The Garden and the Cave
The story of the “Garden of Eden” in the book of Genesis and Plato’s story of the Cave are my choices for the two foundational myths of Western Civilization. One story is written anonymously, and comes from the Hebrew Bible, the other is the work of a man considered by many to be the greatest Philosopher in history.
Here’s how the story of the “Garden of Eden” would sound if it were written by an anonymous twenty-first century philosopher:
“Assume a garden, let’s call it “Eden”, and let Eden be our stand-in for the “state of nature”. There are four players in the garden: God, a snake, a man and a woman. Assume the snake is always rational but assume nothing about whether God or the humans are rational."
"There is only one rule and it only applies to the two humans. If the humans obey this rule they stay in the garden. If they disobey, they must leave the garden and never return."
(According to the original story the snake misleads the humans by telling them how much they could benefit from disobeying God’s rule; but what the snake doesn’t tell the humans is that those benefits come with a steep cost. Thus we have at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible one of the first written records of a successful sales pitch.)
"So. in light of this, our well-funded Philosophy department ran a series of game-theoretic computer simulations. We kept certain parameters fixed and varied others. We listed the costs and benefits of each viable strategy and we discovered that when you lay it all out in purely logical formal terms it doesn’t really add up. This world doesn’t amount to anything more than a hill of beans."
Like my philosophical rendition of the garden of Eden, Plato’s allegory of “The Cave” from Plato’s extended dialogue, “The Republic”, is ugly, awkward, convoluted, and preposterous, but unlike my modern version of the Garden, the Allegory of the Cave may be the single most influential piece of philosophy there is.
It’s not a pleasant picture - Down underground there’s a dark smokey cave, where a group of prisoners are spending their entire lives chained together with their backs to a fire. But these are not totally evil jailers because, oddly enough, they spend much of their time making shadow puppet plays for the entertainment of the prisoners, who can feel the heat of the fire, but can never see it because they only see the shadows that are cast on the wall.
One day, one of the prisoners miraculously escapes, managing to climb up outside the cave and is immediately blinded by the bright sunlight. Gradually he becomes used to the bright light and then he is astonished to see the source of this light - the sun, although, of course, he cannot look directly at the sun, he has to quickly glance at it or shade his eyes.
The escaped prisoner realizes that he has to go back and rescue his companions. They have no knowledge of the outside; they think that the source of all light is the fire in the cave; they think that reality is the shadows on the wall.
So our hero climbs back down into the cave to save his friends, only to be blinded and disoriented by the darkness. When he tries to tell his chain-gang buddies that he has seen the light they just scoff at him. “What a stumble-bum! Can’t even make his way in this well-lit cave. Raving about some source of “white light” called the “Sun”. All light comes from the fire, you idiot, can’t you feel it burning behind you?”
We leave our hero, desperate to save his compatriots, but unable to convince them that they should get out of the darkness of the cave and into the daylight….
Ugly, but effective. This story “sticks”. It is so effective that it has shaped philosophy for two and a half millennia. I can posit four reasons for the “stickiness” of this story. First, it’s odd and it sticks out; it is so awkward and bizarre that it is difficult to forget once you hear it. Second, it is an easy-to-remember summary of Plato’s “Ideas” in the form of a dramatic story.
Third, it introduces some major metaphors that we use even today to understand the concepts of knowledge, truth, and reality. Darkness = Ignorance. Light = Knowledge. Confinement = Inability to understand reality, and Freedom = access to reality. This imagery is very powerful because it affects us unconsciously. That is why it has had such a profound influence on Western Philosophy.
Plato pointed to our common realization that much of our experience is fallible and we are prone to false opinion and deception. According to Plato, just as the prisoners in the cave were physically prevented from looking at the fire or escaping outside to see the real light, we are held back by the faults and imperfections of our sensing bodies from understanding the real truth.
What does it mean to see the light? To escape from the confines of a dark cave, and suddenly have to adjust to overwhelming brilliance? To try and communicate that experience, perhaps somewhat ineptly and be mocked and rejected by those who have no understanding? You can see this as a continuing theme in Western Civilization, starting from Socrates and Jeremiah, then later Jesus, Mohammad, and many others. In the nineteenth century Baha’u’llah, Joseph Smith, and Karl Marx. In the twentieth century too many to count.
