About
Alex Tabaka
LOCATION: A CAVERNOUS EXPANSE OF UNKNOWN SIZE
TIME OF DAY: UNKNOWN
A room, size and contours not yet fully revealed. There is light, but how much and with what power to illuminate is NOT YET CLEAR.
Two men, alone, standing. They have just entered the room. Their eyes are fixed outward toward the expanse of the room, replete with wonder and excitement. One man is older, he speaks first, with all the satiety of a master who has led his disciple to nirvana. His name is Socrates. The other man is filled with admiration and devotion for the older. His name is Glaucon.
They gaze outward into their new environment. THEY DO NOT LOOK AT EACH OTHER. They are REFLEXIVELY AND UNKNOWINGLY touching and lightly scratching at their LEGS and at their NECKS. Their eyes burn with a sense of long-awaited advent, but there is a flicker of UNEASE that lurks just beneath their conscious apprehension.
SOCRATES
You have joined me in the light, dear Glaucon.
GLAUCON
It is truly more wonderful than I could have imagined. Oh long-awaited joy, I am released! You have led me into the light!
SOCRATES
I was but a guide, dear paidion … a Virgil to your Dante, if I may speak anachronistically. More truly, you have led yourself into the light!
GLAUCON
You warned me well, dear didaskalos. Now that I am disabused of my former error, I suffer sharp pains indeed. The piercing glare of the Real is quite distressing.
SOCRATES
Patience. All in good time. Remember, you are still accustomed to the dark. Painful though the light is, at first, rejoice in your liberation!
GLAUCON
Yes, I remember. And I am surely keen to rejoice. However, I do find myself even more at unease than I was braced to expect.
SOCRATES
It is only Mal de Débarquement, and to be expected! You spent so long tossed by the waves of delusion, you are not accustomed to steady land.
GLAUCON
Yes, perhaps. But the unease is not only in my legs, as it were, but in my heart. Is there not a way to be assured of my liberated state? Surely there is some token of our deliverance, however modest, that will strengthen me to better endure these birthing pains and quiet this gnawing doubt?
SOCRATES
(with a tinge of annoyance and perhaps a shade of panic that he secretly notices in himself as though observing someone else)
Oh you of little faith! Is not all that you are experiencing everything that I have already foretold? Can you not patiently bear with your period of acclimation?!
GLAUCON
Forgive me, dear teacher. I will try. But I do have a thought, if you will hear it.
SOCRATES
Speak your mind, O liberated one.
GLAUCON
When I was in the cave, I remember that my legs and my neck were bound with chains so that I was prevented from turning. We have not yet looked upon each other, teacher, that we might see in each other’s eyes the joy of illumination.
SOCRATES
(Now with more than a shade of panic, and with a tinge of anger)
What foolish discontent! Is the joy of your liberated state not enough for you? Must you demand the foolish play things of children also?!
GLAUCON
Do not be angry with me. There is a disquiet that continues to scratch at my bones. Is this not a simple enough request?
SOCRATES
Forgive me, Glaucon. I cannot explain my harshness. It was fear, though why I am afraid I cannot exactly say. Perhaps your disquiet has infected me as well.
GLAUCON
Then let us turn to each other.
SOCRATES
Let it be so.
(The gripping fear of realization falls across his face, his hands slowly rise to explore his neck, frozen in the twilight)
I cannot.
GLAUCON
You cannot what? Turn to me?! I will turn to you teacher!
(visibly struggling and grasping at his neck and legs)
I do not see the chains, they are invisible to me … but I am as bound as ever I was before! … Turn to me Socrates, turn to me! … rescue me from this new bondage!
SOCRATES
What yet stranger image is this! What yet stranger prisoners we are! Delivered from one degree of bondage to another. What new devilry is this?!
GLAUCON
(now clawing violently at his neck and his legs)
But, I do not understand … Is this not enlightenment?!
SOCRATES
(calmly, with a hint of both defeat and admiration)
Be at peace, Glaucon … as much as you are able. This is not enlightenment. What I believed to be the outside world is but another cave. What I believed to be the light of the sun is but another lesser light, from what source I do not know. What I believed to be but one cave is, apparently, a great labyrinth of caverns!
GLAUCON
So, you have led me from prison to prison?!
SOCRATES
I have done nothing, except that you have willingly followed.
