Freedom Through Reality

Amber Carpenter

We begin someplace unlikely, deep in the bowels of Plato’s cave: 

“Imagine human beings living in an underground, cave-like dwelling...They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. A fire burns far above and behind them, and in between, on higher ground, is a path with a low wall along it, like the screen in front of puppeteers showing their puppets above...

Imagine people along the wall – some talking, some silent – carrying all kinds of artefacts—statues of people and other animals—projecting shadows onto the cave wall.”

To which, Glaucon quite rightly remarks: “This is a strange image, and strange prisoners”.

“They are like us,” Socrates replies. 

They are like us. 

These strange characters with their necks bound, staring at a wall that has shadows of puppets dancing across it–they are like us?

If they are like us, it is because this image captures so aptly our ordinary, unreflective and uncontemplative phenomenology. To not turn our heads, to not get a variety of angles and perspectives, to be fixed on how things first appear and take that as the whole of reality—this is how most of us live most of our lives. We never ask what causes things to appear as and when they do, or who causes them to arise—we don’t even suppose there is some cause. We just take them as self-evident existences. Some of us are apparently not actually shackled at the bottom of the cave; some of us spend our time manipulating images so as to capture the attention and determine the experiences of others. But these experiences are manipulated by the manipulation puppets—not by making real changes in the world. The puppet-masters strategically placed on the ledge, like those down below, have their eyes fixed on the cave wall, watching the shadow-play just as avidly.

But notice: it is not that the patterns on the wall are so enthralling we just can’t look away. It is not the mesmeric power of the images themselves that binds us. In this image, we are fettered by something. Something prevents us from ‘turning around’, from getting a perspective that allows us to see both the two-dimensionality of the images—their lack of depth—and the causes of the images in the machinations of others.

What are these bonds?

Plato does not spell it out explicitly here, but one need not look far (the moral psychology of Republic IV and VIII-IX makes it clear enough) to see that he agrees on this point with basic Buddhist psychological claims: We are fettered by our own desires—especially our desire for sense-pleasures and to avoid pain, but also, as articulated so well in Plato’s image of the divided soul, our desires for esteem, fame, status and our fear of insult, disregard, humiliation, lack of control. These desires bind even the puppeteers, who also cannot take their eyes away from shadows on the cave wall, lest their power and control should slip. The Buddhist sums up these psychological bonds as the eight worldly concerns that block our ability to see reality as it is, to see everyday experience for what it is: hope for pleasure and fear of pain; hope for fame and fear of infamy; hope for praise and fear of blame or scorn; hope for gain and fear of loss (see Nāgārjuna’s Letter To a Friend [Suhṛllekha] 29).  

It is our own compulsive, acquisitive, fearful and self-protective impulses that bind us to a single, flat perspective; through their lens, the world as it appears to us is felt as simply given. In the Phaedo “every pleasure and every pain provides another nail to rivet the soul to the body...so that the soul believes that truth is what the body says it is”. Through the dominating craving of ambition, for instance, the other candidate is self-evidently a rival, a threat; their vulnerability is just an obvious opportunity to show myself superior for the job. Our self-regarding desires imprison us in these perspectives, keep us from looking round, considering alternatives, noticing the superficiality, and examining the causes. 

If this diagnosis of our condition from these ancient texts sounds strikingly apt today, it is because we have remained as bad as we always were at getting a critical, inquiring but benevolent distance on our immediate impressions, constructed by desires that present themselves as non-negotiable fact. The eight worldly concerns preoccupy us still, and have not really changed; our obsessive concern with our status and gratification reasserts itself anew in each generation. But for those of us with internet access in our pockets—and this is no longer a feature of the privileged few—the prospects of getting such a critical distance have become considerably worse. For these fix our attention ever more uncompromisingly on the shadow-play of dancing puppets that constitute and reinforce a world structured around these concerns. Unbroken access to online discourse provides limitless opportunities for the small gratifications and disappointments that nail our perspectives ever more firmly in the same unblinking direction.

What, then, could unbind us? What could release us from the fetters of our own craving—craving for stability, for authority and autonomy, our hunger to be confident that we have control over things, that we are accepted and respected by a circle of peers, that we can be assured of having what we want and not having what we don’t want?

How do we move from an uncontemplative phenomenology to a contemplative one?

