Plato called it "Good", I call it Love.

My brain is literally still buzzing from today's discussion in class today. Our reading assignment was Plato's allegory of the cave, from The Republic, which seemed straight forward enough at first glance.
To very briefly summarize, Plato paints a scene of prisoners chained to a cave wall. A fire casts shadows of everything in the cave against the ground and the walls, and these shadows are all the prisoners can see, and have seen. To the prisoners the shadows in this cave are their reality. They don't see a person, they see a shadow of a person. Likewise, they don't see their own reflection, they see their shadow. But to them, this is reality.
Plato then suggests that one of the prisoners is released from the cave into the world. He would be blind from the light of the sun, but will slowly gain normal vision and see this new reality he has been brought to. The last thing he is able to perceive is the sun; the very thing that gives him the light to perceive his surroundings, creates seasons, grows trees, etc.
Here's a direct quote from Francis Cornford's translation of The Republic:
"In the world of knowledge, the last thing to be perceived and only with great difficulty is the essential Form of Goodness...this is the cause of whatever is right and good" (The Republic, 231).

So...Plato is suggesting that in our current state of mind we cannot fully realize that "essential Form of Goodness". He doesn't even define it, which at first seemed problematic to me. Here I am thinking: this guy pulls the rug out from under us, tells us we're living in some lower state of consciousness, but doesn't bother defining the goal of this journey towards enlightenment (what the hell is enlightenment anyways?) The concept seemed ridiculous to me. I was blinded by the light of this "Goodness".

In class Professor McKinney told everyone to draw her chair "exactly as they saw it". This was to literally illustrate our subjective nature in our current state. I saw the chair differently that the girl sitting across the room saw it, therefore our pictures looked different (also, my picture looked like crap, I'm a poet, not a painter). I started getting excited, sitting there in class, because I felt one step ahead. As soon as the word subjective is mentioned my mind starts swimming with terms like cultural relativism, and perspective. I quickly wrote in my notebook: If everything is subjective/relative what is true?
Objectivity.
That's why Plato didn't define "Goodness". He couldn't define it in such a way that is comprehensible by those of us still dwelling in the cave! If it's the last thing realized in a quest for enlightenment how could anyone expect him to tell us what it was. It's beyond this realm. We see things from our point of view, based on where we are, how we were raised, the mood we're in, our experiences. Right now we are subjective beings. I see what I see, not what you see. I'm getting ahead of myself, I haven't properly defined objectivity, merely implied its definition. For something to be objective it must be independent of our reality. This changes everything. Professor McKinney suggests that once this "Goodness" is achieved we realize true happiness. Sure I buy that. The word Nirvana is ringing through my head. Some of my classmates struggle with this idea. They say things like: "How can that make me happy?" "Happiness to me is different than happiness to someone else". They have a point, although it's shallow. The kind of happiness they are talking about is personal, subjective, opinionated. The happiness achieved through enlightenment is universal, timeless, and most importantly objective. It relates to Nirvana, Heaven, Good Karma, all that spiritual whatnot (I'm not getting into that specifically right now, maybe in a later post).

Here's something that's been stuck in my head since 12:15 today. Love. I'm not talking about corny one liners in romantic comedies, be my valentine baby, shallow pop songs, none of that. I'm talking Love with a capital 'L'. That kind of objective Love can relate to the quest for enlightenment Plato was talking about. In fact, I think it's what pushes us towards that "Goodness" he spoke about back in the day. Don't believe me? Listen to this:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done,
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung,
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be,
It's easy.
All you need is Love.

I don't know how much John and Paul studied Plato, but they hit the nail on the head. This song is about the Love that drives us to enlightenment. Universal, objective, timeless Love. Sure, it might be a little vague, it's hard to describe something so vast in a blog...or at all for that matter. Some would say this song is about "fate", that everything is predetermined for us, but I disagree. To me, the song tells us that if we cut the crap, cut the subjectivity, and act out of Love we're doing things right, and we're on our path out of the cave.
If I had this mindset earlier when asked to draw the chair I may have piped up and said I couldn't, not because of my lackluster art skills, but because how can I capture the true essence of that chair in a simple drawing? How could the drawing even compare to the chair? It's 1 dimensional. The drawing of the chair would be more like the drawing of the chair's shadow, and that's how I know I'm still in the cave.

Until my next mind altering epiphany,
T