(Platos) Reality Is Not What It Seems

Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” famously opens with an image of an angry woman.

I say angry, because this is how, according to Kahneman, my brain’s ‘System 1’ categorises her. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort. It operates on the surface and is fuelled by emotions. On the flip side, ‘System 2’ is thoughtful, conscious and reasoning. It is much slower. As we go throughout the day, our mind switches between System 1 and 2 depending on situation we are facing.

There are some parallels to another framework; namely the second-order thinking philosophy, which encourages us to go deeper into analysing a thought or data point from more than one angle. First-order thinking considers the woman as unpleasant company, second-order thinking looks underneath the bonet and considers her circumstances, and perhaps the non-obvious factors as to why she comes across the way she is does.

Both those methods talk to the concepts of perception and reality, which were first wrestled by Socrates and Plato in Athens some 2500 years ago. They were the first philosophers after the pre-Socratics, who dealt with understanding human life rather than nature.

Plato sided with Heruclitus who is known for saying that no man ever steps in the same river twice. Heruclitus also felt that the world is in a constant state of movement. Things around us (such as the climate, your home, your political views etc) all operate in a state of flux, impacted by rather random events. However underneath the chaos, there is something solid that does not change, and Plato called this ‘form’ of things.

The concept of forms comes through in Plato’s various dialogues. Plato says that every object in reality has a form or “an idea”. That idea can be a fish, a person, the mountains, courage, love, happiness, all that stays constant. The fish or the mountain that we actually end up actually seeing with our own eyes is just one edition of the real thing. It is a momentary portrayal of the form, so to speak.

Plato, who was heavily influenced by Socrates, then goes even one step further. He believes that all the forms were known to us in the past and lived deeply within your soul before it entered your body. So the deep wisdoms about form or ideas are in fact deeply coded within us but they need to be woken up through questioning and being at peace with yourself.

One example of this point is shown in Plato’s Meno, where Socrates brings a slave and teaches him geometry, purely by questioning him. He proves that the slave actually knew how to solve the problem himself, and only through asking him questions he had reached the right answer. Not digging in deeper to find the answers can be similar to living in a dark, as referenced to his Allegory of the Cave.

In the famous allegory, Plato portrays a world where a few slaves are living in a dark cave far away from the realities of the outside world. The slaves are chained and facing the cave’s walls. They can only see shadows of objects behind them, amplified by a bonfire in the background. As far as they are aware, the shadows are the reality and the cave is the world as it is. One of the slaves can escape and, both figuratively and literally, see the light outside the cave. He might come back still blinded and tell others slaves about it. They will not believe him and feel threatened to even consider going out.