The Discipline of the Cave (Routledge Revivals)

John Niemeyer Findlay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415682510
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136625602
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1966, The Discipline of the Cave is the first series of a course of Gifford lectures on philosophical issues.. J N Findlay's lectures use the image of the Cave to show how familiarity is full of restrictions, and involves puzzles and discrepancies unable to be resolved or removed. Such philosophical perplexities may be a result of the misunderstanding and abuse of ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. They may also be a way of 'drawing us towards being', providing proof of the absurdity of ordinary thought, speech and experience unless modified and added to in ways which may point beyond it. What may be called a mystical and otherworldly element may need to be introduced into or rendered explicit in all our experience in order to give a viable sense to the most commonplace human utterances and activities.

LECTURE I

THE FURNISHINGS OF THE CAVE

The design of these lectures is to sketch the essential pattern of what has been called the human ‘predicament’, the plight in which we, as rational, concerned beings find ourselves, the sorts of thing that come before us at varying removes and distances, and in varied guises of reality and unreality, as well as all the varied styles of recognition, appraisal, practical manipulation, etc. in which we show our concern for them and are busy about them, together with our own central essence as what holds the picture together, and gives it its equivocal, ever shifting sense and interest. To deal thus with the plight of men is to cover all the main themes of philosophy, for however much we may affect interest in the architecture of nature or its various departments, or in the various detached systems of ideas which proliferate abundantly in their glassed-in compartments, it is plain that we cannot achieve clarity in regard to any of them without achieving clarity as to our own empirical, conceptual and linguistic approaches to them. Without due study of these we are more than likely to see our own thought-and speech-habits and problems merely written large on the cosmos, and there is, in fact, no easier way to fall victim to what is arbitrary and personal than to set out uncritically to be objective and impersonal. If a certain deep criticism is of the essence of philosophy, and if such deep criticism necessarily involves seeing matters in their full context and setting, then it is as much such contexts and settings which give unity to philosophy as the deep criticism in question. If it is a mark of the feebly bitten philosopher to hurry from personal human approaches, to some majestic body of correct dicta or data which he derives from science, authority or some similar source, it is a mark of the deeply bitten philosopher to be as much concerned with what we take to be correct dicta or data as with what really are so, and as much concerned with the tests involved in the use of the label ‘correct’ as with the situations as with the situations to which we attach it. The interest of philosophy is not in the objects of our primary interest but in such objects only as they interest or concern us: if the world and reality figure largely in philosophy it is because they are for us such objects of omnipresent and necessary concern. In studying the structure of our plight we do not therefore neglect anything that is of philosophical importance: but we deal with whatever we deal with in the only manner in which its full significance can be clarified and appraised.

The design of these lectures is, secondarily, to explore whatever may be intended in judging and feeling our everyday existence to be a predicament, a strange lot into which we have been, by some inexplicable accident, cast, rather than as the familiar home territory to which our powers are adjusted and in which our speech and thought should work at ease. Possibly the queerest of all the queer things in this life is that we should find this life so very queer, and that we should even speak of it as this life, contrasting it by implication with some more normal state of which we none the less have no lucid view at all. That we do in fact find this life full of perplexities, absurdities, odd and arbitrary restrictions, things all pervasive that might none the less have been quite otherwise, does not admit of question. If we find even children capable of being thrown into a mood of wonder by the strange passing of time, shall we credit them with familiarity with the ways of eternity? If we wonder why, of all marvellous chances, we happen to be the individuals we actually are, does this argue acquaintance with the queer mechanics of becoming somebody else? If we find our knowledge of other people’s minds hopelessly external and peripheral, does this point to knowledge of some more intimate way of penetrating their privacy? Possibly all these perplexities are no more than a proof that man is a philosophical animal, one who will not rest till, like children with their toys, he has taken his notions apart, and has seen how they really fit together. And possibly the lesson that we, like children, must learn, is that it only pays to prise things apart if one can again put them together, and that there is no better or even no feasible way of putting them together than the one indicated by their various carefully punched holes, pegs, tongues, catches, screws and other attachments (or by what corresponds to these in language). Possibly the only way out of the quandaries in which we, as thinking, acting, feeling beings find ourselves, is to realize that they are not really quandaries at all. Perhaps, however, the fact that we do thus find our present situation full of queer discomforts, and that it does seem to involve cramps, pressures, irruptions, strangenesses that are far from hiding a simple message or harbouring a discoverable sense, does point to some reversing, complementary, compensating situation of which we cannot but have some vague knowledge, and on which the precise character of our cramps and other difficulties can throw valuable light. This at least is a suggestion that these lectures will seek to explore, and it remains a suggestion rooted in the character of our experience whether it turns out to have a meaningful and valid content or not.

