What Do You Call A Cave With No Mouth?
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was when they convinced you He was real, and the event preceded the Serpent. The great problem of metaphysics began in a cave, and it will end there just as well. Disregarding the common practice of a high school English or art class, Platoâs cave is most effectively understood as a metaphysical doctrine and, perhaps, a call to arms in the storming of Heaven which ultimately falls on its own sword. The caveâs exit is neither behind the fire, nor the objects which cast shadows on the wall, but in front of them.
Sorry, Iâm a bit drunk at the point of writing this, and I was feeling artsy, but letâs ground ourselves here for a moment and explain what Iâm saying in a less pompous manner.
It might be pretentious to compare myself to Nietzsche, but then he compared himself to the antichrist, or at least the idea of it, and at least Nietzsche and I share the distinct characteristic of, ya know, being real. Oh, itâs always a beautiful thing to be able to hear every branch of ontology and theology seething in unison. That is, however, besides the point. Nietzsche made a bold move with Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he reunited the birth of western monotheism and itâs consequences with its death, and I here seek to do something similar. A bold reunification with the birth of self-deception and its end. The creation of the Serpent may have preceded the Serpent, but the serpent preceded even that.
God I was so fucking good at poetry in high school and I donât care if you donât like it, by the end of this that is gonna be a banging metaphor. The Serpent, though, who is that guy? More importantly, who is the serpent? Well, Iâm reluctant to fall into fiction to try and explain philosophy, pretentious as that may be, but I canât help but think about a video I watched by the brilliant exurb1a entitled âand then weâll be okay,â which, by the way, is a very well written and enjoyable story even if you ignore its metaphorical content, and I highly recommend it. It is with this story, and the character of the Serpent within, upon which I speak of the Serpent here. The enemy, the devil, the Titans in Tartarus, the shades in Helheim, or the ill defined âinjusticeâ of liberal indignation. He was preceded by a birth, created by men at the same moment they created God, but He was placed as the king of this world and so He shall be the one discussed in this piece. He is what we seek, through our grappling for meaning and eternity, to escape and overcome.
The serpent is his grandfather, siring fear in the minds of his children, that they might construct a fortress in which to hide from him and a jailer from whom they would flee back to him. The serpent is the world itself. We are constantly plagued by something foreign and alien to us, and the great fault of all philosophy is when it presumes to look away from it. Call it what you will: the turning from the Absurd, Nothingâs attempt to become conscious Being-In-Itself, or something as tacky as the âbeing a good person,â we construct escape routes that amount to shadows on the wall.
Sorry, got artsy and angsty again. We are all going to die, we are all subject to the seemingly random happenings of the cosmos, and we are all, as far as we can show empirically, insignificant. That is horrifying. It is, as the fine and fair exurb1a says, âthe madness at the bottom,â even if he doesnât mean it in such a way. So I pose a question. What do you do when confronted with that?
One manâs world of forms is another manâs heaven, and I propose that they come from the same place. A cave, presumably in Greece, that was actually everywhere.
Thatâs right, Iâm reconstructing Platoâs cave to discuss a very CamusâŠian (?) question. Can you live without appeal? This starts, I would say, with a question of who weâre appealing to. Questions upon questions, ugh, I know. Itâs necessary though, I promise. Now, weâre gonna use âappealâ in a pretty loose sense. Think of appealing to a king for pardon. With that, letâs start world (cave) building.
We begin our analogy in much the same way we begin life. Unsure, lost, and without a why. Why are we in the cave? Well, it could be a whole host of reasons. We donât have a definitive answer yet. Likewise, why are we here? Well, ask ten people and youâll get ten answers, I assure you. If youâve ever been on a life raft, youâre probably aware that âwhyâ isnât a question you start with. The real question is what do we do with what is in front of us. âWhy am I hereâ is a question that would certainly come after âhow do I get out of this damn cave?â Presuming you know youâre in a cave of course. For the purposes of our point, however, this cave has no exit, at least not that we can see, save for a sheer drop into the dark that offers no promise of the sunlight. There is only hope of escape, as escape is only really escape if the drop doesnât end a mile down with a corpse in another cave.
You can, of course, write as many symbols on the wall as you want, inked in your own blood. You can pray, hoping beyond hope that someone will hear, and you can believe it too, assured that when your body gives in and the only thing left to do is to crawl to the precipice and hope, you will be free. You can be just as assured that the bottom of the hole will be your death, and that there is no escape. You can decide that it does not matter if you leap over the edge of the abyss today or crawl over it tomorrow. You can die on that very moment of realizing there is no âoutside.â None of these are âwrongâ responses, mind you. But, there is an alternative.
Why hide from it? Why not dig?
You might recall, if youâre an avid reader of my now two part series, a discussion of consciousness from the last piece. To pull more from Stirner and Sartre, I want to examine âspooksâ and fixing oneself. I mean fixing in both regards, as correcting a flaw and as stabilizing oneâs identity. For Sartre, consciousness is in a constant state of reaching towards an ultimate end of being âBeing-in-itself-for-itselfâ (to note, I fail to recall if this is his own wording or mine, but it succeeds in capturing this end either way) or âGod.â The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this piece, but it pairs nicely with Stirnerâs criticism of âfixed ideasâ and, in a more distanced interpretation from the source material, fixed identities.
