursuing goals established by the Russian satellite, Sputnik, which proved, according to many, that science and technology were the only salvation for modern humanity. My mother, the humanist, hoped I would go the way of science in the interests of the common good. I do know that I could not decide: I played football, wrestled, discovered Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, started playing jazz, and studied biology with a certain passion.
When I went to college in 1961 on a football-wrestling scholarship, I immersed myself in the natural sciences and played jazz bass on weekends. However, I received two books that year that would become my Golden Bough. When I asked a popular and very approachable philosophy professor what philosophy was, he gave me Plato's Republic and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason. I could not understand either one of them, but for some reason I thought that it would be good if I did. I transferred to another college and become a philosophy major. Soon I realized that I was the kind of person who was driven by mystery, by the depths beneath appearances, and by the notions of singing gods and opposing monsters. I was intrigued by the infinitely small and the infinitely large, and the beyond that exceeds all limits and measurements. And I have learned that I am not alone. All the arts pursue mystery, although some do it more openly and, perhaps, with less shame and guilt.
My decision to study philosophy meant that I would have to give up what had been safe and familiar: I had planned on being a biologist and a wrestling coach. And, to compound my problem, Plato's Republic was nothing but a confusing mystery. I recall being taken by "the myth of the cave" in my first reading, and by its account of a curious confinement, but beyond that the book did not speak to me.
Many already know the story of the cave, which seems familiar even before it is told. Here Socrates claims to offer up a parable of human education and ignorance that requires an act of imagination. He asks us to
[i]magine human beings living in an underground cave-like dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They've been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets (lines 514a-b).
These prisoners – we do not know how or why they are there – see only what is before them, shadows of objects projected by the light of the fire. There are people on a wall behind them carrying artifacts and providing a constant "shadow show" for the captives. We are asked to imagine, further, that a prisoner is released from the confinement of the wall to face the fact that what he had thought was the real world – i.e., the moving images – was really only an appearance, a copy of an original. If he were forced to face the light, Socrates says, "he'd be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he'd seen before" (515d). The released prisoner would then have to acquire a new "cave vision," which would be against his inclination. "[I]f we pointed to each of the things passing by," Socrates continues, "asked him what each of them is, and compelled him to answer, don't you think he'd be at a loss and that he'd believe that the things he saw earlier were truer than the ones he was now being shown?" (515e). At this stage in the prisoner's development, the copy would appear truer than the original. Rather than face the blinding truth, the prisoner would likely turn to the familiar and comforting shadows. How does he eventually make the turn from these illusions to the source of projection? No solution to this dilemma is offered. Socrates merely goes on with his story.
The prisoner is then dragged by force farther up the rough steep path into the sunlight beyond the firelight. Here he must accommodate his eyes which are blinded all the more by the natural glare. To do this, he has to proceed gradually, first looking at shadows and reflections of objects, and then at the stars and the moon. Only later can he make a cautious move to the light of the sun itself. There is no more mention of dragging or forcing. At this point, Socrates says, the prisoner might "infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see" (516b, my emphasis).
With the basic outline of the analogy before us, we are asked to consider whether the prisoner is more satisfied above ground than in the cave where prizes and praise are given to those "sharpest at identifying the shadows"(516d). The consensus is that the prisoner would surely choose to endure any suffering rather than return to the life of illusion he once led. What has happened? How can we explain the change? Socrates distinguishes between the realm of vision, on the one hand, where contradictions inevitably arise, and the realm of knowledge, on the other, which lies beyond that which is merely seen. The latter is where a person encounters consistent truth:
In the knowable realm, the form of the good is the last thing seen, and it is reached only with great difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it (517b-c).
The prisoner, unchained and above ground, is now able to see appearances as appearances. The prisoner is a metaphor for the soul that now seeks the reality behind appearance – beauty itself behind the beautiful object, goodness itself behind the act done out of self-gratification.
