"Intelligence offends by its very nature, thinking annoys the people in the cave."Simone Weil
Sometimes, one cannot help but wonder what the world would be like if we couldn’t think. In fact, the only thing which separates us from animals is our brain and our ability to think beyond the id, beyond our basic needs and wants, towards the greater good or the benefit of the others. While some people strive for knowledge and believe that there is not end to it, some people, those who choose to live in the dark, find thinking and knowledge extremely irritating.
Knowledge may be regarded as a guiding light throughout our life. It helps us in every step of our lives; when we shop we know the best place to buy the goods, when we want to eat we know the best restaurant etc. However, knowing things doesn’t make one intelligent, or thoughtful. What people are truly against to is intelligence and thinking, which are both incredible processes of the mind forcing us to push the limits of our imagination. People who are happy with their current style of living, their current bank of “knowledge”, don’t want to disturb the happy illusion of the perfect life, so they refuse to think and they get annoyed by anyone who knows and thinks more than them. This is the true nature of knowledge. Unfortunately, no matter how hard people with different thoughts and more intelligence than the others try to enlighten the people in their surroundings, most of the time they feel as if they are talking to a wall: a wall which has a mind of its own, but refuses to use it.
The biggest example of how people find other people who know more than them or have more solid ideas annoying is the constant battle between religion and science. While the scientists say persistently that the number of suns just like ours in the whole universe –which expands drastically even as you read this- is equal to the number of tiny sand grains in all of the beaches on the world, religious people insist on saying that, for example, “God –or who/what they believe in- has created it all just for humans”. These are people who live in the cave of ignorance, darkened and isolated by their ignorance, refusing even to accept the ray of sun coming in through the small opening, which, if wanted, could be widened to let more sun, more knowledge, more people, more creativity and thinking in. Thinking, hypothesizing, and contemplating are actions taken by those who are in the sun, by those of us who have once and for all accomplished to get out of that cave of ignorance and to unleash the reins of their mind.
This is a great start. Well done.
ReplyDeleteSo, would "knowledgeable" be different from "intelligent"? You might want to cite something specific that you are disputing, otherwise you are setting up a straw man, or making broad generalizations. For example, some people would say rather that God created it all, and us, for His pleasure.
Remember that Simone Weil wrote, "The learned in the cave are those who possess empirical forms of knowledge (who know how to make predictions, the doctors who know how to cure people by using empirical methods, those who know what is going on, etc.). Their knowledge is nothing but a shadow."
So if it's not empirical knowledge, what is Plato talking about?