Malisa Basic- Response Paper #2 (Option #3)
Rather than the two given options where I had a choice to write about what Gilbert may have learned through Plato’s philosophy or discuss in detail and explain child’s play, I took a different approach and decided to analyze the two different texts, comparing and contrasting the views of Freud and Plato, and the way they decided to approach their won ideas in text. The ideas Plato portrays in the Allegory of the Cave is set up differently than Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Plato states his ideas in a story format, contrasting to Freud’s piece where he talks directly to the reader being the audience about his views and opinions. Even though it would make more sense understanding a certain concept through a moral or story, I found it more difficult to read than Freud’s work. This may have resulted to the time period each article was written. However, in this case, it seemed as if a more direct and simple approach was easier for me to understand in which ideas the author was trying to express through his work.
In the Allegory of the Cave, prisoners are locked in within a cave where they are only given sight to shadows of objects by carriers of the objects who show the object through fire. They know nothing of the outside world, or exposure of anything else aside from what they are shown. However, once prisoners are taken out of the cave and are exposed to reality and the world outside , they find themselves having a difficult time returning to the cave. Though this may seem like a simple concept, the way Plato has worded this story is quite confusing. However, I find the main idea of this story to be up to one’s own interpretation. The way I interpreted this story was that once individuals are exposed to the truth, they cannot trust what information is given to them. They rather learn about certain objects through their own experience.
In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he states that ”Most of the ‘pain’ we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself.” (pg. 6) Here he states that most pain is a cause of a mental process, a deficiency in pleasure. This can be expressed in Plato’s book because the prisoners don’t feel pain until they leave their cave. Exposure to the unknown brings pain, as does ”something in the external world which may be painful itself” as Freud explained, even though this may seem like positive progress towards improvement for the lives of these prisoners. When people are exposed to reality something that was not shown to them before, it may cause confusion and denial because it is hard to believe this new truth exposed to them, and hard to understand how what they knew before and thought was true, really wasn’t. A feeling of denial as well as deceit can eventually cause pain as the prisoners did. What other factors cause pain? Can pain eventually become an indifferent feeling? Is there a term for this feeling? How would Plato or Freud describe this?
