'Between the Sea and the Land' by Sean Baumann

TimesLIVE

20-06-2025

ABOUT THE BOOK:
'Is suffering inevitable? Are our lives really meaningless? Is God dead and, if so, how should we live?'
This is just one of the chapter headings in Between the Sea and the Land. The book is an extended conversation about philosophy between Tomas and Sara, who are confined to an isolated coastal peninsula during the long days of the Covid pandemic.
They discuss in an inquisitive and sometimes playful way the difficulties of understanding the nature of the crisis in which they find themselves, the fallibilities of language and science, what can be known and not known, and how to find a balance between individual needs and public safety.
They consider the anxieties provoked by intolerance and political strife, and how to cope with the unpredictability and precariousness of life.
The book encompasses a broad history of philosophical ideas from the pre-Socratics to the present day, and the search for answers in shifting contexts of fear and wonder, from the mysteries of the beginnings of consciousness to quantum physics and the accelerating developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
In discursive and meandering conversations that reflect the coastal paths in the beautiful wilderness between the sea and the land, Tomas and Sara tackle fundamental philosophical problems that culminate in the overarching question: How does one live with uncertainty?
EXTRACT
All that we know of Socrates comes through the writing of others, Tomas started. Plato was the first of the philosophers that we know of who recorded his thoughts in writing, and as a student, and clearly an admirer of Socrates, much of his earlier writing was in tribute to Socrates. This was also an act of defiance, as Socrates' teachings had been officially condemned by the authorities. Plato is perhaps most remembered for his later writing, which is broader in its scope, in that he addressed issues other than the moral and political ideas that seemed to be of most interest to Socrates.
So we are all prisoners, stuck in a cave. It does not feel much like that to me, today, walking along the sea shore, under a deep blue sky, Sara mused.
Yes, we return to the cave, but this is a different sort of cave. It is an intriguing and much debated thought experiment. I don't think the details are important. It is quite an elaborate analogy.
Essentially the prisoners are trapped in a cave with their backs to the entrance. A fire casts shadows onto a back wall, and because their backs are to the light, and because they know no other reality, the prisoners mistake these shadows for reality. Their reality is an illusion. In this respect Plato is arguing, as you indicate, that we are all prisoners.
We were imagining that philosophy might be liberating, and anyway I am not sure about all this. It seems both poignant and oppressive. Why are we all prisoners?
I don't think we have to be. We need to go back briefly to Socrates. When he was questioning what we meant by concepts such as freedom or justice, or other such abstractions, he was doing more than just seeking definitions. The implication was that there was something called justice, that was beyond its various instances, in some other realm. It was imagined as some sort of ideal. Plato took this further, and elaborated a theory of Forms or Ideals.
We've lost the prisoners.
Don't be impatient. I am trying to get there. Plato is arguing that there are two realms, one of transience and decay, the other permanent, stable and perfect. He was a fervent advocate of mathematics, and he believed that the cosmos in its entirety was ordered and expressible in mathematical equations. This principle applied to all things. There is a chaotic turbulent surface bound in time and space, and beyond that there is a realm that is ordered and forever. The world available to our senses is inherently unstable and unsatisfactory. He claimed that everything is becoming, nothing is.
This world is a shadow of reality. What we experience as reality is an illusion. It is in our minds. We cannot escape from our minds and experience reality directly. So we are the prisoners. With regard to our concern about how we might live with uncertainties, there are certainties, but they are elsewhere.
They had just started walking. The path turned away from the sea and towards the mountains, which in the early autumnal morning seemed to be floating in a haze of silvery blue mist. The notion that they were in reality trapped in a cave seemed bizarre, if not preposterous. Sara thought so.
Why? Why can't we accept the evidence of this beautiful world that at this moment surrounds us? So what if it changes or ends? That is not evidence that it is not real. Our deaths represent a radical change, a clear measure of the passage of time, and the end of our days on earth. That is the reality: the transience of life does not make it less real. I am sorry about the entrapment of these wretched prisoners in the cave, but I think we should put their predicament aside. They are not us. I am not a prisoner, or that is what I choose to think.