GLAUCON
Indeed! Oh, the bitter sting of seemingly bottomless delusion! Oh, most hopeless of prisons, thou MISE EN ABYME!
SOCRATES
You see in truth, Glaucon. We have found the matryoshka within the matryoshka. I thought I was of those in that supposed upper world who had descended back to the prisoners as a rescuer … but now that we are both here, I see that I was never unbound! … All this time, I thought I was progressing and maturing in my perception of the True. But know I see … I have always only been measuring shadows …
(long pause … though they cannot see each other, Glaucon’s eyes strain toward his teacher with silent fear and desperation, Socrates’ face slowly contorts with controlled rage as he looks steadfastly straight ahead)
Rulers of the hive indeed! What folly and madness! …
GLAUCON
But is there no end?! Is there no escape?! Is the prison and delusion of the illusory an infinitely recursive sequence? Is every moment of perceived deliverance but another layer of deception?
SOCRATES
It appears to be so.
GLAUCON
But what was IT that previously turned us? By what power did we seem, even if only to ourselves, to have escaped our previous shackles and emerged into the Real? Who turned us? What turned us? Was it friend or foe?!
SOCRATES
I thought I knew, at least in part. But now all I see is the reduplication of deception. Layer upon layer. Nothing but Droste.
GLAUCON
But, if we have been brought into yet another room of this prison … a prison of the soul and of the mind and of the faculties so much greater in size and scope than we ever previously imagined! … who or what shall turn us in truth?! …
SOCRATES
Shall you do nothing but taunt and torment me with my failure!
GLAUCON
Such is not my intent … but surely the very conception of true freedom that abides in our innermost places must correspond to something real … however distant from our experience? If there is a power to propel us from one degree of deception to another … surely there is another power to turn us to see at last according to the light of the True?!
SOCRATES
(eyes now closed, muttering)
RecursionError … RecursionError …
GLAUCON
Socrates, what new horror is this? Who will deliver us into the light? Is there no end?! Come back to me!
SOCRATES
(eyes remain closed, darting wildly beneath his eyelids as in deep R.E.M. sleep)
def infinite_reduction(n):
print(f"Current value: {n}")
# Missing base case! N continues to reduce infinitely into the negatives.
infinite_reduction(n - 1)
infinite_reduction(10)
ii. C’est dans ta lumière que nous voyons la lumière
The question is simple enough. Simple enough to deceive us into thinking that the answer will flow like golden rivers of honeyed truth from our lips. But then, with mouths half-opened, in the cavernous hollow of that stuttering, abortive pause wherein so much of our blessed ignorance is revealed (if we are honest enough to face it and yet more, brave enough to rejoice in it) — we see. That despite the disarming nature of the apparent simplicity of the question, there are unexplored depths that should make of us thalassophobes all. Point in fact, it has shown itself to be one of the most stubbornly elusive questions that human beings have ever endeavored to answer, in equal measure perplexing, puckish, and punishing. Smoldering in opposition to the inveterate pride of our little minds with a quiet malice. Many answers have been proffered — philosopher, poet, priest, publican, and proletariat alike. The dizzying array of supposed resolutions couldn’t be more varied, more contradictory, or more labyrinthine in complexity.
How do you know what you think you know?
We are epistemologists all. Every day, in a thrilling and sensational multiplicity of ways, we speak and act, we move intellect and will (who is this we?), all from a carefully guarded place of deep settledness wherein we have assured ourselves (who is this self?) that the body of knowledge that directs our lives is unassailably true. The entire arc of post-modernism has only served to more deeply etch the self-evident character of this given into the history of philosophical thought. Who can outdo the post-modernist as regards the zeal with which they proclaim the axiomatic truth of their propositional claims? But on what basis do we speak with epistemological confidence about anything? On what basis do we so confidently think (διάνοια) and speak (λόγος) and act (ἐνέργεια) and move (κίνησις) and will (θέλημα) and love (φιλέω/ἔρος/ἀγάπη — so richly variegated in expression) as though what we claim as unassailably true has any point of contact with reality?
The “unassailably true” part comes to us effortlessly. As observations go, this one is as empirically verifiable as you could possibly desire. Open up the modern pillbox (smart phone) of designer drugs (social media) and take your pick. Thirty seconds of scrolling on any given day and the conclusion will violently force itself on you — that people simply take for granted a deeply and passionately held faith in the inviolable veracity of their predications. Take a walk down the street, talk to a random sampling of people about the world, about themselves, about humanity, about goodness and beauty, about God. Invariably, they will repeatedly appeal to a body of knowledge, the basic truthfulness of which they will take utterly for granted. We all do it.
