Post #194: War, Ethics, and Plato’s Cave
[Introductory comments at a panel discussion on “Ethics in Times of War” held at Mahidol University International College, 4 June 2026]
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
When I introduce students to Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, I always make a point of reminding them that the Cave may not be such a bad place—at least not in terms of what they are likely to hold most dear.
Health and wealth, popularity and fame, prestige and power—all these are at home there, and so are we all, in a sense, since the Cave is where we get raised. Families, tribes, societies, countries all presuppose it; evolution shaped it in line with the demands of creaturely survival, and even now we could not do without it, though its shape is negotiable within certain limits (the walls, you might say).
Alas, the Cave is also where our interests clash, and where competition over what we hold to be the good things in life can easily get so fierce that it erupts in violence. The Cave may seem hospitable enough on a good day; but it is also where we endure our disasters and tragedies, including wars and other cataclysms in which entire ways of life are destroyed, often by other human beings who dread nothing so much as having the same done to them. From the underground perspective, these bitter conflicts are inevitable: so-called realists make much of trying to manage them more competently, but they have little to say that would point beyond them in principle. And their perspective cannot be wished away, because much of life is, and will ever be, lived at the basement level in this sense.
Not that the Cave is a lawless place, of course. Power operates there to keep our worst excesses in check, at least most of the time, and there is some room for ethics too, even in the midst of war. But Cave-ethics has a specific orientation: it is a matter of protecting oneself with quid-pro-quo arrangements in a pragmatic way. Were I (or my side in a conflict) strong enough, we might well dispense with such constraints; or if we didn’t, others (looking on in the Cave) might see us as fools. To start Plato’s ascending journey, by contrast, is to begin seeing yourself in others, and to refrain from doing things to them for no other reason than that you wouldn’t want them done to you. With every upward step, this identification would become closer, until, at the saintly level, the separation between your interests and mine may disappear altogether. But that is so far away that it scarcely looks believable from the bottom of the Cave.
The so-called realists must be reckoned with, I said, but I am reluctant to call them realists proper because they like to ignore a cardinal point, namely that we do not in fact find the world ready-made for us in the unalterable ways they presuppose. That is half the truth, at best; the other half is no less vital, namely that we make and shape our world every moment anew by what we contribute to it—not only by our actions, but also by the convictions they express. The realists are often proved right, admittedly; but they like to hide, or maybe they sincerely overlook, how much their predictions work like self-fulfilling prophesies. In a world operating on power-based principles, we will get power-based results, and that will often be the case, perhaps almost always. But the dynamics of power depend on our playing the game in a certain way, the Cave way, and that is not simply a given, as the realists pretend.
To raise this point can sound naïve, even soft-headed to those who pride themselves on their hard heads; but as William James pointed out in a particularly moving lecture about whether life is worth living, there are many situations where the difference between what is possible and what is not turns very much on our own faith and commitment, not simply on the facts: believe that something is possible, and act on it accordingly, and you will be proved right; deny it in your heart, and the world will reflect your denial back to you. Whether faith can move mountains is a disputed point; that unfaith can turn everything to sand, quite undeniable.
Life in the Cave does not, indeed cannot look beyond itself—that is its defining feature. We are prisoners not because we lack the capacity to turn around and move elsewhere, but because of how unaware we commonly remain of our constraints. Education, so Plato introduces his famous chapter (Book VII in the Republic), that is to say education in the highest sense, would be about realizing that there is a different, a better way of being human—a path leading upwards, to cleaner air, clearer views, and the discovery of a much more powerful source of light that warms everything and holds it together. The Platonic ascent is not ethically neutral at all, in other words, nor is it a matter of perspective alone, though every traveler has his or her own angle: it leads not only beyond opinion and towards truth proper, but also towards goodness and beauty at the same time.
The upward journey must be an inward journey as well—beginning with the realization that what our senses seem to tell us so unarguably (interpreted and reinforced by the ubiquitous filters of social life and communication with others) is really very arguable indeed, and much less solid than it seems. Know thyself! the Temple of Apollo still cries out at us after 2500 years: to understand more properly what life is really about, and how we fit into the world, we must start by allowing ourselves to get perplexed, admitting that we do not in fact know already, and that our inner lives are largely foreign lands to us. (“I have become a mystery to myself,” St Augustine observed in a moment of illumination.) Yet, rather than “making good use of impressions,” as Epictetus would have philosophers do, we habitually swim along in a stream of unmindful sensory reactions and supposed conventional wisdoms. Of the far shore, as the Buddhists call it, we may have heard; but we rarely credit its existence.
