Plato’s allegory of the cave is a simple allegory of pedagogical-philosophical intentions that, nevertheless, has always been very effective for me to silver a certain very little intuitive blindness: not so much the blindness of the ignorant, but of the one who believes himself enlightened with wisdom eternal, indisputable and not open to criticism.
According to this allegory, any of us can live very comfortably in the dark cavern, observing the shadows of reality that come from outside, and with that we have more than enough. However, as soon as you free yourself from the chains that force you to stare at the back wall of the cave, and turn your gaze toward the entrance, the glare catches you like a mosquito in the face of ultraviolet light. And so you want to know more .
Leaving the cave is also dangerous in the sense that your eyes have become used to the gloom. And suddenly, infinite photons cover everything. So much luminosity can even produce a more pronounced blindness than penumbra.
Once you catch a glimpse of the light from outside, you need to leave the comfortable cave, despite the fact that the outside announces uncertainty, to contemplate what is out there. As if you were Truman Burbank at the end of The Truman Show , after the conversation with God. You don’t care about dying, because you assume you weren’t even alive .
Leaving the cave is also dangerous in the sense that your eyes have become used to the gloom. And suddenly, infinite photons cover everything. So much luminosity can even produce a more pronounced blindness than penumbra. Faced with so much light, many people end up crazy. Others continue to walk as blind as before. And some even lead to light blindness, gawking at the sun, like mesmerized rabbits in front of the headlights of a car .
A former professor of Philosophy, specialized in epistemology, did not once say that giving too much thought to all these matters condemns you to live in suffering. What you have to know how to disconnect. He did it by going to play a game of pool with friends, while smoking a cigar fat as a thumb. Since then, I chose an analogy for such a period of rest: putting on black, smoked glasses, sunglasses that allow you to partially return to your dark cave, when you were an ignorant child. Too much sun blinds you, so from time to time you have to protect yourself from it, without being forced to epistemologically go back to the cave. Plato’s glasses were my solution for this, especially in a time, adolescence, in which the mind tends to spin things more than usual.
Science and ignorance
Science, in a way, is also conducted with the prudence conferred by Plato’s glasses. Instead of gawking at the great light bulb, the great idea, the great belief, the light that clears everything until it eliminates the nuances and chiaroscuro, he prefers to look away from time to time to line the light from another angle, or He wears glasses with UV protection. Because he understands that knowledge is not obtained suddenly , that the glare of certain evidences or inductions can blind true knowledge. That one is always wrong and it is necessary to allow criticism (because self-criticism will never be aggressive enough).
Humanity has left the dark cave of obscurantism, superstition, fraud, fear. However, those who unfortunately have not received enough scientific and epistemological training , not only walk around without glasses at hand, like rabbits crossing the road, but they are left with their eyes fixed on what they already believe to be the pure and simple truth. without fissures.
What if we started to be humble, as if everything we had thought before had only been the delusions of a blind man, and we started from scratch?
Like that group of Catholic pilgrims who, in 2009, in Ireland, stared at the sun with the hope of having a vision of the Virgin Mary. The "sun gazers" for spiritual reasons. Or those who practice "respirationism" or any other variant type "photosynthesis" that, despite not being plants (or Superman), believe that sunlight provides so many nutrients that they no longer need to eat. They are people who look at the sun, who are bathed in its light, far from the cave, but who are extremely thin and blind. Mostly blind . Almost as blind as in medieval times when we all crammed into the dark cave.
They are people who already think they know the truth about everything. If you tell them that there are no serious clinical trials that have suggested that homeopathy works beyond placebo (and that if there were, we should review two hundred years of advances in Physics and Chemistry, because something would not fit, awarding the Nobel to whoever demonstrated something like this), then, those bathed in light, say "well it works for me" , or "I think …", as if they know more than all of us who have just left the cave, and we still need glasses and other gadgets to avoid so much glare, so much blindness, so much arrogance and so much ignorance.
The rest of us are still there, fresh out of the dark, getting used to the different nuances of light, longing for a certain ignorance, managing the light with various filters and instruments designed by researchers in recent centuries, since Francis Bacon said something like hey, What if we started to be humble, as if everything we had thought before had only been the delusions of a blind man, and we started from scratch?