Do You Think You Really Know What You Know?

How do we know that what we know is right or wrong? Where did we gain that knowledge to begin with, and can we break away from all embedded knowledge that we might have not necessarily chosen to know ourselves? 

If you had the choice to format your brain and unlearn everything you have ever learned and to dispose of the knowledge you have gained throughout your life, only to regain it again by choice and conscious, what would you do? This is the question reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan imposes.

In his allegory of the cave, Plato explains a group of people living in a cave their entire lives, chained, they are watching shadows of objects on the wall they are facing. Not knowing anything else but the shadows they believe this to be the only truth.

One day one of the people in the cave, breaks away from the shackles and runs off to the source of the shadows, astonished by the light of the real world and what he’s seen, he comes to the realization that what he and his people have seen all their lives are mere shadows of the truth that lie behind their backs

The man runs off to the cave again to tell them that everything they’ve known was a lie, the truth is right behind their backs. Unable to comprehend what the man is saying they call him crazy and attack him. So, the man, convinced he’d lost his senses, is again left in the dark cave.

In Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Hayy who’s been living in a remote island since birth, alone with no human contact, meets Absal, who’s not satisfied with what he has known all his life, a tormented soul in search of the truth away from society, escapes to the island.

Absal teaches Hayy language and Hayy, in turn, teaches Absal what he, as an individual away from society, culture and tradition’s influence has learned which is deemed the truth by Absal. He decides to take Hayy to the city to teach people the truth that Hayy discovered alone, through sensory experience and enlightenment. Much like Plato’s cave-man that runs off to the cave again to enlighten his people. Evidently, the crowd, raged and angry, opposed and rejected Hayy’s version of the truth that contradicted everything the people in the city knew and grew accustomed to. Disappointed, Hayy and Absal retrieve to the remote island and live there.

What does this teach us? Plato and Ibn Tufayl’s stories imply that when people join a group and when an individual is part of a crowd, they no longer think for themselves. The individual becomes blinded by the beliefs and ideas that the society they are in has shaped on their behalf.

We often think that we are the makers of our own decisions and choices, the reality, in fact, is otherwise. We as individuals are shaped by what our environment, religion, family, traditions, language, etc., impose on us. Jean-Jacques Rousseau says, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Our minds according to Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Aristotle, are “Tabula Rasa’s”, a clean slate that after one is born, is fed and nurtured with whatever its surroundings feed it with. Therefore, we are left with no choice but to be biased, and our minds will always be shaped by the frames of our society.

Does this mean that people as individuals cannot form their own independent mind? Although Individuals make up society, in turn, society shapes individuals’ mind frames. One cannot control their bias, one is unable to comprehend what it is like is to really think without any external influence.

We often see that people who think outside the box, or people with a different mindset are always looked upon differently, people that do not abide by the knowledge inherited to them whether through traditions and culture or individually taught by their own families are looked at as rebels and corrupt, they are shunned by society, while conformists are more welcomed and accepted by people than nonconformists. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were contested by the church for challenging traditional knowledge, their books were banned and Galileo was persecuted by a jury as a result of his challenging views.

In the end, can we reach a level where like Descartes and Rousseau, we dispose of everything we know and then re-gain knowledge selectively, challenge what we already know and be able to make unbiased, independent knowledge of anything? What will you choose, the light? Or the cave? At this point anyone that is reading this article will think that they are the person that discovered the light, but the truth is, how do you even know if the light you have discovered is the real light? What if everything in existence, like Plato said, is just the imperfect representation of the ideal truth that we mortals cannot yet see?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but they will probably be debated by future philosophers in years to come as their predecessors have.  Meanwhile, we will hopefully continue the search for real knowledge as individuals with independent, curious minds to make our societies a better environment for knowledge to flourish and enlightenment to prosper.