Inside one of the most studied caves in the world, the one Plato described during the fourth century BC, people were sitting down, watching the shadows on the wall created by the fire and the signs behind them. The shadows were all they had ever known. And yet, a few of them were getting up, turning around and climbing out of the cave, towards another, more real reality.
During the two thousand years between Plato and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a lot changed in human evolution. Not so much in Charles Darwin’s version of evolution – in which humans and animals are alike – but in the fundamental version, the evolution of human consciousness. Plato represented the last bridge to our ancient past, in which Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition were the main sources of knowledge to the divine, eternal human soul and spirit, while Kant personified the first bridge to our modern age, in which Intellect became the main source of knowledge to our finite physical body, reigned by the brain and the mind. The Kantian spotless mind.
The human spiritual heritage became tamed and caged, while the ephemeral, logical cleverness of the human mind became revered; thinking, at the expense of feeling and willing. To civilized, enlightened minds today, it is difficult to accept that the Kant Cave is also a cave. Its wall is decorated with framed university degrees, as well as taped bananas and other art, intelligently illuminated by smart LED lighting.
Since cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman’s discovery that spacetime and physicalist science are doomed, revisiting the evolution of human consciousness has become more important than ever. In his book The Tension Between East and West (1922) teacher Rudolf Steiner described how the ancient Oriental consciousness that was still alive in Plato, clashes with the modern materialistic Occident. He offered an explanation as to why this age is such a painful, critical time in history, and why it will last until the newfound physical, thinking experience is merged with the driving spiritual forces of the unseen world, where freedom, free will and feeling precede all knowledge.
Caves are like parties, it is important to know when it is time to leave. It is not Kant’s fault that it is still so crowded in his cave. The biggest crowd should have left a little over a century ago, right before the First World War, when the excruciating, unbearable meaninglessness of materialistic reality became apparent to all human beings. Ever since, Kant’s cave has become increasingly difficult to leave, but it is increasingly difficult to stay, too.
(1) Plato. The Republic, Book VII, ca. 380 BC.
(2) Hoffman, Donald. The Case Against Reality, How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Penguin Books, London, 2019.
(3) Steiner, Rudolf. The Tension Between East and West. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1922.
