The real true reality
Simulacra, the cause for our eternal captivity in the cave
Today, we live in a war against media; a war in which the media constantly bombards us with imagery and information that tries to shape our perception of the world. The constant interaction with information through the different social media platforms makes difficult for the public to determine which information is real or a simple illusion. The main question would be: how do we determine what is really true? Humans are mainly driven by their senses, more specifically driven by the sense of sight, to define what is real or what is not. The fact that we see represents a proof for the existence of what the media presents to us. However, does a proof equals to the truth, to reality? To proof is only a statement used for validation, which tries to convince or persuade someone by taking in consideration the evidences. By gathering evidences and proving a point, we only make a theory plausible under the conditions where the theory is tested. Plato agrees that sight plays an important role on deciding what is true or unreal, but ultimately, it is knowledge what lets us understand the real reality. The idea that one can reach to understand the ultimate reality sounds quite impossible for Jean Baudrillard. He believes on the unique existence of simulacra — a copy of a copy. Either way, it seems irrational to claim that we understand reality or that we know what is real since it is impossible to tell what is the ultimate reality, the real truth.
In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, he explains how depending on what we know our perception of reality changes. When the prisoners in the cave are obligated to look at the shadows on the wall, they perceive the shadows as their unique reality and try to give the shadows an imaginative explanation for their existence. These shadows are the ultimate reality for the prisoners as the shadows are their only proof for reality, their only knowledge. However, when one of the prisoners gets away from the shadows and encounters the fire that creates the shadows; he confronts himself with new proofs and meets another reality and gathers greater knowledge. The prisoner now realizes that the imaginative explanations he gave to the shadows were false and believes that the shadows and the fire are the most real thing even though he still is in the cave.
Although the prisoner has gained grater knowledge, this does not mean that he understands the full extent of his reality. When the prisoner leaves the cave, he meets a different reality by looking at the objects that surround him. Outside, the prisoner realizes the statues were just a copy of the real objects from the outside world. However, he does not understand the cause of everything that surrounds him outside of the cave. It is by looking at the sun, the great source of enlightenment, that the prisoner finally understands reality because he has reached the ultimate knowledge: “the perception of the absolute good”. Plato believes that only knowledge would guide us to understand the ultimate reality and bring us as far as possible from the cave.
Baudrillard explains that there is no ultimate reality to be recognized due to how society works nowadays. In Simulacra and Simulations, Baudrillard emphasizes on the theory that today’s society only simulates the real. Consequently, we never reach the real but different forms of simulacra in different times. By simulacra, Baudrillard means a copy of a copy that has been interpreted in so many ways in relation to its original that it cannot longer be recognized as a copy. Baudrillard agrees on the existence of a real that is being simulated but meaning itself has reached a point of destabilization where it is impossible to know what is real and what is not. The real and the illusory have now collapsed into each other not allowing us to differentiate between the both of them. Our experience in society is only a simulacrum of the truly reality that we should be living.
Both theories agree on the existence of a true reality. According to Plato, we can only meet reality if we reach and understand the ultimate knowledge, which would let us differentiate between the illusionary and the real. To reach this knowledge, we must understand dialectics: “the only science which does away with hypotheses in order to make her ground secure”. However, how do we know that what we know with dialectics is true? Indeed, what we know with dialectics is probably not a hypothesis, but how are we certain that what we are trying to explain is not unreal from the beginning? This is Baudrillard’s main concern. He explains that we can’t try to explain or understand reality because there is nothing that has not been distorted. Although if there is a true reality, it would be almost impossible to differentiate it from the illusionary since we never got to meet reality in its pure stage. The only things we have left are ways of talking about things, competing versions of truth, different simulacra of what once was recognized as reality but lost its meaning today.
If we revise Plato’s allegory of the cave with Baudrillard’s vision, it is clear that we cannot attempt the last cognitive stage of the cave. At first, society tried to replicate reality, they tried to replicate the sun and the real objects from the outside world, they tried to replicate what they knew. Society created the fire and the statues inside the cave — the copy of the outside world; and claim it to be real. Through time, these replicas were copied and copied what result in more and more abstracts concepts compared to the original copy of reality. After making copies of what once was a copy of the original reality, we lost the real meaning of reality in the cave, in society. Ultimately, today’s society is in the cave where we are only allowed to see the shadows on the wall as the prisoners did. In our research for an explanation, we can only try to understand where these shadows come from and how they are produced. However, this understanding does not mean that we understand reality. We still do not know where the statues and the fire were copied from in the first place. We are stocked in the highest cognitive level of understanding we can achieve where we only can meet the fire and the statues.
The constant simulacra of things do not allow us to know for sure that anything is true, all we can do is believe on its existence. Many of us believe on the existence of God, on the existence of a cure to be found for cancer or HIV, or on the existence of life in another planet. We believe on what we want to be true, and we use our knowledge to helps us demonstrate it, by using proofs to make our beliefs plausible. Maybe Plato knew what reality was and what was true, but his knowledge and theories have been translated, replicated and interpreted in so many ways that the true meaning of his words have been lost just as Baudrillard explains how the excessiveness of simulacra oppresses and morphs the real reality, the truth. The existence of an absolute true is an enigma that cannot be resolve because the illusionary world is in constant battle with what is left of reality. We are caught in the cave where anything is just approximately true. We can only look for many useful theories but never actually reach the true ultimate reality.
