Three years ago in my world history class, we discussed Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In it, Plato proposed that if prisoners were chained inside a cave for their whole life, so that the only things they ever saw were the shadows on the wall, they would come to believe in a two dimensional world and that there was nothing beyond their wall. If an individual is led outside of this illusion, they would attempt to teach the others in the cave of the real world, but would most likely be killed in order to preserve the prisoner's worldview.
I feel that this allegory has a few interesting connections to The Stranger and existentialism. Firstly, the entire idea that those who are able to break free of societies rules and find their own truths are the free ones seems to parallel existentialism and the themes of The Stranger almost perfectly, even down to the punishments for ignoring those rules and regulations. By the end of The Stranger, Meursault said that he was essentially executed because he didn't cry at his mother's funeral (121). He makes this statement while he's "snapping" at the chaplain that visits him at the end of the book. This nearly directly parallels the hypothetical sharing of information that happens in the Allegory of the Cave that proceeds the "free man's" death.
I can also see an argument against existentialism lurking inside the Allegory of the Cave despite its parallels to existentialism. The way it was presented to us, existentialism is a way to get the most out of life while accepting the randomness of death, pain and suffering, and that the things we hold dear such as love, family, success, justice, etc. are all just distractions to keep us from facing the truth. Essentially lies that we tell ourselves to make the world seem less scary. This statement is where I begin to see problems. We have talked of systems (the distractions from the pain of life) as distractions, but not as solutions. The way I see human culture is as a dynamic machine. Constantly changing and evolving with the times, working to become a perfect system where there is no longer any randomness to pain and suffering. Obviously we are nowhere near that utopian destination right now, and I have no place to say what a perfect society would look like, but I think there are some clear trends that we are slowly moving in the right direction. Maybe. Humans naturally try to eliminate suffering from their lives. This is why we find systems to try to "distract" ourselves from pain. We did not want to have to move around all the time, so we settled down and began to develop agriculture. Eventually we got tired of most of the jobs that eventually arose from specialization, and we got machines to do it for us. Our culture is a representation of this universal human desire to be free from suffering.
Some argue, however, that by maintaining all the systems that are in place and subscribing endlessly will only eventually lead to a complete loss of individuality, and a loss of freedom. I can understand this critique, but I have a solution there too. This is where the Allegory of the Cave comes back into play. Also math. Everyone loves math. So if we imagine the chains on the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave as the systems put in place by society and the wall as our worldview, things seem pretty bleak. The world that is available seems pretty finite. Math jumps in here and kind of messes that up. If you look between the numbers zero and one, there are in infinite number of numbers in a finite space. Therefore, there are in infinite number of choices you could make if you were to have to chose a number randomly between one and zero. Connecting this back to the wall and a highly structured society, those who are born into a society with a large number of systems will still be able to find the wiggle room to be themselves that they need. They do have an infinite number of possibilities on who and what they become after all. The only constraint is that with the systems that society has developed, they will not be subject to the pains we know today. From where we are now, this kind of society seems like a prison, but I think that to someone only exposed to that kind of structured "perfect" society, our own would seem chaotic, torturous, and plain stupid.
I'm sure I missed some part of my argument in here, so feel free to ask any clarifying questions, and I would love to hear what you have to say on these subjects. Do you agree? Disagree? Have anything to add?
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