Socrates Would Be Pleased
August 20, 2025 at 11:30PMEvery Friday morning, students from Warren Wilson College travel to a nearby prison to take a philosophy class. These “Outsiders” join “Insiders”—incarcerated students—in reading treatises by Plato, Socrates, and other philosophers. But the real learning has little to do with acquiring formal knowledge, being able to succinctly articulate the Allegory of the Cave:
I think this is what philosophy should look like. Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights powerful enough to make anyone forget about the so-called “crisis in the humanities.” But it’s not just more friendly and fun. These past few weeks have turned up some of the highest-quality philosophizing I’ve ever witnessed. They highlight what’s often missing from many college classrooms, from the stale proceedings of many academic conferences, and certainly from bureaucratic rhetoric charged with protecting a tradition of humanistic studies.
“So that’s what the hell is going on in the cave,” I say at the close of our lively re-enactment, as we take our seats at the horseshoe arrangement of brown, rectangular tables. “But what the hell kind of allegory is this cave?” I ask. “Why do these imagined prisoners think these shadowy shapes are real? What are they supposed to do now that they’re unchained?”
‘Unfettered!’ Queenie shouts.
Victoria, who tells such stories about her granddaughters, quickly responds: “At first, I was like ‘What the hell is this?’ I remember you said it was, like, thousands of years old and, when I started reading it, I was like, ‘Yeah, it sounds like it!'” This gets a good laugh. “But then I started thinking,” she continues, striking a more serious tone, “it’s kinda like what happens in here. You spend enough time in here and you start to think this is all there is. You forget the world out there. So like who said what and who did what is all you start to care about. It’s like your reality, and you forget it’s not like that on the outside.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/20/socrates-would-be-pleased/
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