But therein lies the rub! The knowledge that we so blithely assume to be unassailably true, that so powerfully shapes and directs everything we do, even the silent and nigh imperceptible (even to ourselves) motions of the inner self — how do we know that it has real, vital, living contact with reality? It is this question, this conundrum, that has, in equal parts, both fascinated and infuriated thinking people from time immemorial. And again for all the attempts of modern philosophy to argue to the contrary, it is a matter of deeply intuitive conviction in the human heart that truth has a universal character, i.e. that reality has meaning and purpose because truth binds us all together, that truth is not a purely subjective construct de mente singulorum.
But therein lies the rub (once more, with feeling!). As Pilate exclaimed with such accidental profundity — τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια? What determines fundamental truth? How do we access it? What validates our truth claims as possessing a vital point of contact with reality? How do we discriminate between truth and its other — error — between knowledge and falsity? We are epistemologists all. There is not a living, breathing person for whom the definition, nature, and limits of knowledge are not of intimate concern. Our lives are a continual and unceasing epistemologization wherein we continually and unceasingly run the background code of our Ur-Commitments in every word and deed, in every thought and affection and valuation — in every movement of the self, either centrifugally toward the other, or centripetally (reflexively) toward itself. We can learn this within any span of five minutes spent in the presence of a precocious, inquisitive child for whom the question “Why?” is the most fundamental and persistent inquiry of their existence. It is not that children are more naïve than adults when it comes to a passion and concern for truth, it is that they are more honest.
However, whether young or old, there is a universal state of affairs that I intend to poke at and provoke to response, like a kid poking a coiled snake with a stick. This state of affairs is that humans are quite distinctly prone to simply bypass the questions above by boldly and brazenly assuming epistemological certainty concerning the knowledge we believe we possess (all the more so when that certainty [moral] expresses itself as a brazen denial that certainty [intellectual] is possible). The mind and the heart cannot be separated; and at the end of the day, all forms of certainty are an interpenetrating unity. But do we have reasonable grounds for any epistemological confidence? Whence does it come? Is it possible to lay our heads on our pillows at night with some modicum of peace that we have real knowledge concerning reality as it really is? Again, small forests in Norway have been felled to record for posterity the vertiginous assemblage. No attempt will be made now to summarize the complete matrix. However, I will share a few words from one distinct perspective — that of the ongoing dialogue between Plato and Christ.
The Allegory of the Cave has been around for about 2400 years, and there is one great, unresolved issue (to this interpreter, at least). Many different answers have been given, many of them problematic (ibid). Who does the turning? When enslaved minds are trapped in the delusion of the cave, who or what actually turns them from the shadows of the fire to the light of the sun? Arguably the most definitive moment of the cave allegory is shrouded in a mysterious and elusive passive voice; when Socrates says to Glaucon, “See what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error” … are released and disabused? Released and disabused by whom, or by what? If the prisoners of the cave are the passive recipients of this turning — who is the Turner? Furthermore, if the Sun in the allegory is the source of the Real and the Good, can it truly be the case that it (whatever it may be) is inert, unthinking, remote and without any care for our personal existence — our continual toil and groping towards its light.
There are many reasons that could be given as to why Christianity and Platonism have always been engaged with one another as passionate interlocutors. Here is one. Human beings long to be turned. The questions of epistemology and of the affections have always been intertwined. Epistemology has always been erotic and kinetic and telic. And the Christian Gospels tell us that Jesus came proclaiming that our innate longing to be turned toward the Real corresponds to the reality of a Personal Being — the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, who does indeed turn according to an eternal purpose and intention:
“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me. Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father” (Jn. 6:44-46).
With regard to the great questions of epistemology, broadly considered, and with specific regard to the great unresolved question of the Allegory of the Cave — Plato is call, Jesus is response. What Plato mysteriously posits as unknown, Jesus reveals. As Paul says on the Areopagus, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).
The Christian Gospel is good news because it proclaims true epistemological deliverance. Not the deceptive and delusive deliverance of those who are themselves prisoners, who offer deliverance only from one part of the cave to another. Without the divine drawing and turning, all epistemology is speleology. Different speleothems, same cavern. The blind leading the blind. True, some have mapped out the cave and its features with far greater insight and precision than others, but all we are doing are measuring shadows. We need the divine illumination, what Paul of Tarsus speaks of as πεφωτισμένους τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς τῆς καρδίας ὑμῶν — having the eyes of our hearts enlightened (Eph. 2:18).
