We are Living in A World of Shadows
Plato said that everything in the physical world is just a shadow
of something that lies beyond the world of space and time. We should not let the
shadows scare us though, as they are just blurred copies of ideals
that exist within our own mind.
According to Plato, when we look out into the world, it is like looking at the ruins
of an ancient civilization. Think of the pictures of ancient Rome that you have
seen. There might be a statue with an arm or leg missing here or a broken down coliseum
column standing over there. However, when we look at the world of ideals within
our own minds, we can imagine how perfect each of the ruins must have been when
they were brand new. It is as if the world of ideals in our mind is like a shining
city at the
top of a hill. However, when we look at the external world,
it is as if everything is thousands of years old and falling into various degrees
of decay.
Here is a metaphor that may help explain what Plato was talking about. Suppose there
is an old horse named Dobbin standing alone in the field during the daytime. As
the sun rises in the morning, Dobbin’s shadow on the ground looks more like a giraffe
than a horse. However, as the day wears on, the proportions of the shadow begin
to more and more resemble what the actual horse looks like. Then, at noon, the shadow
just looks like a blob beneath Dobbin, and as the day wears on the shadows might
once again resemble the proportions of the actual Dobbin. Finally, at evening time,
the shadows look more and more like a giraffe’s.
Plato believed the physical Old Dobbin that created all those different shadows
is like the ideal we have in our mind of what the perfect horse
would be. The shadows on the ground are like the imperfect horses we see about us
in the everyday world. There is an important difference between Dobbin and the ideal
though. This difference is that Dobbin creates the shadows in the
metaphor, but we construct the ideal in our minds
by putting together only the best properties of the actual horses that we observe
in the world.
When we go about comparing various physical objects to the ideal we have in our
mind, it is similar to comparing the various shadows of Dobbin to the actual Dobbin
himself. We measure how closely something approximates the ideal
by comparing it to the ideal in the same way that we might compare the various shadows
of Dobbin to the actual Dobbin. When something exactly mirrors the ideal we have
of it in our mind, it is exactly what it should be. However, when some object about
us is vastly different from our ideal, it is similar to what happens when we compare
the actual Dobbin to the giraffe-looking shadows. In the everyday world, this difference
between the actual and the ideal causes a tension inside of us. We can reduce that tension by transforming the actual into the ideal.
Let us look at how this metaphor of shadows and an ideal applies to a specific example
by looking at the class of all cars in the world. When we look at all the cars in
the world, we notice that there is a large variety of them, just as there are a
large variety of Dobbin’s shadows that fall on the ground through out the day. Some
of the cars will not start; others are old beaters; and then there are some that
closely resemble the ideal we have in our mind of what a car should be.
Plato said that some of the objects “participate” more in the ideal
than others do. But what does this word “participate” mean and how do we quantify
how much one thing participates in the ideal? Robert S. Hartman showed that the
ideal that we have in our mind is actually just a list of the properties
that we think the ideal object should have. For example, we might think the ideal
car should be safe, get good gas mileage, and
so on. Each physical object that is
being compared to the ideal also is actually just made up of a list of properties.
When we compare the actual objects to the ideal, we are just comparing the list
of actual properties of each object to the list of properties we have in our mind
that the ideal should have. The degree to which the actual list
of properties matches up with the ideal list determines how much
the actual object participates in the ideal.
Properties of Actual Car
Properties of Ideal Car
27 mpg
Excellent Gas Mileage
Relatively Safe
No one can get hurt
One flat tire
No flat tires
And so on…
One of the giant steps that Hartman made was to take this general concept of what
it means for something to be good and to apply it to the life of the individual.
In the world of things, each thing ought to match the ideal we have of it. We reduce
tension in our world by trying to transform problematic situations and relationships
into ideal ones.
How does this apply to our individual lives? Each one of us has thousands of different
selves that we could possibly become, but we ought to
strive to be the one that
most closely matches our ideal. In daily living, the phrase that is frequently used to capture this striving is simply that “we are trying to do our best.”
Just because we try to do our best, it does not mean that we will win every race.
Nor does it mean that we will always be working and never playing. We often need to play and rest to be the best we can be!