There’s a wonderful song in
the hit musical ‘Chicago.’ It’s called
‘Mister Cellophane’:
'Mister Cellophane
Shoulda been my name
'Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I'm there'
We are connected to, and intensely aware of a handful of family and friends or ‘significant others’ and to our work. If I may recast a famous image from Sartre, this nest, this egg is the sum total of our reality. The rest of the world is just a smudge, a blob. Of course we can’t ignore ‘others’ completely. They may be a useful or necessary part of our lives. At times they have a nuisance value and need to be disciplined. So we pay enough attention to the crowd so we can push the right buttons and get the required reactions. As we grow, we learn to put insignificant others in behavioral uniforms, straitjackets even. We create environments where outcomes can be controlled. There is order and a balance of sorts in our lives. Conflict is minimized.
No one openly subscribes to the ‘live comfortably and let others die’ philosophy but our concern for others is often superficial, if that. We’ve all seen couples who’ve been married for years interacting with each other like trained athletes jumping through the required hoops, including the mouthing of endearments and platitudes. It’s a meeting of masks in a make believe, ‘happy’ environment. Woe to the man who dares to step outside this charmed circle and tell it like it is. He is ostracized, ridiculed, disciplined and finally made to fall in line. If he doesn’t, he ends up as a social outcast. And it’s cold and freezing out there...The bottom line, even for reasonably moral and decent people like us is not what happens, but who it happens to. A wise elder is often around to mollify the victim: ‘Anger is a waste even when you’ve been terribly harmed and hurt.’ Sound advice if you want to survive. The perpetrators of injustice vulgarize victims and cover them with mud so they can stand on pedestals and look down at lesser creatures with disdain. ‘He had it coming....’ It’s almost a law of nature that some benighted soul stands up in the midst of this drama and asks silly questions like: ‘Is this true? Is it just?’ Is it ethical?
'Mister Cellophane
Shoulda been my name
'Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I'm there'
We are connected to, and intensely aware of a handful of family and friends or ‘significant others’ and to our work. If I may recast a famous image from Sartre, this nest, this egg is the sum total of our reality. The rest of the world is just a smudge, a blob. Of course we can’t ignore ‘others’ completely. They may be a useful or necessary part of our lives. At times they have a nuisance value and need to be disciplined. So we pay enough attention to the crowd so we can push the right buttons and get the required reactions. As we grow, we learn to put insignificant others in behavioral uniforms, straitjackets even. We create environments where outcomes can be controlled. There is order and a balance of sorts in our lives. Conflict is minimized.
No one openly subscribes to the ‘live comfortably and let others die’ philosophy but our concern for others is often superficial, if that. We’ve all seen couples who’ve been married for years interacting with each other like trained athletes jumping through the required hoops, including the mouthing of endearments and platitudes. It’s a meeting of masks in a make believe, ‘happy’ environment. Woe to the man who dares to step outside this charmed circle and tell it like it is. He is ostracized, ridiculed, disciplined and finally made to fall in line. If he doesn’t, he ends up as a social outcast. And it’s cold and freezing out there...The bottom line, even for reasonably moral and decent people like us is not what happens, but who it happens to. A wise elder is often around to mollify the victim: ‘Anger is a waste even when you’ve been terribly harmed and hurt.’ Sound advice if you want to survive. The perpetrators of injustice vulgarize victims and cover them with mud so they can stand on pedestals and look down at lesser creatures with disdain. ‘He had it coming....’ It’s almost a law of nature that some benighted soul stands up in the midst of this drama and asks silly questions like: ‘Is this true? Is it just?’ Is it ethical?
Let’s take the trial of
Socrates as a case in point. Normally, a court of law is a place where the
judge is wise, learned and impartial. The lawyers are far more knowledgeable
than the defendant. An impartial jury is in attendance. Justice is done and
each man gets his due – in theory. Socrates was tried and condemned by people
who had neither his intellect nor his moral integrity. Worse, they were
arrogant enough to think that they were qualified to judge a man of his caliber.
Men who did not have the brains or knowledge to understand Socratic ideas
pronounced them immoral! Socrates, of all people, was accused of ‘corrupting’
the young! Socrates had many disciples but Plato was the brightest star in his
firmament. Plato was shocked by the trial and the verdict condemning Socrates
to death.
Plato’s Republic[i]
is an inquiry into the nature of truth and justice: What is justice and who
will administer it? Plato comes up with the concept of the ‘philosopher king or
guardian,’ a seer who rules but is not allowed to own property or accumulate
wealth. Mahatma Gandhi in modern times
and king Janak in ancient times are examples of philosopher kings.[ii]
The word ‘republic’ is made up of two roots: ‘res’ (welfare) and ‘publica’
(public) meaning a welfare state. The Republic is a blueprint for the
setting up of a just state. Swami Vivekananda says somewhere: ‘that society is
best where the highest truth becomes possible.’ Plato draws up a plan for a
Utopian state. I must mention here that there are many ideas in The Republic
which would not be acceptable in a modern state. The underlying philosophy is
however as sound as ever.
Chapter seven of The Republic is the
soul of the book. It is set forth as a dialogue between Socrates and his
disciple Glaucon. Plato uses poetry rather than polemic as his weapon. The
imagery is sublime, the ideas are ethereal. Imagine, says Plato, a dark
underground cave or dungeon. The mouth of the cave opens towards the light but
no one in the cave can see this light. In the cave are prisoners who have been
there since they were children. Their legs and necks are bound by chains in
such a way that they can’t turn their heads. They can only look straight ahead.