The Republic passage emphasises the pain and discomfort involved in breaking the bonds of habitual acquiescence to the appearances constructed by desires, the sheer effort involved in doing this. But the ‘how’ is left somewhat vague. Certainly, a resolute will alone does not seem a terrific recipe for success in liberating oneself from the compulsions and illusions of desire. Even with the best effort in the world, simply deciding not to believe what desires tell us is no more effective than deciding to believe.

In the cave allegory of the Republic, Plato has Socrates introduce a mysterious ‘someone’ who compels a prisoner to shake themselves free from their imprisoning enthralment to the desire-fed/desire-feeding appearances collectively constructed by our engagements with each other. But what does such ‘compulsion’ actually consist in, non-metaphorically? Who is this mysterious saviour who does the compelling, and what are we supposed to do if no such forceful liberator chances by? Presumably, the liberated ‘someone’ is meant to be Socrates; and if there is no such Socratic figure at hand, we ought to do whatever it was that he did in order to free himself from his bonds. But what was that? How did Socrates, who never left Athens, never immersed himself in world literature, or learned critical thinking through an intensive university education—how did Socrates nevertheless attain a perspective from which to interrogate the ambient norms and prevailing presumptions and expectations?

In many ways, this is impossible for us to know. This central mystery lies at the heart of Plato’s dialogues and drives his philosophy. That it is possible cannot be in doubt, for it happened. But how any one of us might make the same move towards freedom from our bonds is less clear. But Plato recognises as well as the Buddhists that rather than a bald, spontaneous rejection of the phenomena that appear so real, we need a means of changing the phenomena themselves, so that they release their grip on us as they become gradually but lastingly more apt. We must first come to experience the shadows as shadows, so that we can even conceive the curiosity to discover the puppets that cast them.

How do we do this? 

Plato recommends that we ‘turn the soul’ from appearance towards reality. Through inquiry motivated by a love of truth, he advised, we may so discipline and transform our desires that the fetters of egoistic desires and fears fall away. The paradox is that our pathologically ordered motivations are the very thing making any such ‘turn’ impossible in the first place. So it is not clear how much this answers the question—except that surely reading Plato’s Republic itself can be one of the means by which we can become aware that turning the mind is even a possibility, and inquiry once begun tends to beget further inquiry. 

The Buddhist answer, I think, is that we change the phenomena by changing the default metaphysics on the basis of which the phenomena arise as they do. We see this not just in the explicitly philosophical works and in the Path literature, which guides one to increased realisation of ultimate reality; we see it even in Buddhist story literature—as for instance the tale of the Bodhisattva as Bodhi the exiled minister, who returns to court to save the king from moral disaster, by engaging in a debate about the metaphysics of causation.

Buddhist narratives especially illustrate how we all carry a default metaphysics around with us, a picture of reality, through which we interpret experience and the field of possibilities presented to us. As the Buddhist diagnoses it, for most of us, this is a metaphysics of selves; and this metaphysics does not make us happy. Such a metaphysics presents us with a world containing enduring selves that have identity and agency, and having this identity and agency becomes existentially important. This causes us to parse experience in terms of What It Means for me; in terms of ‘Who Did It?’ and ‘Whose Fault Is It?’ It makes us live in fear of threats to our identity and to our autonomy, in chronic need to do the impossible: to distinguish ourselves non-relationally, intrinsically, and to prove our agency by asserting it over and over again. For identity divides the world neatly into ‘me’ and ‘not me’, and ‘agency’ constructs the only alternative as ‘passivity’, as being-done-to, as suffering. It thus undervalues or even makes us feel threatened by the responsive virtues which can only arise in dependence upon another, and which emphasise the ways that we only exist in virtue of and in relation to others.

To get rid of this default metaphysics of selves, we need to recognise that we are carrying it; to recognise that it is optional—not forced on us by the nature of things; and we need to thoroughly explore the look and feel of experience as it arises within the alternative no-self metaphysics. 

Buddhist Meditation, Platonic Inquiry

One of the central mechanisms for such exploration in Buddhism is meditation. In the rich and varied Buddhist meditative exercises, many in one way or another aim to enable us to experience the no-self metaphysics that is discussed and debated through words and concepts in philosophical texts.

