Reflections from the Cave

Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 63.

I was inspired to write about Melville’s The Piazza as a response to the conversations in Nature Writing, a seminar taught by Michael Hampe in the fall of 2019 at ETH Zurich.

In Plato’s cave allegory, men chained deep in a cavernous interior face a wall; this is the limit of their vision. Behind them, people pass in front a fire while carrying different objects. Shadows of their movement are projected onto the cave wall. Hearing the voices of the men above them, the prisoners perceive the projected shadows as true forms. One of the men escapes his chains and manages to climb out. Seeing the sun for the first time, he realizes the falsehood of his previous experience: the forms on the wall, which he perceived as true, are mere projections. They are shadows and not “real” objects. He returns into the cave to tell the other chained men of his discovery. However, they are not interested in knowing the real source of the shadows produced into the wall.

Shadows are always a double, a duplicate of a form, created by a light source. In the cave allegory there are two light sources, the fire and the sun. Both cause objects to cast shadows, but for Plato it is only the sun that reveals truth.

Olivia Hershey and Hazel Barton, “The Microbial Diversity of Caves,” in Cave Ecology, eds. Oana Teodora Moldovan, Ľubomír Kováč, and Stuart Halse (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 70, ➝.

“How caves form,” British Geological Survey, 2017, ➝.

Thomas C. Barr, “Cave Ecology and the Evolution of Troglobites,” Evolutionary Biology 2 (1968): 43.

Ibid.

Stefano Mammola and Marco Isaia, “Cave Communities and Species Interactions,” in Cave Ecology, 255, ➝.

Jane Qiu, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus,” Scientific American, June 19, 2020, ➝.

Mark Townsend, “Revealed: Surge in Domestic Violence during Covid-19 Crisis,” The Guardian, April 12, 2020, ➝. See also Amanda Taub, “A New Covid-19 Crisis: Domestic Abuse Rises Worldwide,” New York Times, April 6, 2020, ➝.

Kathryn Weedman Arthur, “Feminine Knowledge and Skill Reconsidered: Women and Flaked Stone Tools,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 2 (2010): 228–43.

Rachel Nuwer, “Ancient Women Artists May Be Responsible for Most Cave Art,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 9, 2013, ➝.

Theresa Howard, “Alltel website takes interactive campaign into man cave,” USA Today, August 16, 2007, ➝.

Trefis Team, “Home Depot’s Stock Up A Robust 65%: What’s Next?” Forbes, June 22, 2020, ➝.

Celina Ribeiro, “‘Pink-Collar Recession’: How the Covid-19 Crisis Could Set Back a Generation of Women,” The Guardian, May 23, 2020, ➝.