I have given these lectures a somewhat misleading title: it might be thought that I was about to add to the vast body of interpretation of Plato’s cave-myth as set forth in the seventh book of the Republic. Plato, as you know, placed the human race in a dark cave, where their movements were so restricted by chains that their gaze could not stray beyond a cave-wall in front of them. A fire at their backs threw shadows on this wall, and the objects which cast these shadows also lay behind them but between them and the fire: these objects were being moved along a roadway near the mouth of the cave, but were half concealed by a low parapet, so that their shadows were quite fragmentary and unrepresentative. The voices of men walking along the roadway and carrying these objects were echoed from the cave-wall, so that to the men chained in this strange underworld the whole environment was one of speaking and silent shadows. There was, however, in the story, a difficult possibility of freeing the prisoners from their chains, and of turning their heads round to face the objects behind the parapet and the fire whose beams played on them: this presumably would cure mo thescrepancies and inadequacies of representation that were found among the shadows. And there was also a further possibility of leading the prisoners quite out of the cave into the upper daylight. There all would at first be sheer bedazzlement, until reflections in water allowed the gaze to rest on them and to take stock of them. Later the gaze would be sufficiently tutored to look on the objects which cast such reflections, and these objects would in their turn lead the gaze to the luminous bodies that lent visibility to the objects in the upper world, until at last it became possible to look on the sun, the supreme source of all earthly light. These accounts of an ‘upper world’ and of glorious visions that occur in it are, of course, not unconnected with accounts that occur elsewhere in the Republic, in the Meno, in the Phaedrus, in the Timaeus, and in the particularly wonderful upper–world descriptions of the Phaedoy accounts now generally disregarded as stemming from Plato’s lamentable ‘middle period’, a period he fortunately outlived when he came to write his ‘great critical dialogues’. But the cave-legend continues by depicting the sufferings of the liberated prisoners when at first compulsorily brought back into the cave, and their subsequent ability to use their upper-world experience in interpreting and predicting and (if one makes a few small adjustments in the story) controlling the behaviour of the shadows. Certainly for Plato upper-world visions and visits had a profound relevance to understanding and action down here, even though he did not go so far as to see their whole significance in such relevance. One’s science and one’s mathematics and one’s political arrangements and decisions would be better if one had enjoyed certain other worldly visions, which goes far towards making them not other-worldly at all. Whereas, if modern philosophers have dealings with the transcendent and the other worldl, they seldom expect this to improve their calculations or their routine theorizing or their practical decisions.

