Shooting Our Way out of Plato's Cave

I like answering questions that others have posed, when I think I can give an Objectivist spin on the answer. And so I read the question of whether we are "reverting" to our animalistic nature, our brute side, with all the violence we seem to see that comes from not only terrorists, but from normal, everyday people. Is this reversion "predestined", asked the question. No explanation was given as to why it would be "predetermined", but the reversion to our brute side made me think in another direction.


No, not predestined. We are simply going backward into the cave of Plato, as we did after St. Augustine incorporated him into Christianity. Now, however, he has been incorporated, since the writings of Kant, into secular thinking.

"Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history... whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato." Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/aristo…

It was because of the Augustine/Plato connection that the Inquisition used torture, murder, and the killing of witches. 

• St. Augustine, on the contrary, was still opposed to the use of force... Finally, however, he changed his views... Apropos of his apparent inconsistency it is well to note carefully whom he is addressing...in his writings against the Donatists he upholds the rights of the State: sometimes, he says, a salutary severity would be to the interest of the erring ones themselves and likewise protective of true believers and the community at large. link

• "No human judge," Augustine wrote, "can read the conscience of the man before him. That is why so many innocent witnesses are tortured to find what truth there is in the alleged guilt of other men. It is even worse when the accused man himself is tortured to find out if he be guilty. Here a man still unconvicted must undergo certain suffering for an uncertain crime –- not because his guilt is known, but because his innocence is unproved. Thus it often happens that the ignorance of the judge turns into tragedy for the innocent party.

 Now the Platonic/Kantian epistemology has turned a different direction, from the religious to the secular, where men (and increasingly, women,) are randomly killing others on campuses and in post offices and other public places. 

Why? They have been taught that it does no good to leave the cave; the flash of rationality and sanity outside the cave is no longer what it was. Those who keep men chained to the cave and cast long shadows are now on the outside of cave where they can catch you, and it is safer inside the cave. 

No one wants to remain in a cave, so they shoot their way out.

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What is "Human"?

To be human was defined by Aristotle as being "the rational animal." For that, we can't ignore intelligence.

But because we see intelligence in other animals---chimps, dogs, whales, elephants, dolphins---we have to wonder about their reasoning abilities, especially when a dog, for example, has been seen to "think" in stressful situations and run for help, continuing to bark until someone pays attention to it, then leading people to the problem, such as a child who is hurt.

But the great naturalist Loren Eiseley described this kind of intelligence as the animals' "eternal present" because they learn nothing from it that is learned by others of its kind. It does not pat itself on the back and later think about the good deed it did, and it does not tell other dogs of its exploits. Once the event is over, it may remain as a part of the animal's overall empathy toward the child it saved, or it may even bolster its own self-esteem if such a thing exists in an animal; but these would be sub-conscious since we see no evidence of its own conscious recognition of what it has accomplished.

Ayn Rand had another description for this kind of "thinking" on the part of animals; "range-of-the-moment consciousness." That is easier to understand than Eiseley's phrase, when used without an explanation.

So "being human" is a matter of retention of consciousness, which it expands all the time by integrating other moments of consciousness into it. First Responders, for example, make a career out of what the dog does only in emergencies.

Retention and integration of moments of consciousness removes man from that "eternal present" and presents him with a dilemma: what to do with his memory?

He "feels" his memory as conscience when it deals with morality; and when it deals with morality it becomes part of his (natural, not super-natural) soul.For this reason, "being human" must at least implicitly involve being "good" or "bad", and certainly involves intelligence.

The fact that much of our literature and entertainment have let society down by not standing up to moral scrutiny in its explanation of "human-ness" means only that modern philosophy, the philosophy of context-dropping and of creating moral greyness where black-and-white ought to be visible, is present in our forms of art.

That does not make the authors, painters, actors and other artists correct in their evaluation of what it means to be human. It means they are obfuscating and refusing to face up to the fact that man has moral choices to make if he wishes to remain "the rational animal."

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