Thinking Outside the Box: Plato & Sartre

Plato, through his "Allegory of the Cave," expresses that our senses, a primary mode of attaining our knowledge of our world, cannot be trusted.  What we sense, isn't always the whole truth.  What we perceive is an imitation of the truth and thus we must not rely entirely on our senses.  We must look from different perspectives; we must turn around.  Our senses are narrow, we must use all senses to determine from one point what something is, then change our location entirely and perceive all over again.  Again and again.  In order to attain more truth of what it is we are sensing.  In order to change our location, in order to carry out this search action as described, we must be free of binds.  The prisoners in the cave were comfortable with their binds and their location and thus did not free ourselves.  Our comfort is our self-set limitation on our knowledge.  By stepping outside our comfort zones we expand them, permitting more truth.  Often times thinking differently is uncomfortable and difficult, and more than often this is what changes your thinking and attains knowledge.  Plato expresses that thinking differently and searching for knowledge is an acquired skill, as staring into the bright sun got easier as the one prisoner continued to do it.  Our limitations are self-created, self-accepted.

"GARCIN: Inez, they've laid their snare damned cunningly-- like a cobweb. If you make any movement, if you raise your hand to fan yourself, Estelle and I feel a little tug. Alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we're linked together inextricably. So you can take your choice. Hullo? What's happening?"

This quote from Sartre's play, "No Exit" can be interpreted to say that our knowledge is dependent upon the knowledge of those around us.  Our knowledge has been accumulated by the distributed information from others, albeit false, true or otherwise.  In a sense, the knowledge of others is both our limitation and our expansion.

"Alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we're linked together inextricably."

Alone, we can question and ponder, we can experiment and reason, but our thoughts and enterprises can never be validated without others, we can never know how close to the truth our thoughts and opinions are without the scrutiny of others.