The 100 emoji

Book XXI of The Republic has every right to brag about its “street cred” for a number of reasons:

1. The Allegory of the Cave. It’s so famous that they stuck it in a movie with Keanu Reeves (and that philosophers have been studying it for centuries because it’s one of the most intriguing ideas about how humans have lived their lives, but let’s give Keanu Reeves a bit of limelight this time around).
2. It explains what intelligence is, what it isn’t, and who is able to possess this intelligence so that it betters society.
3. It describes what is able to help educate certain people to be able to possess such intelligence.

As Book XII opens, Socrates’s goal is to explain how the standard human is educated.

Picture this: a cave with a small entrance to the outside world at one end, a fire in the middle, and the wall of the cave at the other end. There are several people stuck in a cave, strapped into chairs so that they can only see straight ahead of themselves at the wall of the cave, and have been like that since childhood.

By the fire there are people with shadow-puppets, putting on a show and allowing the light of the fire to project what is being displayed to the cave people. It’s understandable that whatever these shadows are presenting, whether they be nonsense or not, the citizens of the cave firmly believe that THAT is the essence of truth because it is all they’ve ever known. In the absolute reality, these shadows only give us a sliver of what is true; all that is intelligible is actually outside the cave where the cave people have not dwelled.

Now let’s say that one of the cave people breaks free and sees everything that’s around him/her: the others strapped in chairs, the fire, the puppets, and the glimmer of light coming from the other end of the cave. This person will be confused, lost, and his eyes (a metaphor for the mind) will have a hard time adjusting to the change. The person wanders  bit more and finally makes it out of the cave, stares up at the sun – the form of true goodness – and is blinded. Most would flee back into the cave, back into the safety and security of the shadows, and forget all about knowing the forms, which is why Socrates believes it is only those who are capable and courageous enough *cough philosophers cough* of scrapping all that they have known that are able to make the transition from darkness into light.

And let’s not forget about the journey from light back into darkness. Say the used-to-be cave person is actually (and conveniently) a philosopher and has absorbed the pain of knowledge and light. What about the others in the cave? Perhaps he may venture back into the cave to try and convince the others of what he now knows, but the others, still strapped in their seats, will believe the used-to-be cave person is absurd. Even more so, if the other cave dwellers break free, after hearing of the light outside, they would most likely kill the used-to-be for disrupting the peace inside the cave. Ouch.

Socrates notes that it isn’t uncommon for the used-to-be cave people to seem a bit… loony. As much as it is hard to believe that what we believe we know might not actually mean anything at all in the world of the forms, in turn, it must also be hard for someone accustomed to the light to come back to the darkness to try to make sense of the silly shadows on the cave wall.

Therefore, education isn’t like soup; you don’t just top yourself up when you need more. Education, in Socrates’s eyes, is the strive to understand true reality. The capacity to think is already there, but the ability to understand is often directed towards the shadows.

Socrates then goes on to talk about things that benefit such education, such as geometry, calculation and dialectic. Dialectic study (a fancy shmancy word that describes an argument where multiple people voice their opinions in hopes of reaching a truth) in particular holds favour in the path to enlightenment; a dialectic person is able to understand the being of something, its true form, whereas someone who isn’t dialectic only (supposedly) knows what something is, which could very well be a shadow.

Chew on this: what if someone told you that blue wasn’t actually the colour blue?

Who’s stuck in the cave now? Not Keanu Reeves in the meme at the beginning of this post, apparently.

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As soon as Jill mentioned that Penelope’s story (as well as that of Odysseus, the maids, etc.) could not be trusted, I immediately thought of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Not only is it one of my favorite books, it goes to show that not all narrators can be deemed honest. Furthermore, is this a thorough analysis of Penelope and Nick Caraway, or did I just want to bring up The Great Gatsby? We may never know. I digress. Anyway.

Though Penelope may not have been exactly lying, she may not have been telling the whole truth either, blowing some aspects out of proportion and understating others. It is easy to see, after reading Penelope and the maids’ voices juxtaposed alongside one another, that the story became far too complex for anybody to fully wrap their heads around. There are a plethora of sides to any and every story, and it proves to be just so in The Penelopiad. It seems that there are a myriad of possibilities to each event posed by Homer and Atwood and it is interesting to see the different approaches that each author lays out for his or her characters. It is quite plausible that both The Odyssey and The Penelopiad were crafted to get us to delve into the underlying messages posed by each text, and that we are supposed to read between the lines of exactly what is being said; the problem is, every character has an opinion – a certain sharpness in tongue that may be subtle and unconscious (or not) – that we must take into account.

How are we supposed to know whose story is the truth? What does Atwood’s Penelope gain by recounting her story after her death? Is she trying to explain herself, and if so, why? Why exactly does she feel the need to explain herself if she hasn’t done anything wrong? Furthermore, why do the maids hold such vengeance against her? Perhaps there is more of a reason that expected, but it is all a matter of questioning the narrator and asking ourselves, “Is this really what I believe, or should I take this with a grain of salt?”

Each narrator presents a bias which we must train our brains to detect; it could be an underlying cynical tone, sarcasm, bitterness, whimsicality, or even a modest hubbub that gives the one telling the story some flare, as well as a bit of vulnerability into his/her mind. We have to wonder why ancient Grecian Penelope is trying to relate to 21st century young adults (because everybody knows that a ((great)^100) grandmother that tries to act “hip and modern” is nothing but trouble for all).

Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Penelope’s tale, as well as the tales of the others, are not to be trusted in fear that details they provide are merely added or removed to “spice up the story”.

Well played, Atwood. You’re a legend.

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