The fourth reason for the “stickiness” is that the allegory of the cave is reinforcing a story of the trial and death of Socrates that Plato had told before in his four famous dialogues Euthyphro, Crito, Apology, and Phaedo. Socrates searched for knowledge by showing everyone else that they were actually ignorant about what they thought they knew a lot about. He was a “gadfly” (his words) that got under people’s skin. Some of his followers, but not Socrates himself, seized political power and made a mess of things. After that mess had settled down, the citizens of Athens used Socrates as a scapegoat for the mayhem. They condemned him to die for impiety and corrupting the youth and he willingly accepted their judgement, even though the charges were unfair.
In the allegory, Plato wants us to imagine that Socrates is that escaped prisoner, the one who has seen the light but is unsuccessful at getting anybody to follow him out of the cave. Plato believes that Socrates is onto something because he can show, by skillful questioning, how anybody who thinks they understand a subject doesn’t really know it at all. The problem is that they don’t appreciate his doing this. Nobody wants to be shown up as an ignoramus. (So much for the dialectical method.) The fact is, Socrates sacrificed his life for the cause of philosophy; and this happened four hundred years before Jesus.
So, if Socrates was unsuccessful, what is the point of the Cave allegory? Plato wants us to see that someone did escape from the cave, and he is passing on some of that illumination to his students and readers. If you haven’t already guessed, the successful escapee is Plato himself. He’s the one who started the first University, in 387 BCE, called the “Academy”, where we get the word “academic”. Yes, we can blame Plato for being the first academic. But not only did he invent the University, and write some of the most important works in the history of philosophy, he did it because Socrates was put to death for practicing Philosophy.
A very inspiring story, I’ll admit. But the metaphor of objective knowledge as a bright light, so powerful that it blinds us, plays into the idea that learning anything important must come from a guru, an enlightened master who passes on his difficult doctrines to his faithful students.
The concentration on light: sunlight, artificial light, shadows, and darkness points to a hierarchy of knowledge with an all knowing at the top and the majority in darkness and ignorance at the bottom. The Hebrew story of the burning bush at the top of Mount Sinai is a reflection of the same imagery.
True knowledge, reality, morality, etc. is like the sun, an authority over everything, shining over everyone. It is objective in relation to every point-of-view. It determines and defines everything. It is surely no coincidence that this period twenty-five hundred years ago, named the “Axial Age” by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, corresponds to the time of Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, and Jeremiah, and to the development of Monotheism.
It’s easy to imagine visual objects that appear to be permanent and unchanging. The sun and the stars for instance. They can have a powerful effect on us, and yet we cannot reach them, touch them, or act on them.
Plato’s imagery points to a perfect realm of “Ideas” or “Forms” outside of sense experience. It leads people to forget or even disparage the fact that we construct most of our understanding through social interaction, not by top-down transmission of objective knowledge.
Plato’s allegory does a hatchet job on the other senses. But those other senses serve us well in the darkness, and when we have to stand up, walk, and talk. It is really the depreciation of the body and the other senses that leads to the exaltation of the abstract, the formal, and the spiritual over our common experience.
It is by focusing on seeing something permanent and unchanging that Plato sets the stage for "Dualism" - the belief that there are two different worlds. One that is more real because it is unchanging, the other less real because it is constantly changing. This leads to an unbridgeable dichotomy between the world of “Mind” or the “Soul”, which is supposedly not subject to physical decay, and the world of the “Body” which is subject to change and dissolution.
Knowledge is not shaped by our interactions with others and with the physical world - that is only fallible opinion, according to Plato. Knowledge is only given to us from on high. Knowledge can only be objective truth. The evidence of the senses is suspect, because, as Heraclitus said, everything changes and nothing stays the same. This dualism has infected Philosophy ever since, and it predates Descartes, the modern champion of dualism, by more than two millennia.
