Outside

pp. 1-8

in: Mats Rosengren, Cave art, perception and knowledge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Caves and philosophy go well together. In its very beginning, Western philosophy appropriated the cave, most eminently through Plato's famous simile in Book VII of The Republic, as a metaphor for the human situation. Ever since, the chief objective of man appears to have been to get out of his troglodytic settings; to free his mind of the shadows, the smoke and the images coming out of the deep recesses of the earth. Metaphysics as we know it is all but unthinkable without the image of the cave and, no doubt, without the images in the caves. The constant urge in Western thinking to find an absolute beginning cannot, it seems, free itself from this chthonian fantasy. It is as if the emergence of mankind inevitably has to be connected with coming out of the earth, breaking free in an upward surge towards the stars and the sun, leaving body and matter behind. Enlightenment is but a metaphorical prolongation of such a tortuous thinking. This book is about bringing thinking and philosophy back into the caves again. It is about what the mind can find in the caves, as well as what the caves can bring to mind.