Persuasive Power of Metaphor
3rd July 2010
Consider Plato’s Cave.
This metaphor forms the foundation of philosophy for Western Civilization. Plato has us as dumbstruck slaves fooled through P.T. Barnum ploys as we divine truth, beauty, and justice – from fire-drawn shadows made by other people we can’t see. And, when we first break our shackles of ignorance, turn our faces (and our minds), we see a new truth, beauty, and justice in the form of all those shadow-shapers behind us. What a shock! And most of us, according to Plato and other elitists, grateful in our escape from bondage, stand again dumbstruck, watching another illusion, yet seeing the new truth, beauty, and justice or in today’s parlance the New New Thing. Only a few, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, seek a brighter view and find our way out of the Cave and into the Eternal Sunshine of Truth, Beauty, and Justice.
So Plato and his eternal metaphor of the Cave.
What’s an inquiring mind to do with this ancient image and philosophical brand?
Consider Nietzsche.
In this book we find a “subterrestrial” at work, digging, mining, undermining. You can see him, always provided that you have eyes for such deep work, — how he makes his way slowly, cautiously, gently but surely, without showing signs of the weariness that usually accompanies a long privation of light and air. He might even be called happy, despite his labours in the dark. Does it not seem as if some faith were leading him on, some solace recompensing him for his toil? Or that he himself desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing as he does that he will in time have his own morning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn ? — Yea, verily he will return: ask him not what he seeketh in the depths; for he himself will tell you, this apparent Trophonius and subterrestrial, whensoever he once again becomes man. One easily unlearns how to hold one’s tongue when one has for so long been a mole, and all alone, like him.
Nietzsche literally undermines Plato’s Cave with his Trophonius miner.