I don't want to make you more cross, but he elaborated these ideas on a political level, Tomas said. I don't see how that is possible, if all this earthly stuff is unreal. There are three aspects to us, or maybe levels. These are the passions, the intellect and the will. The passions are perhaps the default position. It seems that the masses, whatever that might mean, constitute humanity at the level of the passions. The intellect should govern the passions through the exercise of will. I must please remind you, again and again, that I am not a philosopher and I might have misread this, but it does seem incredibly condescending, and ruthlessly hierarchical. According to this Platonic system a police class should keep the masses in control, under the guidance of the philosophically informed governing class. The masses lack virtue and knowledge, and anarchy would ensue if they were allowed to govern. This should be the responsibility of wise philosopher kings.
How this elite was to be selected is, of course, problematic, but as I am sure you can imagine, these ideas have had a great influence on political thinking over the centuries, including the totalitarian systems on both the left and the right in our lifetimes.
It seems strange, if not incredible, that the ideas of a philosopher in Ancient Greece should have such an influence in modern times, and to my mind, to be held to justify injustices.
As an artist you are not going to like his ideas about the arts either, Tomas replied.
Well, I don't know what a man who believes we are all stuck in a cave can say usefully about the arts.
He believed that the arts were inherently representational, and as such appealed to the senses, distracting us from the important need to look beyond the surfaces of the world to the eternal and perfect realm beyond the senses. The arts are seductive, engaging us in a world that is illusory and deceptive, and should therefore be discouraged, if not suppressed.
He proposes a very bleak world, Sara said. If we are not trapped in a cave, we are exhorted to contemplate the featureless order of forms.
I don't care whether or not it can be expressed in mathematical terms. There is no poetry in mathematics. Not for me, but I am not a mathematician. Perfection, maybe, but not poetry. No music, no dance, no fine art, no celebration of the beauty of transience: it seems to me that there is little humanity in this.
I am sorry to disappoint you and it is certainly possible that I have misrepresented his ideas, but I do think it is important that we recognise the many ways in which Platonic thinking has shaped our world.
How? So far you have described influences that I personally regard, for the most part anyway, as negative.
Yes, but influential nevertheless, and I think, in an indirect way, these ideas have shaped our religious ways of thinking, perhaps especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In what way? This cave metaphor is still with me and I struggle to imagine the divine in association with entrapment.
The cave is our physical confinement in time and space, our being limited by our only being able to know the world through our senses, and of course by our mortality, Tomas argued. I know you are not a religious person, but surely this notion of another realm that is perfect and harmonious and everlasting conjures up an image of heaven?
Yes, I understand heaven as a reward for good behaviour, but this other realm you have described seems more of a metaphysical concept, if I may use that word.
We should try to understand the influence of Plato perhaps more in the work of Plotinus, who is described as a neo-Platonist, and was writing in the third century, at a time when Christian ideas were beginning to emerge in the ancient Graeco-Roman world.
Plotinus was not a Christian but he had an important influence on Christian thought for the next thousand years. In a rather mystical way, he believed that reality ultimately consists of Platonic Forms.
What exists is mental or of the soul, and so what is created has to be thought into being. There are three ascending levels of being, the lowest, I am afraid, being ourselves, or our souls, the next the intellect, making possible the apprehension of Ideal Forms, and the next and highest level is the good, which I suppose is God.
The world is created in the mind of God and we seek to transcend ourselves into a state of oneness with God.
I am still not sure about all this. I have a sense that Plato was saying that life, or reality, is elsewhere, and if so then what are we to make of our brief lives here on earth?
Then maybe we need to turn to Aristotle, Tomas replied. He did not believe in an abstract reality. He did not believe we are prisoners. But before we leave Plato, and perhaps to make you feel a little more sympathetic towards him, and something for us to keep in mind when philosophy might seem rather abstract or dry, he memorably declared that philosophy begins with wonder.