But, what about that other foundation myth - The Garden? We don’t normally think of it as philosophical, but if we did, we might find that it better serves as a place for discussing the origins of metaphysics and morality. Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not advocating some form of Intelligent Design or Creationism. They are just stories, narratives that reflect our understanding of ourselves and the changing world around us. But these two stories have had an outsized influence on Western Civilization. And in my opinion the older story - The Garden - is the deeper more fruitful story for Philosophy.
One of the things that I love about the garden of Eden story is its childlike simplicity. According to the story we humans are made in God’s image, and that means that God is kind of like an old uncle who walks around in his garden to enjoy the “coolness of the evening” and needs a day of rest after a week of hard work.
But once Plato’s ideas started to pervade the ancient world the Genesis story seemed hopelessly out-of-fashion. This started to bother some people in the ancient world, and by the time Jesus came along, four hundred years later, there was a whole group of people, called Gnostics, who believed that the resurrection was a big improvement over the God of the Old Testament. They were plainly embarrassed by talk of a God who walks around in a garden, and is surprised and gets angry. This Old Testament God is too down-to-earth, too human. He doesn’t seem to initially have any spiritual qualities at all.
I believe that it is the influence of Plato and later, from him, the Stoics, that leads to prioritizing the spiritual over the material, and to the Gnostic schools of Christianity.
To get back to the Garden, the beauty of this story is in its appearance of naive simplicity. It seems to be trying to understand how humans became differentiated from animals, and it points to morality as an answer. In fact, the simplicity is only apparent. The story has wonderful twists and turns so that it both uses the contrast between knowledge and ignorance and the contrast between obedience and disobedience to give us an imaginative guess at what could have been the way that humans first entered moral systems.
In the story, Adam and Eve are in a double-bind: if they decide to obey God they will not be able to learn about good and evil. (The profession of teaching was a long way off when this story was written, it seems); but, if they decide to disobey God and obtain knowledge they will get kicked out of the garden. Is it a quibble to ask: how could they have know it was wrong to disobey God, before they knew right from wrong? To ignore this conundrum is called “begging the question” in Philosophy.
The fact is that the story could not make sense if we did not assume morality from the very beginning. In the interest of the dramatic narrative we have to assume morality in order to make sense of what the first humans are doing and in order to understand the consequences of their actions.
Although it is not stated explicitly, the story does suggest that our becoming moral beings has to do with growth and development. Children are not ashamed of being naked because they have not yet mastered social norms. At the same time, in some circumstances, they must be told what to do, and be expected to be obedient, even though they may have little or no understanding why. The framework for morality can be seen as obedience to authority, because that forms the scaffolding for our learning right from wrong. Our parents protect us from harm by imposing rules, and the rules afford us opportunities to learn. Separation from nature can be seen as a maturation process where children safely assimilate social norms and acceptable reasons for them by the time they reach adulthood.
But if that’s the case, then the story of the garden telescopes the whole developmental process into one short but sweet act of rebellion. Whereas with Plato’s allegory, knowledge is equated with light, with all that implies, in this story knowledge is contained in a fruit. This fruit is forbidden in Eden, dare I say, because knowledge of good and evil differentiates us from animals.
The image of knowledge as fruit is truly inspired. It suggests that knowledge is available to everyone if they are willing to receive it. It equates knowledge with the body rather than with transcending the body so that it makes a metaphysics and morality based on our experience and human history possible. Plato’s imagery of the transcendent sun outside the cave, leads to far too many years discussing “essences”, “propositions”, “multiple worlds” and other disconnected abstractions.
The tree of knowledge has roots that reach deep into the ground. Knowledge has to come from somewhere, presumably it is the result of our activities and our interactions. We share knowledge amongst ourselves, just as we share food with each other. Food often grows from a seed, and knowledge grows from the seed of parenting and raising children, sharing the wealth of our experience from one generation to the next.
The Garden is a very clever story for being able to picture the beginning of morality as a separation of humans from nature. It points out some of the basics of morality: if somebody commits a serious wrong, then they are likely to be punished or excluded from the community, sometimes permanently. It gives the example of human sexuality as a common object of moral rules, and it points to the example of “shame” as a distinctly human emotion. On the other hand, the idea of eating forbidden fruit from the “tree of knowledge” is so imaginative and evocative that it’s one of the things that forever after determines how we remember this story.
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