Allegories of the Cave at the End of the World
One of the more viral ideas to persist since Greek antiquity is the Allegory of the Cave. Why is this? What is it about the cave that so captures the metaphors of critique? Do we really live in caves? We have all encountered “trolls” and surely that would infer the existence of some kind of cave. But what kind of cave is it? Do you ever feel cave bound? Am I living in a cave?
Let us examine a few instantiations of the Cave in its viral form.
1. The Essential Cave
The essential Cave is this: you are tied-up facing a cave wall, Firelight casts the shadows of artificial objects upon the wall that you, never having seen anything else, believe to be the Real itself. For Plato, who sees himself as a kind of arch-Chad, only the true philosopher, after years of skeptical discursive thought can free themselves from the illusions of the cave and climb the steep labyrinth up into the broad light of day—which is also the light of Reason and the Good. This is a metaphysical allegory of idealism: everything that we encounter here on earth is but a pale shadow of its true form which resides elsewhere, in the far reaches of the cosmos; in this labyrinth, truth is always deferred. Note, that Sight and Light are the key elements here; Philosophy prizes vision above all senses. Note also (as Irigaray points out) that the Cave Allegory is isometric; the philosopher will only exit into another higher plane of masculine illusion; the green fields of earth awash in the glare of Reason is yet another cave.
2. The True World, or The Christian Nihilist’s Cave
The hard idealism of the Cave Allegory gets run through Gnosticism and is booted up into most (but not all) of Christianity. The Cave has resided there, virus-like in its Christian host from antiquity, undergoing little change and biding its time. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and the Great Divorce are prime examples of the Cave Virus in its modern Christian form. The “true world theory,” otherwise known as the afterlife, immortal life or “heaven” is the toxic nihilism emergent from this manner of cave thinking. In a stunning reversal of dramatic irony the Christians, pumping the cave-narrative (salvation), now reside in a world/cave of their own making, busy denying the flesh (along with the “fallen” earth) and putting all their bitcoins in a speculative future of a glorious tomorrow that will never come. That this world is merely incipient to the next leads inevitably to a millenarial apocalypticism—the whole-sale discounting of existence on planet earth—and is arguably the leading cause of our climate catastrophe; if planet earth is just a cave, then it’s okay if it gets trashed. The Nam era slogan (originally coined by Pope Innocent III) “Kill em all, let God sort em out,” is this idea made explicit at its most lethal. Destroy the biosphere, heaven is waiting.
3. Philip K Dick’s Glass Darkly
The gnostic impulse as forced through the early Christian church complicates the Cave Allegory with a lens, or obscured mirror, as first seen in the famous metaphor by St Paul: “Now we see in a glass darkly but soon we shall see face to face”. This is the Speculum Aenigmate and as Borges has pointed out it has its own elaborate tradition. It is a very strange and persistent metaphor and yet it retains in simplest form the inside/outside structure of the Cave. Put simply the Speculum Aenigmate is an augmented-reality device that flashes illusion to real. In the life and fiction of Philip K, Dick this “enigmatic mirror” becomes liquid and allows passageway from the world/cave to the universe. For PKD crossing through the mirror is a result of the study of occult knowledges, such as the I Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, pulp Sci-Fi, and not to mention a few drugs and one or two psychotic breaks. These “symbols” become the enigmatic mirror going liquid, creating an event, perhaps unasked for, that arrives with all of the force of revelation; one recognizes that Orange County is an illusion that merely obscures a new dimension, or higher level of dream. The dirty shrouds of the world/cave are torn away in an instant to reveal the universe. This revelation is two-fold: first one realizes the world/cave is a kind of prison—for PKD a literal iron prison established by the Romans and ruled over by a wicked demiurge with empty eyes. And second that there exists a higher cosmic realm in which presides VALIS or the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, the source of “pink light,” the Gnosis itself; this special knowledge is the salvation from the base material existence of Southern California.