Look, I know this feels like itâs jumping all over the place but trust me, there is a through line to this. These fixed identities are the source, as youâll see, of a great deal of metaphysical hullabaloo and tomfoolery, malarkey even. This is in its assumptions. Permanence, eternity, essence. These are not the case of consciousness. Consciousness, the âUnique,â is the unnamable, untouchable momentary you as an ever-shifting whole. You cannot be fixed. Fixation is for Being, and you, both metaphorically and metaphysically, are Nothing. You are distinctly not-being, and thus you are at odds with it, ever in contest. This, I dare say, is the meaning of life. This is not to say that there is a âwhy.â âWhy am I aliveâ is nonsensical, made possible only by our cave drawings. The real question is âwhy do I choose to be alive, and what do I get?â
There is no ârightâ answer between suicide, broad religiosity, or what I here propose, but there is a distinction between two forms of suicide and life. If you somehow failed to pick up on this, I have begun reading The Myth of Sisyphus, and I have made the distinct choice (determinists btfo, and Iâll tell you why in another piece) to write this before finishing the work. I want to play with the ideas thus far, and see where it leads someone else after. What I find most interesting is the statement of intent in a piece that otherwise rejects the stability and grounding of such judgements as it makes. Camus seems, as far as I have thus read, to argue that we ought not commit suicide. I would like to argue a somewhat different point. I disagree that any generalized âreasonâ or âlogicâ can lead us to such a conclusion. Indeed, his discussion of virtue on whim can be applied here much the same. I simply propose that the choice is one of simple preference between Revolution and evasion.
As Camus brilliantly puts it, the abdication in confrontation with the Absurd of Kierkegaard is a philosophical suicide. The reaching out of consciousness to objects is fundamentally one of thought, and the ideas which may be coalesced into oneâs reason are solely the coalition of these objects of thought. To, as does Kant, abandon reason for the sake of faith, is a death in itself. Camus may be correct, a la Hume, in confronting the world as fundamentally unable to be conceived of totally and perfectly, in his description of the unreasonable. There is an immeasurable gap to be leaped in any belief whatsoever. The possible fault of our thought is ever present. As such, it is present just so in any assumption that there can be a âlogicalâ answer to suicide. It is merely an unimportant, absurd choice we make between suicide, philosophical or physical, and life.
This is only to do away with the pretense of concrete thinking and nascent moralism present, at least thus far, nowhere else in The Myth of Sisyphus. Beyond this, we can here much agree with Camus on the qualities of the choice to live, but at least thematically it is necessary to focus on that of âmy revolt.â I propose that the, for lack of a better word, ânature,â and, thus through the lens of intentionality, âmeaningâ of life is revolt.
Philosophical and physical suicide are abdications. Oneâs views on the matter aside, the act of suicide is escape from the absurd being of the world. Living, however, is revolutionary. In living, we must confront our lack of our perfect knowledge and concrete nature, and instead of escaping it, bitterly wage war on it. To refuse suicide of both swaths is to exist without foundation, to accept that you cannot have one, and thus to live without justification.
So letâs finish building our cave, finally. Youâre there, for no discernible reason, and youâve the choice of making your own shadows on the wall, accepting defeat, or digging. What is digging? Digging is to acknowledge your cave, and to reject the hope of an outside. The cave is, at least now, all you know. Digging is also to not care if there is an outside. Beautiful sculptures, should they be to your liking, can be carved of stone. More space, if you so prefer, can be freed from the walls of your cell. Digging is to strive for whatever you can have within your cave, the walls of what you know on every side, and to do so not with self-imposed ignorance of the situation, but with utter indifference to the terms. Digging is living with an acknowledgment of the world, itâs cruelty, itâs indifference, and itâs pain, and doing so as if these were nothing but hurdles. A pickaxe of stone against a stone wall on until the day your limbs give out, all for the sake of whatever you wish to do with your damned cave. The meaning of life, that is, not itâs âwhy,â but itâs meaning, is to dig. To dig is to strike out. The meaning of life is revolt against what you are not, can knowingly never be, and covet anyway for whatever joy it make give you to take as much as you can.
Plato, necessary as he was for the development of thought, conjured for himself an exit to the cave, but Sisyphus had already rolled his boulder over the exit. Plato thought for himself a way out, casting images of a Serpent, the world, itâs finitude as far as he himself could ever be concerned, an enemy in the model of death. He cast himself a shadow of an exit, and so did all those indebted to him, but these were only ever shadows. The cave is the truth. So, what do you call a cave with no mouth? I call it a choice, and for it I have and can have no justification. My only thing to say on the matter is, if suicide of the mind or the body is abdication, then it is on its knees, and in both senses, living on my feet seems to me better than dying on my knees.
Thank you for reading.