Education, according to Plato, is the training which enables one to see the world outside the cave, the real world of light and truth. This can be achieved by various means: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and ultimately through something called "dialectic." Through physical acts of calculation like counting fingers, one learns about number, which is really no one thing but is that toward which all countable things point. The "1" on the page is not the number itself but is its meaningful appearance. By measuring the earth – the literal definition of the term geo-metry -Ð we take yet another step toward grasping the notions of points, lines, planes, and solids. But these forms are not essentially real in and of themselves; the house the architect conceives as an idea, for instance, is a reality that lies beyond the form that the contractor builds. Plato's "house" – the ideal state, the Republic – is even further removed. In short, all manner of measurement can be related to some standard, which is the reality behind the appearance. Putting this another way, once what is before us appears as appearance (like a shadow on the wall), we should begin to look toward the standard, toward "the light," in an attempt to understand what is truly before us. This is the way laid out by the liberal arts which are concerned with the totality of what is and can be known. But more specifically it is the way laid out by philosophy, whose principal tool, according to Plato, is "dialectic."
In the Middle Ages, "dialectic" would have referred primarily to logic and Aristotelian disputation, but Plato's dialectic was much less doctrinaire and perhaps more mystical. It was what the business of arguing was all about. Socratic dialectic appeared within the give and take of dialogue with the purpose of igniting sparks in the reader to suggest that the goal of argument was not argument itself. Socrates indicated that this dialectical art is higher than mathematics and all the other arts because they make unexamined assumptions. Dialectic is different:
[It] is the only inquiry that travels this road, doing away with hypotheses and proceeding to the first principle itself, so as to be secure. And when the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it upwards, using the crafts we described to help it and cooperate with it in turning the soul around (533d).
While learning to count the soul presumes that things and number are the same. To go from counting oranges to algebraic equations, however, the soul needs to face its previously held assumptions and see physical numbers not as things but as signs. This is how our knowledge of the world grows, by questioning assumptions. Advances in nineteenth-century geometry required questioning the Euclidean assumption that space is a plane and essentially flat. The dialectal move toward curved space allowed parallel lines to intersect and ushered in twentieth-century physics and mathematics. Einstein was indeed moving out of the cave of classical physics when he proposed his theory of relativity.
The Republic begins with the question, "What is justice?" Socrates and his friends reveal that this question, and so many others, is really dependent on a prior consideration: "What is knowledge?" This moves us to a deeper concern over the making and representation of knowledge. At the heart of education, clearly exemplified in the myth of the cave, is the soul's realization that it is lacking and that this lack can be represented. The soul must learn to take charge of representations with its ability to distinguish between the literal and the figurative, the metaphorical (378 d-e), and to develop imagination, opinion, understanding and reason, the stages of the soul's development as expressed in the story of the cave.
Plato disliked the incoherence of the myths of Homer and Hesiod and the falsehoods they represented. When he has Socrates say that the new gods are not to be represented as liars or shape-shifters, or as doing malicious deeds, he is at the same time teaching logic. It is a simple argument: if the gods are good, then they must not be characterized as being bad, that is, as having human features. Humans are humans and gods are gods. The other virtues, truth and beauty, should also be exemplified by the gods. A logic of imitation is thus set forth that presumes a distinction between copy and original. As Socrates says, our guardians must be kept away from all other crafts so as to be the craftsmen of the city's freedom, and be exclusively that, and do nothing at all except what contributes to it, they must neither do nor imitate anything else. If they do imitate, they must imitate from childhood what is appropriate for them, namely people who are courageous, self-controlled, pious, and free, and their actions (395c).
Imitation is understood here as a form of making that is not merely repetition. The good bed-maker, Socrates points out, is the one who does not merely imitate other bed-makers but makes beds in which the gods would choose to lie (597-599). The philosophical ruler of the ideal Republic, knowing the Good, would construe and construct a state, and therefore a soul, that would garner support from the gods. One should be wary of souls "spoiled and cramped by the mechanical nature of their work" (495d). This statement, however, should not be read as an attack on the mechanical arts, after all, Socrates was most likely a stone cutter himself, or some other kind of craftsman. Rather, it is a rejoinder that a coherent soul cannot be all things to all people and must only strive for excellence as beyond the mundane and trivial. The soul must strive for beauty itself, and those things that exemplify it, rather than for merely beautiful things. Plato thought that guardians of the state should be wary of actors who were slippery slopes and smooth surfaces, "teflon people" we might call them today. He was no simple critic of poets, as is often supposed; being a poet himself, he opted for philosophical poetry beyond the traditional myths of his age.