A fire is burning at some distance behind them. Between the fire and the
prisoners, high above them is a path which runs along a low wall. People walk
across the path, chatting with each other, sometimes carrying wooden or stone
statues, animals or other sundry objects.
The prisoners see reflections
of their own selves and the people and objects moving across the path on the
wall in front of them. They hear echoes of people speaking. All they can see
are shadows, and as shadows go, they can’t tell the difference between the
shadows of living human beings and
shadows of statues and other objects. The prisoners talk to each other about
the shadow figures as if they are living, breathing creatures. Since the echoes
come from the shadows, they think it’s the shadows speaking. They play games
and become experts at predicting the order in which certain shapes appear. This
is empirical, verifiable reality as they experience it day after day. This is
truth as they see it. This is their egg, their world, their cocoon. For.For Plato,
life in the den is existential life, a life of slumber and shadows. In Vedantic
terms, this is the hazy world of Maya. It is an existence that has no
substance. There is only one true reality, God.
Supposing, says Plato, one of
the prisoners is set free. He stands up with the utmost difficulty. He is asked
to turn around and look at the people, animals and objects moving across the
path. He hears people speak for the first time. He is shown that the shadows he
saw earlier were mere reflections of living human beings and inanimate objects.
He is stunned and incredulous. His eyes, long accustomed to a dark, unending,
black night are blinded. He is then made to climb out of the cave. At first he
sees only shadows, and then slowly, reflections in water, gradually his eyes
get used to seeing things by starlight and finally he learns to see clearly on
days lit by the blazing sun. He finally understands the difference between
flesh and blood people and their shadows, tunes into the cadence of real voices
and laughs at the echoes in the den.
At one level, the prison
represents external societal constraints and the shadow play of interactions
between people that we have touched on earlier. These are external shackles.
There is a much deeper, inner component: The darkness of the den signifies
tamas or ignorance. The chains are attachment to the five senses and the
difficulty we have in breaking free from the prison of physical reality. At the
existential level, life is slumber, a dream state and a puppet show of shadow
figures.[iii]The
journey to light is the destiny of every pilgrim soul without exception. The
guru guides the struggling soul to light and freedom.
Plato does not talk of God.
He uses the concept of ‘Ideas.’ We live in a twilight world trapped in bodies
we can’t walk out of and rooted to the phenomenal world through sense
perception. The prison is the sense world. The light of the fire represents the
sun. The journey out of the cave is the soul’s odyssey ...its trek to the
intellectual world. ‘The eye of the soul’[iv]
is normally buried in ‘an outlandish slough.’ When the soul sets out to find
the Holy Grail, this eye turns upwards towards the good, towards truth:
‘...in the world of knowledge
the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort, and
then, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things
beautiful and right, parent of light and of the Lord of light in this visible
world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual, and
that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public
or private life must have his eyes fixed.’[v]
Vedanta speaks of a veil of
Maya that traps us in a net of illusion or half truth. Through persistent
effort we have to cut our way out of Maya to freedom. Plato makes an assertion
which is interesting from the Vedantic point of view: You can’t put sight into
eyes that are blind. Knowledge is in the soul already[vi].
It’s not put there by some external force. The transition from ‘becoming’ to
‘being’[vii]
happens when the eyes are turned away from ‘the lead weight of sense pleasure
to the opposite direction.’ The mind is polished until it is free of dross and
becomes a perfect reflector for truth.
The allegory does not stop
here. It’s not enough that a prisoner breaks free and comes face to face with
truth. Plato forces him to go back to the cave and pull others out of the den
they are trapped in. This is the philosopher king, the guru. It’s very hard for
him to come down from divine consciousness to the ‘evil state of man.’ Once
again his eyes are blinded. Plato adds a telling remark here: if he is forced
to fight in a court of law while his eyes are adjusting to darkness about
shadows of images, of justice with those who’ve never seen ‘absolute justice,’ he
would be totally out of his depth. This of course, is what happened to
Socrates. He could not explain the truth to people who were rooted to a world
of false consciousness.
When the seer returns and
tries to tell his mates that what they see are shadows, they laugh at him:
‘Men would say of him that up
he went and down he came without the use of his eyes, and that it was better
not to think of ascending, and if any one tried to lose another and lead him up
to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to
death.’[viii]
The guardian must work in spite of this
ridicule. In Plato’s republic, young people are put in the care of guardians
who turn their minds towards the right values, towards the good. They are thus
trained to be fit administrators in a just state. Education is the key to
truth, justice, freedom and felicity. The faculty of sight which was turned in
the wrong direction is now focused on the truth. We now have the answer to the
question which The Republic set out to answer: what is justice? What is
truth? The welfare state is one in which the highest values become practical,
where sages like Socrates are celebrated not condemned to death.
Pic: 3quarksdaikly.com
Pic: 3quarksdaikly.com
[i] Plato, The Republic,(2000)
trans. Benjamin Jowett(New York: Dover Publications).
[ii] For an academic analysis, please
see: Davidson,Pramila,”Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: A Vedantic Reading,” Prabuddha
Bharata, Vol.114,No.8,August 2009
[iii] Ibid.,p.196
[iv] Ibid.,p.195
[v] Ibid.,p.179
[vi]
Ibid.,p.180
[vii] Ibid.,p.195
[viii]
Ibid.,p.179
