Classical and Non-Classical Epistemology of Caves (Part 1)

Natural caves served as a shelter from bad weather for the early Homo and as a short-term dwelling as well as a place of worship and art for the Neoanthropus. Caves in themselves started to interest humans with the development of civilizations, when they had learned to build their own, artificial “caves”. Philosophy considers the cave either as a physically invisible landscape-symbol or as a locus objectifying the feeling of the unusual, the unnamed, and even the forbidden. The former is the object of the classical, while the latter, of the non-classical epistemology of caves. In the first part of this article, an attempt is made to “collect” the classical model, identify its paradigmatic features and characterize the analytical approach, which is basic for it. Turning to M. Heidegger’s works, the authors emphasize that prerequisites for shaping the classical epistemology of caves were formed in antiquity: it goes back to the allegory of the cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic. Understanding the cave as the Beyond, the authors thereby define the classical epistemology of caves as a glance-from-the-Beyond. It is postulated that the speculative Platonic cave puts forward as the fundamental concept of the classical model “the light of the unhidden”, which is interpreted as the reality of aletheia, or idea, and opposed to the trifling reality of shadows. Aletheia is accessible only to the correct vision, since vision directed at shadows is blindness. As a result of transitions of the cognizer to the outside light, the cave ceases to be the Beyond, for the light turns out to be the limit of cognition. This allows us to consider the cataphatic approach as the basic one for the classical epistemology of caves. It is associated with the speculative sciences, primarily with mathematics. The authors of this article believe that the key dimension of the classical model is the spelestological one. It states the inevitability of the cognizer’s return from the ideal world to the projective physical world due to the gravitational influence of paideia. In this way, the classical epistemology of caves gives rise to the non-classical model, with its dominant speleological dimension.