Basic practices such as noting mental events as arising mental events enable us to make that first step in releasing ourselves from the fetters that bind us in Plato’s cave. In meditation, we do not encounter the claim that craving constructs reality; we experience reality-constructing cravings as the ephemeral phenomena they are. We witness the way that they suggest thoughts about the world to us, without thereby believing we are genuinely thinking about the objective world. Metta practice as Buddhaghosa describes it offers techniques for experiencing others as non-threatening; Śāntideva’s treatment of the perfection of kṣānti offers detailed ways of perceiving concrete emotionally-charged situations from a no-self perspective—and so on.

Meditation practices thus give us localised practice in experiencing our bonds as bonds—and as bonds whose strength consists in our strong commitment to a self-metaphysics of identity and autonomy. This is the first necessary step to releasing their hold on us. One way meditational exercises do this is by presenting an alternative frame within which phenomena arise. We gain experience in feeling and seeing whatever arises as without self, transient and mutually dependent. Practised in a controlled environment, meditation creates piecemeal opportunities for the pressing demands of the desire-created world to appear differently to us—to appear as not necessary and obvious but as optional, as caused by something that is not what it pretends to be, as something therefore that we can let go of.

Plato recommends a different technique for changing the phenomena. While the exemplary philosopher will indeed engage in the contemplation of reality, this is the culmination of a lengthy process of turning the soul towards an intelligible and impersonal reality through inquiry. Such soul-turning inquiry may take place through inquiry into any number of special subjects—harmonics, physics, geometry, even perhaps grammar and music—so long as the material into which one inquires is not itself part of the reality constructed by our ordinary fears and desires. That is to say, if we are to conduct inquiry in a way that will be therapeutic, and afford us the opportunity to change the internal forces that keep us tethered to the everyday orientation around egoistic desires and fears, then the reality we inquiry into must be in these respects impersonal—not constructed around person-oriented aims and ambitions. Inquiry into impersonal reality is soul-turning because to engage in it is to discipline one’s own worldly desires. It is an ongoing practice of preferring truth, clarity, understanding to convenience, comfort and success. But it will be so only if truth is sought as the ultimate end—and not in the service of the esteem, power, or money that knowledge can bring. 

Seeing this rational order of reality, intelligibly structured and unmoved by local or personal concerns, instils an awe and a desire to be so oneself, as well as a non-egoistic will that all things be likewise good. And, like Buddhist meditation, the appreciation of reality at the culmination of Platonic inquiry changes the appearance of ordinary worldly things. When someone who has seen the well-fitted, proportionate and explanatory inter-relations of real reality then turns their attention to everyday affairs—when the successful philosopher returns to the cave—she experiences things differently. She sees each thing for what it is, namely as an appearance of goodness and of fearful things cast by artificially constructed facsimiles of what is genuinely good and bad. Having trained and disciplined her own desires, she no longer buys into the values mistakenly attributed to pleasure and position, recognising these as false constructions of the real values that are embedded imperfectly in the sensible world. 

Narratives

Stories can be another mechanism for enabling us to experience the world in a non-egocentric way. If one grows up and has one’s outlook formed by the right kind of tales, the bonds of self-oriented desires and fears will not grow so strong—for one will have from the first an alternative, impersonal and more wholesome perspective available, which shows up the worldly desires and fears as non-necessary and unhelpful. 

In the Republic, Plato recognises the importance of stories for providing such basic moral orientation from an early age, and for enabling the possibility that a care for truth may get a toehold in dispelling the compelling hold on us that ordinary values and desires have. But we do not have concrete examples of stories that would, on his view, be good for the soul to grow on. One may perhaps use the Platonic dialogues themselves in this way; but they seem more suited to interrupting malformed outlooks than to forming a healthy no-self outlook in the first place. In the Buddhist tradition, by contrast, we have an embarrassment of riches. The many and well-travelled jātakas, avadānas, and so on, are another Buddhist mechanism for changing the way we experience everyday reality, so that the bonds of fears and desires are loosened. These tales show the familiar everyday world in all its diversity, but enable us to experience it in an unfamiliar way—as essentially transient, dependent, without self (just as the Buddha experiences it). The narratives, in fact, often bring us from the conventional feel of a situation to the contemplative, fostering a widespread and deeply embedded exchange of the old metaphysics for the new. 

When, for instance, a young woman feels an ogress as a fearful threat—for the quite understandable reason that the ogress has already devoured two of the young woman’s babies—the Buddha recognises instead an opportunity for extending care and generosity. He invites the parties to the conflict to see—more, to treat the situation likewise; and we (the audience) are enabled to shift our own appreciation of the situation from the one to the other. 

