Fiction is All That is Seen

The human psyche is limited. What man sees is just a shadow. Plato's Cave Allegory, an excerpt from his political-minded opus The Republic, paints a picture of how enlightenment deeply changes the way one sees the world, leading one to operate with respect to a different plane of motivations and understandings than the others. While Francis Bacon uses the understanding of man's crippled vision to put away intuition and rely upon repeatable causes and observable effects for the constitution of discernment, Sir William Rowes Hamilton takes the idea of unseen reality as cementing the significance of the more and more enlightened man's more and more perfect intuition.

Physics, music, and narrative share common understandings. If one's interpretation of the world is a comparison of raw perception with preconception, and if the fabric of reality is composed of harmonious structures, then analogy may have some discrete basis. These structures come alive within the human psyche. Human satisfaction maintains a dualistic tie with perception of reality through the lens of narrative.

A second dynamic the Cave Allegory casts is the profound change of concerns that takes place when a man sees the light. Renewal of mind makes the man as incompetent and blind to the old world's sensibilities. There are two directions a man may take with the receipt of truer vision: his calling may look higher, with his concerns touching the shadowlands' perspective less and less, or he may wall himself off to the heights, and return to the base earth with new advantages. Whether by malice or misunderstanding, irreconcilable conflict grows the greater the disparity between one man and another's self-perceived worlds.

Plato said: "our senses give us only a very partial and often misleading picture of the world" (Wilczek 57). The rest of human awareness is inferred. Furthermore, differing landscapes of presented and inherent reality — seen clearly in language barriers — deeply effect our conceptual bearings (Boroditsky 65). Emotion is critical to reasoning (Jourdain 309); and narrative is capable of manipulating some deeply-engrained psychological tendencies. In this pursuit of understanding, the wise man's goal is to develop a heightened perception: where "the rough-and-ready perception with which evolution has supplied us is leavened by an admixture of our own creation" (Wilczek 340).

Because perception is in a state of constant compromise, narrative is the truest translator between the incomprehensible world and the needy human mind. Furthermore, nature or what moves it has made this insane paradigm of transcendental truth a real agent of transitive understanding and validation thereof. Humans, unlike the animals, have the "happy burden" of choosing what they are prepared to see (Wilczek 339). Self-perception is a signature of one's humanity (Sengers 428). If one does not choose their own mindset, it will probably be chosen for them (Harris 5). The battle for the mind is one that isolates and obfuscates and demonizes the wrong thing. It's a war on noticing; and ownership is the victory.