There is more to the world than what we sense it to be. And perhaps this is why, Klavan intones, we are frequently unsatisfied with the world. Socrates and Plato departed from the Sophists on this point. They built their philosophy on the bedrock of reality, which is knowable by ensouled human beings capable of thought, abstraction, and reflection that enables them to know the Good. Our thinking is not exhausted by mere sensory data from matter. With our soul, we can think in “the intelligible realm, the realm of things like numbers and goodness. Things we can only perceive with the soul.” Plato’s argument about the Forms and how they relate to our world was rejected by Aristotle in favor of form and matter and causality, but both thinkers built on a knowable reality that man did not create.

To highlight the perennial debate between reality and unreality, Klavan points to Plato’s famous Cave allegory in the Republic, where a group of people are unknowingly manipulated by others with various artifacts. Nothing is real in the Cave, but the people believe otherwise, and Socrates concludes, “They’re like us.” The only way out of the Cave is to know that our soul is made for light “not made by man,” a light that does not control and cajole us but is the ground of everything. But this takes work. We must desire truth, accept that we were wrong, and leave behind the comfort of others’ leading us for their narrow purposes.

We are always facing the problem of the Cave. Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse is only the latest attempt to give us a puppet show that dazzles us, leading us astray from who we really are as tangible human persons.