Begin the walk · 4
See, don’t chase.
A mind holds a handful of things at once. The wisest thing it can do is hold them well.
The cave, turned round.
Plato drew a cave of shadows, with the truth outside in the sun. We keep his cave and change two things: shadows are readings, and there is no outside.
Before the walk
About 2,400 years ago, in the Republic, Plato has Socrates set out to show “in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened”. Picture prisoners chained in a cave since childhood, facing a wall. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners, people carry objects to and fro, and the prisoners see only their shadows on the wall. They take the shadows for the whole of the world.
One prisoner is freed, and dragged, dazzled, up and out into the sunlight, where at last he sees things as they are, and finally the sun itself. For Plato the shadows were the prison and the sunlit world was the truth, and education was the art of turning the whole soul round, from the shadows towards the light. His word for that turning was periagōgē.
It is one of the most powerful pictures anyone has drawn of how we come to know things. Plato turned the soul round. We turn the picture round, and change two things in it. Our own line is short: the dark is what is, and the light is how we look.
Shadows are readings
The light is not the truth. It is how we look: a beam from somewhere, through an eye, a lens, an instrument or a sentence. What it shows is real, and it is always a part, taken from one place, at one time, in one way. The philosopher Karl Popper put it like this: a mind is less like a bucket that fills up with facts than like a searchlight, aimed by the questions it asks.
So a shadow is not a lie. A shadow is a reading of what casts it, and you read it well when you know the fire, the angle and the thing. Around 240 BC the Greek scholar Eratosthenes worked out the size of the whole Earth from a noon shadow in one town, no shadow at all in another, and the distance between them. In 2019 astronomers published the world’s first picture of a black hole, and at its heart is a patch of dark they call its shadow. Good science reads shadows all the time, and says where the light came from, and whose it was.
A torch in a dark room
Move the torch over the room, or tap it. Everything you find in this room was there before you looked.
The room is dark. Nothing in it is seen yet.
There is no outside
In Plato’s story, the freed prisoner sees everything from outside, in full sun, and comes back to tell the others what is real. We think there is no such outside. Nobody gets what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called a view from nowhere, and nobody sees the whole. The cave is the world, and we are all in it, each with a light of our own.
That changes what the dark means. The far side of the Moon was there before a camera first saw it, in 1959. The hiss of the oldest light was all around us before anyone knew what an antenna had caught. Much of what is true has never been looked at. So where nobody has looked, the right thing to say is neither “there is nothing there” nor “it is all there”, but “nobody has seen it yet”. Unlooked-at is not the same as empty, and it is not the same as full. It is open.
Nobody can prove how much is waiting there. But it is a hopeful thought: there is more to see, and every look lights a little more of it, for everyone. The work is not climbing out of the dark. It is carrying light into it, and saying where the light came from.
Try it tonight
A dark room that shows the world
Choose a room whose window looks out on a bright, sunlit scene. Cover the window completely with card or foil held by removable tape, and make one hole about the width of a pencil. Shut the door, wait a few minutes for your eyes, and look at the wall facing the hole. The world outside appears on it, upside down, in colour, moving. A smaller hole gives a sharper picture but a dimmer one. Never look at the Sun through the hole. It is Plato’s cave with the fire put out and the world let in. Its name is camera obscura, Latin for “dark room”.
For your organisation: much of what your organisation could know has not been looked at yet. The index shows what has been looked at, which mind looked, and what nobody has looked at yet, so you can carry the light to where it is needed.
Where we’re heading
What nobody has seen yet treated as open ground, and what each mind lights shared across the organisation.
See the Observer’s IndexWhat stands under this piece
Built in: how the index works. From the field: something observed, by scientists or in our own index. Likeness: a comparison, not a proof.
- Built in
- Where nobody has looked yet, the index shows it as unobserved, an invitation, never as nothing there.
- Built in
- Every look the index keeps carries the name of the mind that took it.
- From the field
- Light through a small hole into a dark room draws an upside-down picture of the scene outside, because light travels in straight lines.
- Likeness
- Plato’s cave beside our dark and light: a picture we turn round, not a proof.