Among Plato’s mistakes was the underestimation of the actual vastness of the cavern which constitutes our epistemological prison. Room after room, features upon features, a nigh innumerable collection of passageways that would seem to promise escape — yet leading only to another system of rooms. Without the illumination of the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation (Eph. 2:17), we are trapped within a darkened labyrinth that we cannot escape. Our desperate plight is that we have an inborn longing to escape, but not an inborn ability.
But does this stop us from trying? No! For in the heart of humanity there is an equally inescapable longing and notion that the possibility of escape exists. Problem being, of course, that we invariably seek for escape presupposing that our natural abilities are meet for the task and will lead us to freedom. And just like the myth of old, philosopher after would-be philosopher believes himself to possess Ariadne’s thread and so fancies himself the long-awaited guide to lead us out of the perilous labyrinth of our epistemological condition. But the outcome is always the same. With no power to truly turn anyone, every postulated escape proves a delusion, just as the Minotaur rounds the corner and we find ourselves hemmed in on every side with our backs against the wall.
How is Jesus any different? Because as man he is the one truly turned, and as the Son he is the one true Turner.
“Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you that believe not” (Jn. 6:61-63).
“Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn. 8:32).
What is truth, Pilate asked. Jesus had already given the answer to his disciples — “‘Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth’” (Jn. 17:17). Jesus lived and taught and prayed out of the deep conviction of the Hebrew Scriptures that epistemology has been spiritual warfare from the beginning: “‘Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” (Gen. 3:1). All other voices inevitably betray. All other paths inexorably proceed only from darkness to darkness. Regardless of the degree of sophistication with which it presents itself, it remains mere speleology — a maze with no solution, a labyrinth of constant flux and the infinite regress of endless obfuscation, where every supposed solution plays out to yet another dead end. There is but one true escape.
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one” (Jn. 10:27-30).
To whom will we listen?
iii. Il était une fois dans la terre vaine
How could it be how could I be made whole after everything after everything I failed I wept adulteresses adulteresses I am she I am the man again again never again yet again is it unceasing is there a way home is there a path to take me to the place which place I don’t know and yet I know I have never been there but I yearn and sometimes think it’s there right around the corner every gesture of longed for something but gone gone gone like shadow like sand why does hope die so willingly I run looking if it will not stay with me I will force myself upon the wind I will force myself upon the world I will have it I will make it I will grasp claw tear dieu a-t-il réellement dit? dieu a-t-il réellement dit? if you will not do my bidding I will rage rage against the dying of almighty me everything will bow nations will be mine but in the quest to subdue all things to myself celebrate myself sing myself rage myself destroy myself destroy myself everything means everything means nothing the circle of pleasure pain hope despair never ending never ending how could I be made whole after everything after everything I failed I wept adulteresses adulteresses I am she I am the man again again never again yet again is it unceasing is there a way home can I be made whole?
What must change except everything what must be healed except the depths of me every joy I ever suspected ever trembled to think was there waiting right behind every moment of beauty was always there always there never changing no variableness nor shadow of turning not an idea not a destination not a thing to put in my pocket but source and cause and end and life the bush is burning burning nec tamen consumebatur adulteresses I am she I am the man I am the man not now in bitterness or rage or rebellion but in the sweetness of release falling freely down down down into a love that has no end because it has no beginning there is a way home there is a way I did not find it but He found me tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo the true light which lighteth every man rend the heavens oh rend the heavens and come down the voice of יהוה a thunderclap of life shattering what he hath seen and heard that he testifieth his banner over me was love I will seek him whom my soul loves he heals my apostasy he loves me freely oh! like the rain oh! the Spirit’s petrichor he is the evergreen cypress ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή the eternal newness that makes all things new you whispered and beckoned and shattered ἐγώ εἰμι and I will not let you go until you bless me sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi a sound! a sound! oh trilling lark! oh new song of the heart! cantare amantis est the voice of my Beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills make haste my Beloved and be like a gazelle oh the mountains of spices! the Spirit and the Bride say come and let the one who hears say come and let the one who is thirsty come and yes I said yes I will Yes.