Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 5: Plato and the Cave
Traumatized by the death of Socrates, Plato sought to explain how the people of his beloved city could be so foolish. He arrived at a theory that people experience inner conflict between certain lower and higher motives that often leads to self-destructive behaviors. In his theory, people are composed of different centers, characterized as the Man (representing Reason), the Monster (representing Appetite), and the Lion (representing enculturation or Thymos) which resides between them. Each of these centers operates by different principles.
The Man, capable of abstract and rational thought, is concerned most with the Truth, and is thus able to pursue long term goals and ideals. The Monster, concerned mainly with survival and satiation, operates mainly in terms of pleasure and pain, and what is salient at the moment. The Lion is concerned with the person’s position within the social space, and operates in terms of honor, shame, and other social emotions. According to Plato, to live a wise life means to get these centers aligned and working together.
One of the key challenges to getting people to think rationally is that people naturally reduce the salience of events that are expected in the future through hyperbolic discounting. While generally adaptive, it falls short when dealing with abstract possibilities such as Death. For this, we need reason to inform salience perception. Plato suggests that one way to do this is by training the Lion (social brain) to align with the goals of the Man while taming the Monster. As a result, we reduce inner conflict and achieve more harmony of being.
Reducing inner conflict, and thus becoming more in touch with reality, is an example of a meta-drive, which if fulfilled, results in the ability to satisfy many concrete drives. This is at the core of a virtuous cycle of incremental enlightenment called anagoge as illustrated in the parable of The Cave. Enlightenment in this sense is a form of participatory knowing, which one can reenact cognitively and spiritually, that results in getting progressively more in touch with reality.
In Plato’s epistemology, knowledge is greater than the sum of facts one knows about a subject, in the same way that a bird is more than the sum of its physical parts. The structural-functional organization, or essence, of a thing that we intuitively grasp is called the logos (Greek) or gestalt (German).