'Intelligo me intelligere - I understand that I understand.' -St. Augustine
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News
- [1-21-06] I'm setting up my email, and got the guestbook up
- [1-20-06] Added some quotes to my quotation script.
- [1-19-06] I've begun my poetry page
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If I had a treatise on my most favorite plantonic allegory- this would be it
Don't mind the title oh so much, I just tried to be witty
apparently a failed attempt eh? Regardless of it's success in humor, it carries weight and importance to my next few moments here with you. Consider if you would, knowledge to be latent; all knowledge Plato would argue (well Socrates with platos mind forming the picture)is indeed within us, it's just simply forgotten as we're borne among men. He set this idea up with an allegory of a Cave. Dark inside, like the mind before it discovers it has been condemned to this cave. He further paints this picture by including some men in this cave. Bound to the wall, staring into the cave wall unknowing of the entrance, even ignorant to the light which bathes him each morning, assuming it's some foreign device of his captor, which ultimately is himself, oddly enough. One day one of the men bound becomes curious of what is behind him. Hereinafter he freed himself from his bindings through the abolishment of ignorance in his own mind. He had done something no one else would have been so forthright, or industrious in the enterprise of seeking knowledge anew. What he found from his view was light, was the world, life, and everything within it. He quickly retreated back to his post on the wall, until he could again be so brazen as to find his way outside. Again he turned back, but not in cowardice of the unknown, but enlightenment for his fellow prisoners to this viel of ignorance. Eventually they all had been freed and set into this brand new world..
God I love this story, and I hadn't the slightest chance to do it justice, but my point of referencing this story is this. In a metaphorical sense, we as a species of man have been confined to this wall. In this dark cave, unknowing of what beauties soon lay beyond the confines of our bleakness.
Though there is hope, if you're brave enough to find me within this cave and come along with me I do believe that we can escape this stagnation that has habitually became our captor, keeping us in the mediocre world. We're seething over the top of invention, with good fortune, hard work, I believe, I know we can find the world outside so much better than this that we've grown accustomed.