These tales lack the psychological complexity and ambiguity familiar from novels of the modern era, but not because the tellers of these ancient tales thought people lacked idiosyncratic personalities with highly complicated and conflicting projects, quirks, traumas and desires. Naturally people have all these things. It is just that it is unedifying to become engrossed in these all-too-engrossing details of personality. What is edifying in narrative is being pulled out of precisely this. From the Buddhist point of view, it is not surprising that we become completely enthralled by all the messiness of samsara. Enthrallment is our default condition. The pungent psychological intricacy of modern novels feeds our ordinary habits of constructing worlds of real selves, real passions, real crises. What we need if we want our literature to be edifying is a form which resists this natural tendency to become engrossed in the world as desires and fears construct it.  

We might compare here the way that Socrates, as Plato depicts it, continually resists the natural interest that those attracted to him have in him personally. It is not him that matters, Socrates insists; we should be jointly looking to the shared object of inquiry, the thing that really matters—and that has nothing to do with any personal idiosyncrasies. Plato gently mocks Apollodorus in the Symposium, who took to going about barefoot in emulation of Socrates, without in the least being able to do what made Socrates so genuinely striking and unusual—namely, to turn his attention to the questions Socrates attended to. The stories that Socrates prefers, in Republic II-III and X, are similarly stripped of pathos and internal conflict, of the high drama of the unwise soul torn by competing senses of what is good.

Instead of distracting us with the details of desire as these are felt and lived, instead of re-presenting to us the psychological involvement with which we are already all-too-familiar, actual Buddhist narratives (like the ideal template of narratives sketched in the Republic) present repeated opportunities to see the world differently—to see reality as the Buddha sees it. In Buddhist tales, we do not entertain dependent arising and transience as hypotheses, but experience reality through the Buddha’s normative perspective, as dependently arising and no-self. Story after story contrasts the way the default metaphysics constructs reality with how things appear on a more wholesome metaphysics. This, more than any picture of an exemplary Bodhisattva, enables us not only to recognise the bonds of craving for what they are in particular cases; more importantly, it enables us to experience positive alternatives to this in concrete instances. 

Let us conclude with a turn outwards.

These mechanisms for self transformation are all very well. But how, we might wonder, do we make the cultivation of a wholesome phenomenology about something more than our own personal purity?

This is undoubtedly a question demanding a many-faceted reply. One facet can perhaps be brought out in reflection on narrative, meditation and Plato’s cave. 

First, consider what we are actually up against: Our human condition, as depicted in Plato’s allegory, is such as to be particularly vulnerable to the Attention Ghouls. There have always been those who tried to determine the direction of our attention, the shape of our desires, for their own profit. Today, in the name of values that made good sense in one context, we are allowing the same old forces of greed and fear—personified in CEOs of billion dollar tech companies selling our attention to their advertiser customers—to determine our reality. Makers of apps and platforms get rich from capturing our attention—and, as they know very well, richer the more of our attention they capture.

How to combat this? 

Reflection on the mechanisms for moving from uncontemplative to contemplative phenomenology suggests that we must, every day, in every encounter, articulate reality as we have come to experience it in practice, but—as Plato insisted in the Philebus—at the right level of detail.

We cannot skip straight to ‘well it’s all just impersonal co-arising, mere phenomena anyway, so never mind about it’. We cannot, as Platonists, just assert the reality of goodness or of intelligible Forms. This would be like someone standing in Plato’s cave and shouting, ‘They’re all just shadows! Can’t you see?’ It may be true, but it is no more effective in transforming the phenomenology for others than it would be for oneself.

We must rather use the skills developed in meditation, or in pursuing genuinely disinterested inquiry into impersonal reality—skills of detaching from assertions made by desires arising from self-metaphysics; the ability not to be caught up in the narratives that are being peddled to serve purposes other than understanding; practice in experiencing relationality and mutual dependence and the contingency of any identity. We must use these skills to become part of the phenomena that changes other people’s phenomena—for instance, by recasting through our own engagement with them particular situations as they look and feel from a no-self, dependent arising metaphysics—or, as Platonist, from metaphysics of impersonal, well-ordered and intelligible reality. In our interactions with others, we must become tellers of Buddhist narratives, gentle Socratic inquirers, genuinely uncertain but clear-eyed about the tricks that ego plays on all of us, articulating both in content and style not just facts, but the new way those facts appear, so that one can feel what dependent arising, transience and no-self mean here.