Podcast Tips “The Myth of the Cave”

Greek philosophy is always current. Are we sure we know ourselves? Reality is how we see it or is there more?

Podcast transcript

Hello to all dear viewers. Nuovo podcast tips. I remind you that you can go to my site which is now also in English. Today I want to go back to talking about philosophy. You know that I am a fan of Greek philosophy. Because I think it because I think it is the most current even if the oldest because it is simple and reaches the essentials.

In questo caso voglio parlare della del mito della caverna di Platone. I have always liked Plato a lot especially because he used myths to explain his philosophical concepts. He believed that difficult concepts should be explained in the simplest way possible and the simplest way was a myth. It was a blast.

This curious concept is also present in Albert Einstein who said this famous phrase: if you don’t know how to explain it in a simple way, you don’t understand it well enough. Here I think there is some similarity between Einstein’s sentence and Plato’s doctrine. This myth of the cave is one of the most important concepts of Platonic philosophy and it is also a beautiful tale that I find really very current.

Now let’s see if we can make you understand where the news is. Platone si immagina che ci siano dei prigionieri incatenati in una caverna fin dalla nascita. These prisoners will only be us separated from the rest of the cave by a wall which, however, does not reach the ceiling. So pass some light behind this wall there is a fire.

So all the things that move behind this fire, these chained people see them as shadows and having no other experience so their only experience is that of these shadows. They think that reality is made of shadows is not made of real things.

At a certain point, however, one of the prisoners manages to free himself and seeks the exit from this cave. Arriving at the exit which is indicated by the light coming from outside, he is blinded by the light he cannot really see because he is not used to it.

It needs time. So at first he sees nothing. Then after a while he still sees the image reflected perhaps in the water in the puddles and then slowly he begins to see and understand what reality is. Once he realizes the reality he immediately wants to go back to his still chained companions to explain that what they were watching is not true.

Plato says that doing this takes a huge risk because his companions probably won’t believe him. Some will not want to try to go out and others will not want to believe them because they will not want to question the reality they have always believed to exist.

In my opinion, this is a beautiful metaphor for our times too. We are often asleep and we are satisfied with what we think we see or think we know but that we actually see we know.

And this is the famous effort that we have to make every day to reach awareness and knowledge knowledge gives us awareness that first of all being the knowledge of us as Socrates said, know yourself is the hardest thing to do.

Once we get to know each other we have awareness of ourselves. Then we begin to see we begin to truly see reality. We begin to see the world we begin to understand what the important things are.

So also in this case thanks to the Greek philosophy we understand that it is very important to reach this level of awareness and to do it we must commit ourselves every single day. Thank you all.