A Platonic Dialogue About Fate or The Allegory of the Road · 3:55am Apr 15th, 2015
So, I had to write this thing for my classic literature class called a "creative flight" and it was to be a creative writing exercise in which I could write about any subject in a creative way. Well, since we'd been talking about fate vs. free will with regards to The Iliad and The Oresteia I decided it would be fun to write a discussion of this in the form of a Platonic dialogue. For anyone who doesn't know, Plato wrote most of his work as a dialogue with his teacher, Socrates, so I tried to copy that style here, especially with respect to his Allegory of the Cave. Philosophically speaking, it's not a really well-argued theory, and the allegory is a bit shaky, but this was just supposed to be a fun thing, so whatever. I'm posting it here because... I don't know why, to be honest. I guess I just liked it a lot, and I'm kind of proud of it, so here you go. Fair warning, I'm no Plato.
Suppose for a moment that the Gods exist, and then further suppose that their power is absolute and unchanging. Who then, of the Gods, might one consider to hold the most power?
Zeus, certainly.
Perhaps, but even higher still who can Zeus himself not overpower? Who among the powers has such power that no force in the world can alter it completely? We see this figure in the works of Homer, and in Aeschylus. It conspires to kill men and destroy countries, but never acts directly.
Ah, he said, you refer to Fate.
Indeed. And now that we have supposed of Fate’s existence and granted it all the power befitting its position, we shall add another supposition.
Name it, he said.
Suppose that I, a mere mortal man, wished to make a choice regarding, say, the direction in which I walk to my home in the evening. Instead of walking past the forum, let us suppose that today I choose to pass the tree by the pond instead.
A simple choice, one would think.
Indeed, but if we have already granted Fate’s existence, and granted it its powers, then does it not follow that my making the choice to pass the tree by the pond was not, in fact, a choice at all but rather a fulfillment of my predetermined fate? To put it another way, is it really a choice if one could not have made a different choice were one to turn back time and make the choice again?
Certainly it is not an easy question, he replied. But let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that in choosing to pass the tree by the pond, you decided that it was in your best interest to instead turn back and pass the forum in your usual fashion. Would you be altering your fate then?
Surely not. If, as we have, we grant Fate’s existence, then even my choosing to reverse the choice I originally made is still the fulfillment of my fate.
Hmm, he mused.
Imagine, if you will, that our individual fates could be laid out before us like stone paths. We could imagine that our paths would begin with our births and end in our deaths. For simplicity we will neglect the possibility of life after death and instead focus solely on life. Now, these paths, being a few feet wide and made from stone, would be shrouded in an extremely thick mist through which no fire could penetrate, not even the mighty sun. If we were to position ourselves on this path at some indeterminate point we might imagine what we could see, yes?
Certainly.
Before us would be the same opaque wall of mist that I described earlier, and it would come all that way to our toes, allowing us only the tiniest fraction of a glimpse into the future. And behind us would be the length of path which had already been walked by us. We could imagine that this path might curve around obstacles, or climb over hills, or dive into the earth through tunnels only to once again rise up, but it would give no indication about what lies ahead in the fog-covered future. But, you might ask, what lies beyond this ethereal mist? If we take what we have imagined thus far and apply it to the path that exists beyond the mist we can easily see that it would undoubtedly stretch on for an exact length and then stop, but this would, of course, be invisible behind the fog. However, if we possessed some power which allowed us to shift the fog we would be able to examine the path and determine all the bumps and curves in our future.
I would imagine so, he said.
But even if we allowed this extraordinary power to exist, it would not in the least bit augment our ability to alter the path on which we walk. Even the very act of lifting the fog would have to be part of our path, would it not?
Certainly, it could be no different.
So then, the question becomes, what is a choice? Or, to ask it a different way, why is it that we feel we make choices if we are simply following our own paths?
The mist blocks our sight, he said. By being incapable of perceiving the path in front of us, it gives the illusion that when we choose to turn left, the path turns left, and when we choose to circumvent an obstacle the path circumvents an obstacle. In short, the choice is illusory.
Exactly. If a man leading a blind man, who has absolute control over where the blind man goes, wants to turn left to avoid a horse and simultaneously the blind man chooses to turn left, then the blind man never really made a choice. He was going to be turning left regardless of whether he chose to or not. Is a choice really a choice if we have no choice in the matter?
Certainly not.
We are left then with the question of whether this is truly the case or not. As I see it, if the Gods exist, and if their power is absolute, then this allegory must be the case. For if we grant fate, then we must also forfeit choice in favor of the illusion of choice. Perhaps this is enough for some, and perhaps the illusion is a comforting one, but if it is an illusion then freedom is a word with no meaning. In a world where fate exists, freedom must be the first victim.
What, then, must a man do to be truly free?
If a man wishes to be free, he must first cast off the chains of immortality. Only by breaking the manacles of the Gods and rejecting the offer of life after death, of immortality, does a man gain his freedom. Because true freedom must include the freedom to choose to die.
This song almost immediately popped into my head, and it stayed there throughout the blog:
I had a different song in mind.
Well, it makes sense to me. Total predestination and free will are mutually exclusive concepts. Goodness knows there are plenty of myths about those who tried to circumvent prophecy only to fulfill it through those very attempts.
This was nice and an amusing read, but the conclusion they come to seems not to follow at all from their conversation, and is directly contradicted by it. If fate exists, the choice to die is no more a choice than the choice to walk home by tree instead of the forum. Right? So there is no freedom to be gained by having that 'choice'.
I want to have a dialogue with you, and I don't mean a platonic one.
2986052 I'm honestly surprised you didn't have a Panda Bear song on hand.
2986998 :|
This is all nice and everything, but WHY ARENT YOU WORKING ON UNREAD LETTERS!?
I hope you take this as what it is, a joke
I think it's worth noting that the presumptions of their age were quite a bit different in this regard. Plato had a quasi-gnostic view of the universe - indeed, Gnosticism would by and large take its cues from Neoplatonic thought.
There's something to be said for trying to apply the Allegory in a modern, secular, materialist context - ie, only those who engage in the higher realm of philosophy truly understand the world - but I think it's almost impossible to separate the Allegory from its spiritualist roots.
In essence, Plato viewed the Cave as the prison of our own dim perceptions, and only by spiritually transcendent philosophical meditations could one perceive the true world in any meaningful way.
I think the Allegory applies quite well when we consider that our minds are in fact the Cave, and we dimly perceive what little filters into our minds through our senses with no "direct" experience of the universe. In that sense, each of us is a cave, and the observer(s) lie within. Of course, we know now that there is no conscious observer in the human brain, and that our consciousness is a collection of phenomena working in concert, akin to a symphony rather than a solo, but it's still quite applicable I think. We may not be able to spiritually experience the world (gnosis) as Plato would have liked, but we can picture it through mathematics and reason.