Plato’s story of the cave has, as everyone knows, been the subject of almost infinite controversy: people have tried to make it accord with the somewhat thinner details of his account of the Line, and with nearly everything said by Plato in the Republic and elsewhere, or with everything that others have been inspired to say by reading him. This remarkable exegesis was, of course, for many years a specifically British preoccupation, ever since Ben-jamin Jowett made Plato in general, and the Republic in particular, the core and centre of Oxford education. These days are now very remote—they so hackneyed Plato that one does not regret them— and I must assure you that I do not intend to discuss the Platonic cave in the manner of Adam, Prichard, Ferguson, Nettleship, Bosanquet, and other gifted exponents. I do not myself believe in this sort of semi-scriptural interpretation, exciting as it may at times be to pursue it. For the cave to me is one of the greatest, the most telling images of philosophy—a study in which, it may be held, one always operates with images and diagrams, though one does not usually have the frankness to draw them clearly— and this great image was probably not meant to illustrate every winding of some complicated doctrine. One suspects that the Pythagoreans, or their Orphic predecessors, may have used it in some detailed doctrinal way—like the various rocks and areas of pebbles in some Zen stone-garden—but it would not be right to attribute such a use to Plato. And precisely because it is a great image, it can be used on reflective backgrounds quite different from that of Plato—as Bacon in fact did use it, and as I propose to use it in this course of lectures. For we do all feel that it describes ‘the human condition’ in a true and poignant manner, even if it raises the most serious problems that the latter should be thus des-cribable. We do all somehow feel, whether with justification or not, that we are fixed in a situation involving many strange restrictions: there are features in our life as immovable, as fixedly presented, and also as deeply astonishing and absurd as are the wall, the parapet, the fire, the chains, the social games and the speaking shadows of Plato. In one respect indeed we enjoy greater liberty than Plato’s prisoners, for we are not mere passive observers of cave-phenomena: we may be tethered elaborately, and not able to turn our heads round completely, but we have at least the ability to move about in our prison, to touch and handle some of its nearer fittings including our fellow-prisoners and their bodies, to manufacture at least some carvings and figures of our own and to project their shadows and those of our own limbs and bodies on the walls of the cave. We are not, fortunately, in the position of David Hume, that perfect specimen of the pure observer, who in the neurotic seclusion of his bedroom in France, passively waited for metaphysical visits from his own Ego, the efficacy of causes etc. etc., visits which to an observer so minded never did or could happen. But though we may have this limited liberty to move about, it does not at all suffice to throw the major masses and fixtures of our surroundings into marked parallax, nor to unmask the mystery and mechanism of the speaking shadows. We do not feel, despite our protracted stay in our present habitat, and our lack of experience or memory of any other, that we quite know our way about it: it involves cramps, tetherings and deTached, lofty shows that are far from conveying a simple and coherent message. And we are persistently haunted by the notion of some other posture, some freer condition, some higher point of vantage from which the phenomena and the restrictions of cave-life will be comprehensively understandable, in which the walls will be breached, the cramps assuaged, and things generally seen in a less fuliginous and flickering light. It is, as we have said, supremely remarkable that we who have been born and bred in a certain condition, and who know no other, should think of this condition as one of bondage: possibly the only way out of such bondage is to realize that there is no other condition with which it can be contrasted, and that it is just as sensible, or as void of sense, to regard it as a condition of freedom as one of unfreedom. We should not, however, be describing our state truly if we omitted to say that it seems, in nearly all moods of deep reflexion, to be just that state of being tethered and obscurely imposed upon which Plato so well describes. If the arrangements of this life, and our responses to them, are truly in order as they are, then it is part of these arrangements that they have a persistent tendency not to seem in order, and we should not be describing them truly if we ignored their intermittent appearance of oddity or

It is not, however, enough, to speak in these general terms: we must make plain what we imagine to be the main parts and furnishings of the human cave, and where in particular we find its main rigidities, obscurities and painful stresses. Here, without going into the detailed principles of cave-exploration, which will concern us in our next lectures, we may emphasize one principle that will guide us in our researches: to preserve the phenomena, to be loyal to the appearances, to allow no robust sense whether of immediate or ultimate reality to prejudice our account of the way things look to the human observer or agent. A cave ceases to be a cave if one pours harsh external light into it, if one strips it of its glooms, echoes and reflections, of its various queer lighting devices, if one explains it all atomistically or neuro-physiologically or psycho-analytically or behaviouristically or linguistically or in some other external—and I may here add quite questionable— manner. To be a cave-delineator, a transcendental speleologist, one must be a phenomenologist in HusserPs sense of the word, one who thinks nothing more solid, more factual than the way things look or feel to the human observer or experient, the peculiar way in which they impress or express him, and who is never willing to sacrifice the oddest, most irrational flicker of an appearance for the most conclusive experimental demonstration of what is actually there, or for the most irrefragable logical argument as to what can or cannot be there. The speleologist must practise a wholesale suspension of all such misplaced experimentalism or logicality: he must practise that sweeping

of transcendent conviction which Husserl recommended, though in his case it seems to have become frozen into a permanent paralysis.

