Initiation to the Lie

It is clear from the allegory that the prisoners are initiated into the lie because they are exposed to the shadows on the wall without the benefit of seeing the things themselves “under broad daylight.” Because of this, they take the shadows as truth. Mere shadows of what is real therefore inhabit their worldview. But what is the nature of this worldview we speak of?

The worldview or constructs we bring with us are the attitudes, concepts, and beliefs that “[mediate] between the subject knowing something and what it is that he knows.”[i] We adopt such worldview through a particular cognitional act that aims at arriving at justified true belief. According to Potter, such act goes through the following incremental and cumulative stages: presentation through perception, understanding through conceptualization, and judgment through affirmation or denial of the proposition.[ii]

It is my belief that one develops his aptitude for each of the three processes through time. That is, one sharpens his ability to perceive, understand, and judge through constant practice. The crux of the matter is that, because man is an embodied spirit, he continuously assimilates stimuli through his senses that are eventually translated to loosely connected concepts without the benefit of understanding and judging. That is, a child may adopt constructs from authority figures without much understanding and judgment since his ability to conceptualize and judge may not be as developed as his sense perception. Such is unfortunate since Potter further asserts, “there can be no reasonable affirmation unless there has been intelligent inquiry into what immanent intelligibility a sensuous presentation may have or is likely to have.”[iii] Thus, it is inevitable that one will discover that some parts of his superfluous worldview will be untenable in the context of his experiences.

At the beginning, our minds are conditioned and our acts habituated according to the worldview of our gurus. As to whether this captures reality as it truly is needs verification since these were absorbed without the benefit of judgment. Hence, armed with this common sense, we march into the world with only one message in mind: “I have been prepared by both school and home to face this world without fear. I am in charge of my life and of my world. I can chart my own destiny.” The individual plunges into the world with a Nietzschean Will to Power and the Levinasian jouissance believing that he is an invincible actor in the world and is determined to “suck the marrow out of life.”

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[i] Vincent G. Potter, On Understanding Understanding, A Philosophy of Knowledge (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 76-77.

[ii] Ibid, 38-40.

[iii] Ibid, 39.