The leaden weights that Plato describes as holding us down to the bottom of the Cave turn out to be not so much the manipulations of others (though these too are a fact of life), but our own desires and aversions, that is to say, our own sense-guided and self-centered notions and perspectives, which seem so natural to us (within the confines of the Cave) that we may scoff at the very idea of anything better or more reliable. (Such jeering should not surprise us: the Tao would not be the Tao if fools did not laugh at it (Tao Te Ching, ch. 41).)
Be our outward successes ever so brilliant, what determines how well we are truly doing in life must be sought elsewhere than on the shiny surfaces. Everything ultimately depends, Plato insisted, on how soundly we have come to be constituted on the inside, that is to say, on whether our rational, spirited, and appetitive parts have been properly balanced and aligned. (A matter of good karmic housekeeping, a Buddhist might say, so long as we remember that good karma means not pleasant consequences, but proper volitional alignments that eventually bear fruit according to their nature—a subtle difference, but a crucial one.)
To make this idea of the inward constitution plausible is the grand project of Plato’s Republic—prompted by the challenge of a hotheaded sophist, wolfish Thrasymachus, who thinks he is being very clever when he trumpets that justice is nothing other than the right of the stronger. An echo of war, even then: for in their recent showdown with Sparta, the Athenians had answered just this to the Melians who had appealed to them on grounds of morality and international law. “The powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The small island was mercilessly besieged, betrayed from within, and completely destroyed—its men slain, its women and children enslaved.
It would be presumption, not wisdom, to speak of the upward journey as if one knew it well; it is a long, winding, rocky road that leads towards the Sun, and one should never be too confident of one’s progress, lest one vitiate it all. Who can be sure, along the way, how much one has really been able to see? (The Tao you can talk about is not the real Tao, as we are warned at the very gateway (Tao Te Ching, ch. 1), and those who know don’t speak, at least not too loudly (ch. 56).) Even so, there are glimpses to be had of the rays coming down from the top—and other intimations of what awaits above—so long as one has taken at least a few steps away from the bottom of the Cave. These momentous first steps, with which even a journey of a thousand miles must begin (Tao ch. 64), do not depend on one’s own devices and initiative alone; they require some nudging by others.
Which bring us to the sense or nonsense of exploring such possibilities together, perhaps even in a classroom. It would not be uncommon, at a contemporary university, to shrink from anything that might suggest a concern for wisdom, not just knowledge. (“We are not the wisdom business!” a colleague once chided me, and he was a political theorist at a liberal arts college.) I disagree, but I understand the concern. So let us be very clear that we are not talking of dogmatic assertion here—let alone of preaching or trying to make converts—but of inquiry only, of dialectical discussion, and testing long-established tenets by one’s own personal experience, which one cannot do if one has never heard of them.
When Socrates made his rounds in Athens, he did not claim to be a sage who knew better than others; he merely asked his pointed questions, hoping for better responses than he was getting. What mattered to him was not so much this or that answer, but the readiness to keep asking, seeking, and giving others an account of one’s beliefs—with undiminished enthusiasm even if one may be going from error to error, and failure to failure (which has been offered, incidentally, as a definition of Zen as well). The most important thing, he thought, was a concern with the state of one’s soul, not just everyday wellbeing.
Another famous formulation comes to mind: “For what would it profit us if we gained the world but lost our souls?” (Mark 8:36) It remains a haunting challenge even if one does not share the religious certainties with which it is associated. And nowhere is this challenge more acute than when the stakes are highest, and the dilemmas most intractable, as they must be in times of war. It would be better to attend to the beginnings of problems, when they are difficult to diagnose but more easily cured, a rare point on which Machiavelli and Lao Tzu agree (Prince, ch. 3, Tao Te Ching, ch. 63). But even when the bombs start falling, law and ethics do not suddenly fall silent, as has sometimes been said (by Cicero, notably); they may speak too quietly to be heard above such noise, but what they have to tell us is as important as ever, and perhaps never more so.