Here I must leave any claim for the true doctrine of Plato. Did he believe in eternal truths that were unchanging and that caused our adequate ideas of them in a way sensory objects never could? Some claim that his whole philosophy culminated in a theory of Forms, eternal truths above the fray of sensory conflict. In the famous "Seventh Letter" Plato declares that the truth cannot be written down, that it is a spark that ignites (or not) between listener and word, reader and page, teacher and student (241a-d). In other words, the truth cannot be known as substance but as appearance, and this happens through dialogue; it cannot be known apart from an other with whom we share our perceptions, even if that "other" is ourselves. And herein lies the irony: the truth which offers freedom from inconsistency and contradiction – i.e., the separations that plague our lives – cannot be known without relying on the very otherness that we are trying to overcome. Ultimately overcoming the separation cannot be our life's vocation; rather, always seeking to overcome the separation should be. And in this the liberal arts are our guide.
The Republic is a story that reminds us of the limitations of knowledge that come with our embodied condition (whether this be our literal body or the more figurative cave of our language and culture). And it also reminds us of the profound anxiety produced by these limits that can be met through dialectic and the ecstatic kinds of making – glimpses of the Good – that it can inspire. Like Plato's prisoner, we are currently confined by the myriad images played out by the mass media, and in this the soul suffers a decided cramp. Like citizens of fifth-century Athens, we are pulled by desires for pleasure and for knowledge that are often at odds, so we settle instead for insipid entertainment in which our pleasure is constrained and our reason circumscribed. In our world, knowledge is often reduced to fact, to information that no one knows or understands, but which is readily available on the Internet or some other super highway. We are migrant identities driven by the clock and other technical machinations along the paths and grids that link our hopes to corporate America, to those malls and other sacred spaces where buying and selling offer the empty promise of substance. The television has become our cave wall with the media as the artifact movers who are further commanded by a handful of corporate/political interests. Likely there are other interests as well.
Essentially, we have the same problems the ancients had: we must convince someone that we are intelligent, reasonable, and rational, and that we can measure up according to the objective standards that still dog the modern world, problems that require the liberal arts as a whole. But we should realize that what most concerns us – love, beauty, truth, life (and the death that surrounds it) – resists measurement, even though our concerns require it, regardless of time and place.
As Schiller somewhere said, "Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain." Our stupidity lies not in an absence of fact or information but rather in an excess of it. Our stupidity is a fact of separation, of our American post-Sputnik push toward ever more specialization. Our enlightenment should lie, however, along a much different path, a road more worthy of Kerouac than Kruschev, both of whom, ironically, were preaching their respective gospels in 1957. Kerouac's road was a "holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?" (251). It was this road I sought in my photograph of the road aiming at roadness itself, the reality behind the appearance.
I still wonder about the pictures on my mother's wall, and continue to search among these for the "real me." Certainly there is an author, a maker, and there are images. The camera, like the story of the cave, however, reminds me that what I see (indeed, the eye itself is a kind of camera) is never wholly real, or rather reality consists of intersecting planes, circles and other figures both raised and lowered to the being of matter and wave. On this level, all is matter that vibrates, and photographs are witnesses to this vibrating light. And then there is the act of witnessing itself without which being would have no appearance, or without which appearance would have no being. I am not certain about the absolute existence of eternal truths, but I cannot deny their appearances. All the pictures of me are to some degree me. At each stage I remember struggle and verges of enlightenment, each present a past anticipating a future: the youth, the college freshman, the husband, and now the sixty year old. I know the me is in there, in those three shadows, but also the me, the evanescent "I,"is in here and in whatever moments might come.
The gods need our struggles I think; it's why they bothered making us in the first place, and why we must take making seriously. At each moment I attempt to write down the truth, to say something universally true, but I am left with words and images that are simply "nows" that both mean and do not mean what I want to say. They are particulars rather than universals. But particulars add up: "nows" remain "nows" until I witness them as "thens." The witnessing and expressing are required, and the liberal arts provide the media for this.
When I moved to Hastings in 1987, I reread On the Road and learned that the sheriff of Shelton, Nebraska, asked Kerouac and Eddie, his traveling companion, "You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" To this, Kerouac responded, "I don't know. I'm going as fast as I can and I don't think I have the time" (22-23). Instead of having the time, he was too busy writing and remembering. And that's all the time we need, all the time we have, and the nature of time itself. Or so it seems right now at this moment of enlightenment, with this degree of transcendental cave vision.
WORKS CITED
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Viking Critical Edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.
Plato. "Seventh Letter." Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Revised by C.C.C. Reeve. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.
