Christian establishment. Every morning when the rest of the school would gather in the assembly hall to sing hymns of praise to Jesus, a small knot of Jewish boys would be excused to stand outside in the playground, self-consciously with yarmulkes on our heads, to chant and sing our Hebrew prayers. Classes were hours of soul-sucking boredom, punctuated by sudden violent dramas. Some of the teachers had long ago given up on love of learning as motivation, and they would get our attention by periodically whipping us — getting “cuts,” we called it — one at a time in front of the rest of the class for a variety of obscure transgressions. One bored biology teacher once started class with a surprise quiz; twenty questions, and for each wrong answer we got one cut of the cane. We spent the rest of the period getting whipped. Teachers intimidated us in class, and the bigger boys persecuted the smaller in the playground. It disheartened and enraged me. I developed a loathing for bullies and hated school.
Alienation from South African society deepened with my early discovery of the Nazi Holocaust. One day exploring my uncle’s medical library, I opened a book on Nazi medical experiments and found myself looking at photographs of mutilated children. I was horrified to discover the Nazis had slaughtered two-thirds of the Jews who had stayed behind in Europe. The shock reverberated in the small daily cruelties of apartheid I witnessed around me. Injustice was brought close to home when I first confronted starving children dressed in rags, coming to the kitchen door begging for “bread and sugar water.” I remember my confusion at being stopped from acting on my childish generosity and sharing the contents of the fridge. This sudden encounter with evil cracked my world apart forever. I began the quest without knowing it as a way of healing this fracture.
I would live for weekends and holidays, when the miles of bush and the clean, empty beaches offered an escape from human-inflicted misery and a spectacular playground for my imagination. Vervet monkeys thrived in the bush, and the tidal rock pools were rich underwater gardens, crusted with black and brown mussels and volcano barnacles that cut bare feet; there were also limpets tending their little lawns of algae and bright red and orange plum anemones, spiny sea urchins, and the camouflaged, quick-darting klipvis — the rock fish, which we caught and released. With so much food in plain sight, it was easy to imagine the “beach-Bushmen” — whom the Dutch settlers called strandloopers — living a life of plenty in the wild, protected from the elements by cozy campfires in the spacious rock shelters that dot the coast.
My early wordless love for Africa and Africans remained unbroken, since our family emigrated before I had to renounce the black friends and loving caretakers of my childhood. There were many obvious privileges associated with being a white African, and many were guilty, but perhaps the most noble and the least celebrated lay in being able to regularly escape civilization into moments of “wilderness rapture.” Having direct access to wilderness as a child gave me an early introduction to crossing boundaries and being comfortable with living in the in-between. It allowed a part of me to resist being socialized and, in staying wild and African, paradoxically remain more human.
The Cave
Plato’s allegory of the cave is philosophy’s most famous metaphor for consciousness entrapped, enlightened, and entrapped again. It appears at the climax of the most celebrated text in the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, as part of the discussion of the education of the philosopher-king, the ruler who must love wisdom more than power. Socrates asks his pupil Glaucon to imagine the unenlightened — by implication all of us to some extent — as prisoners in a cave, chained by the leg and neck since birth. The prisoners sit facing the back wall, on which are projected shadows of a fire-illuminated puppet show taking place behind the prisoners’ backs — a primitive movie theater. All the prisoners know of life is their experience of the shadows projected on the wall and their shared interpretations of what they see. The allegory suggests that to some degree we are prisoners in the cave of our past experience. Any worldview becomes a cave the moment it is taken for reality.
One of the prisoners is somehow liberated. Stepping out of the cave into the larger sunlit world, the liberated prisoner is blinded by the light and disoriented. As he takes stock and explores the larger world, he remembers his journey out of the cave and is led to construct a larger universe of meaning, within which he can recognize the limits of life in the cave as a small part of a larger whole. “Anything is better than to go back and live as they do,” Plato tells us. But despite the joy of escaping, the prisoner returns to the cave. Why? We are told it is his duty to liberate his fellows. Why do we feel compelled to help, to enlighten others? Why is it good for the philosopher to be concerned with the well-being of his fellows?
On returning to the cave the philosopher finds his eyes are unaccustomed to the dark, and he has lost his easy familiarity with the world of shadows. When he tries to enlighten his companions, they ridicule his awkwardness and think he has lost his mind. Plato, in the voice of Socrates, gives us a warning. If the philosopher persists too stridently in his mission, the prisoners will turn on him and kill him. The warning is well taken, since we know the Republic was written after the polis executed the unrepentant Socrates for questioning authority. In contrast to the comforts of contemporary academia, Socratic philosophy is not an obscurantist escape from public life — but an urgent, practical, life-and-death matter. Why take the risk?
To answer this we need to reflect on what we know about the Socratic practice. Socrates wrote nothing and saw face-to-face discussion, with anyone, about the big questions, as the royal road to truth. To pursue wisdom the philosopher needed to share his knowledge and to keep learning from others. On returning to the cave, the philosopher has to acknowledge that life outside the cave has transformed his ability to live harmoniously as a prisoner. Yet to win the trust of the inmates, he needed to reconnect, to sit and listen to their stories of life in the cave. One cannot “enlighten” without listening and learning something from the “ignorant.” Having demonstrated the sincerity of his concern for their mutual well-being, the philosopher can point to the obvious asymmetry of the relationship between “those who stayed and the one who returned.” The return embodied the fact that the philosopher had undergone a conversion experience. He had opened himself to experiencing something larger and truer that illuminates the nature of the quest. Socrates and Plato called this process a “turning around of the soul,” a periagoge, an opening to the mystery of self-awareness and the possibility of living in the light of greater consciousness. This has democratic implications. To put it simply, however fixated on the shadows the prisoners might be, they are still capable of the most minimal act of reflection, which at the very least reveals that one cannot evaluate “life in the cave” without comparing it to something larger — “life out of the cave.” Everyone can benefit from the philosophical quest.
Here the metaphor needs to be expanded to serve the Socratic intention of clarifying the quest. We are all in caves of our own limited experience of life. We all need to teach and learn from each other in order to pursue the good life together. We all get the greatest benefit by opening to the experience of those who differ the most from us. We teach most effectively when we learn from those we are trying to teach, and we learn most effectively by being allowed to teach those who are trying to enlighten us. The process of face-to-face Socratic enlightenment is reciprocal and endless.
The Athenian jury gave Socrates three choices: give up the practice of philosophy, leave Athens, or die. Socrates chose death. His last act becomes his most unambiguous and eloquent teaching: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And this examination needs to take place within a community of like-minded seekers. As Aristotle famously noted, human beings are indeed “political creatures.” Once one has grasped the liberating capacity of reflection in the face-to-face situation, there is no going back. The prisoner is initiated into philosophy — the truth quest — as a minimal condition of the good life.6
Out of the Cave
At the age of twelve, a few months before my bar mitzvah, I escaped from the cave of South Africa, together with my parents and sister. We exchanged the brutalities of apartheid for the mild liberal climate of England. The small, long-established Jewish community of Plymouth welcomed us as part of the tribe and then witnessed my initiation into Jewish manhood as I sang my assigned portion of the Bible.
But