4.The Matrix Redounded
For Posthuman Hacker culture, “reality” is not so much perceived as fucked around with. This impulse transmuted the weird Gnosticism of PKD through a strong concoction of Baudrillard and put it straight into The Matrix movies. This is the contemporary Cave Allegory at its most viral. The Matrix is a kind of well-wrought urn in that it is serviceable for whatever content you want to put in there. Whether you be Trans, a Bitcoin Maximalist or proponent of ACAB, The Matrix can apply. This fungibility has allowed the red pill/blue pill choice to receive total meme-ification. All across the internet, people are getting pilled: orange pilled, Love pilled, mushroom pilled, MAGA pilled; The pill activates the enigmatic mirror that flips you from the world/cave up into the Desert of the Real; and by that I mean you just spend way more time on forums. The sheer number of pills available indicates the raw utility of cave-thinking itself. You may be trapped in the Matrix if have not dropped LSD, never given birth to a child, nor read the Phenomenology of Spirit. A dynamic tension vibrates between the YOLO/FOMO of the dark mirror that is the Cave Exit; there is always another Cave to be free from. But these matrix/caves are oftentimes mutually exclusive; if you exit one cave you will most likely walk straight into another. It’s all caves, all the way down. Of course, you can only take so many pills before you die; some pills are better than others.
5. The Vicious Internet Cave of Capitalist Surrealism
The insistence in Meme culture to log off, to go outside, to touch grass, are all indications of an awareness that getting matrix pilled online for too long is harmful to mental health. This seems obvious: if you do not want to become a troglodyte or worse, then please log off soon. And yet the internet is designed to keep you inside the cave. As The Hobbit makes clear, if you spend too much time in strange caves, you will probably be kidnapped by fascist trolls; the algorithm makes it a certainty. I know this first hand; it happened to my parents. MAGA Jesus and Qanon are vicious internet world/caves of the first order. With the unholy trinity of the Metaverse, Cryptocurrency and GPT-X the internet is now becoming the most literal and vicious instantiation of the Cave Allegory yet devised. We are now living in the opening phase of a Ready Player One style dystopia where, in the face of ever-increasing global catastrophe, humans will log off reality by logging on the net and getting paid to spend every waking hour online. The money, as Baudrillard has made clear, is the determining factor in turning illusions into the real at scale; it pays to stay in the dream. This is already the case in much of the world. Note that this money-induced dream/cave is also isometric, it flips from Net to reality. Living in the suburbs is a kind of dream that money affords. It is easy for science fiction to image that we will soon be dropping people into vats to live out the rest of their lives in a play-to-earn video game, stuck with an opioid drip because, from an isometric standpoint, this is already the case; it creates the perfect citizen of techno-capital. This is hegemonic cave-thinking in the extreme. The powers that be have read their Plato and seen The Matrix and they’ve been taking notes. The Cave Allegory phases in and out from being a method of critique, to a method of control; the action of this phasing metastasizes the Cave into a labyrinth.
6. The Non-Cave or The Womb
It should be clear by now that the Cave is historical; that is to say, it will come to an end. But how? The labyrinth is, by all appearance, endless. Is there no escape? Will an attempt at making an exit only result in a return to the same vicious cycle?
Perhaps. But there are other, less visited, parts of the labyrinth yet to be explored.
Borges opens up the door to one such new zone of the labyrinth when he inverts the Speculum Aenigmate so that instead of it being a portal from world/cave to universe as in PKD, it opens inward to the psyche. It becomes a “skylight through which one might submerge oneself in the true Abyss, which is the human soul. The terrifying immensity of the Firmament’s abysses is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived as in a mirror.” Here Borges is following the psychoanalytic turn in which the typical inside/outside distinction of the Cave is inverted: inside/even more-inside.
Likewise Irigaray follows this turn by defining Speculum both as “mirror” and also as that medical instrument that is inserted into the body to examine the womb.
Can this inward turn provide a clue to some path leading out of the Cave Allegory?