To the student of cave-life words, for instance, are as potent and pervasive and dynamic a factor as things; they ooze in fact like a perpetual commentary from everything in the cave, or are firmly attached, built-in labels of phenomena. It is not remarkable, as Wittgenstein shows, that their tangles and abuses should project a character of ‘depth’ on the matters seen in their light, nor that we can study all issues in connection with them, as Austin proposed in his ‘linguistic phenomenology’. Imaginary, ideal, even visionary factors have likewise nearly as much power and importance in the cave as have supposedly or authentically real ones, even though these last may have a prerogative which extends even to the field of appearance. The wholly neutral, factual visions which appear in the dry light of scientific reporting or in certain types of aesthetic realism, have only the importance of the very special cave-corners to which such phenomena are confined. The scientific ones never entered the cave till the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the aesthetic ones hardly before the nineteenth century. The transcendental speleologist must likewise be willing to acknowledge the presence in the cave of gaps and emptinesses, of fragments of things not capable of existence nor even of making complete sense as they stand, of things poised on the verge of being but not as yet actually there, of things incapable of enumeration and utterance and definite only in their essential indefiniteness, of things without a precise local habitation and incapable of having any, and so on and so forth. Even logical contradictions, shocking as this may seem, have an indefeasible speleological status, for while their inward discrepancy renders them ultimately unstable, and while they plainly have to be banished from all well-lit, well-swept corners of the cave, we can often only do so after we have first given them unsuspecting hospitality and have then been revolted by their disorderly ways. We are not, be it noted, asserting the existence of unbracketed contradictions, nor the desirability of freeing them from the brackets of oblique reference: we are only asserting the impossibility of dealing with the phenomena of bracketing without sometimes bringing them in and the difficulty of being sure, in many contexts, whether what we have before us should be bracketed or not. For the central power and supreme privilege of mind is to be able to intend, not only what is, but also what is not the case, and not only what can, but also what cannot be so. It is not, however, our present task to explore and expose all the idols of the cave, but to dwell rather on its unchanging furnishings. I mention its queer illusions only to scotch realism, logical deductivism and reductive science from the start: wherever their rightful place may be, it is certainly not in the construction of cave-pictures. Whatever we do, we must not, like Hume, say that what cannot, on some special view of logic, exist in reality, is likewise incapable of coming before us ‘in idea’.

What shall I now say are the basic furnishings or basic types of furnishing of the human cave? In enumerating and distinguishing these, and dwelling on their relations and the problems they raise, I shall be giving you the whole pattern of my ensuing lectures, so that you will know how far and where they will be of interest to you. I shall not go far wrong if I make bodies, and whatever goes with bodies, the basic feature of cave-landscape. We may, if we like, put them in the foreground of the picture, between the prisoners and the cave-wall. Bodies have two features which make them utterly unlike the speaking shadows of Plato’s cave: they are extraordinary in their persistence, their regularity of behaviour, their almost exact recurrence, all traits that attracted the notice of Hume, but they are also extraordinary in their impressive-ness, their power to enlist imagination, conviction and expectation, even in the moments when they are not palpably present. The reality of bodies, and of the space in which bodies are, is in fact nine-tenths blind conviction, something felt in our bones, and only one-tenth palpable presence. Persistence and impressive-ness are of course not characteristic of all that we call bodily: there are in the bodily world, such things as winds, waves, eddies, shadows, and so forth, all conscientiously noted by Moore. But it seems only in the interstices of persistent bodily phenomena that such elusive things can nestle, and Kant seems to have been right in holding, as others have done after him, that the basic element of permanence in human experience, what gives it ballast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Muirbead Library Of Philosophy
• The Discipline Of The Cave
• Series Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• LECTURES
• INDEX
• CONTENTS OF SECOND SERIES OF LECTURES