Epistemology, again, is the branch of philosophy concerned to discover how we get knowledge. The most famous expression of epistemological philosophy in the history of Western thought is found in the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” in his dialogue the Republic. In this parable, Plato’s philosophic mentor Socrates suggests that those who rely on the senses for knowledge—the eyes and ears and other senses—are thereby lost in a cavern of ignorance. The path to genuine knowledge, Socrates counsels, leads upward out of this sense-perceptual labyrinth into a radiant world illuminated by divine, supernatural ideas he calls “Forms.” To avail ourselves of this higher knowledge, Socrates advises earlier in the Phaedo, we should look within, to the “recollection” we had of it before we were born.
The import of Socrates’ mystical epistemological dogma is that we should ignore the evidence of the senses and accept ideas that can only be affirmed intuitively. As shouldn’t be surprising, however, abandoning the senses does not lead people out of caverns of ignorance, but deeper into them. For it is through the use of our senses that we discover and test the truth of our own ideas and those of others. When we embrace ideas without looking outside at the world discernible by our eyes and ears, etc., we risk entering a cave of ideas that bear little resemblance to the actual facts of reality. This can make us vulnerable to ideas that are empirically baseless, such as authoritarian ideas.
For the philosophical—the metaphysical—foundations of authoritarian doctrines are empirically baseless. There is not a speck of sensory evidence to suggest that reality is spiritual and sustained or called into existence by some mind, or minds, as the metaphysical Idealists aver. And notwithstanding the fact that human beings are capable of evil and irrationality there is no empirical reason to believe that these and other such negative traits are built-in, deterministic attributes of human nature, as metaphysical Materialists like Karl Marx assert. And despite what Heraclitus said, the preponderance of empirical evidence testifies that the particulars of the universe have stable metaphysical identities: that gold is gold, lead, lead, and that events occur as the result of the enduring causal nature of specific entities. So why did Socrates and Plato tell us to abandon our senses and place our faith in supernatural ideas?
It’s because Socrates and Plato were authoritarian—rather, they were totalitarian, philosophers. All of the above-mentioned metaphysical ideas, and their evil political implications, were propagated by these ignominious Greek casuists. The reason they concocted their “cave” epistemology, with its touting of sacred ideas and disparagement of sense-perception, was to render us more vulnerable to these baseless dogmas, so that we would become more vulnerable to political domination. But Socrates and Plato were not the only philosophers to use epistemology as an instrument of political machination.
Many of the other intellectual giants so revered by our culture: St. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, etc., etc., have similarly been practitioners of that abidingly effective method of subverting humanity’s political rights by leading us down into the darkness of epistemological caverns. Because the citizens of our modern liberal republics have so little understanding of these practices it might be said that, today, the whole of “Western” civilization is epistemologically lost in “Plato’s Cave.” This leaves us dangerously vulnerable to those modern “Socrates” and “Platos” who work to subvert these noble societies, just as, long ago, the original Socrates and Plato worked to subvert liberal Athens.
Authoritarianism 101 