Had Plato had the gift of eternal life and should he still be living today after having viewed the intellectual development of man beyond his time, I have no doubt many if not all of his theories would have been revised. One downside to the passage of time is that even the most brilliant philosopher of an age can only but speculate about how their ideas will fit into society generations to come. If anyone had the capacity to imagine the technological age centuries before it arrived, I'm sure it would have been Plato, however I highly doubt even his brilliant mind would have envisioned the modern day and age.
Likely, as he began urging people to step out of the “cave of ignorance”, had he seen what the world would come to by the 21st century, he wouldn't have bothered. In his view, society today would be evolving it's way backwards and people moving back into the underworld after having tasted and forgotten about the air above. Plato would not be please. Then again, if he lived today, he would most likely be to caught up in the latest season of some reality show and have no time to admonish our ignorant behavior. Oh how the great have fallen.
The cave dwellers watched pictures intently as though they were reality. In truth, they were nothing but light toying with the eyes. Mediated society watches pictures and, if not duped into believing they are real, certainly wish they were reality, that or simply do not care that they are not. Is there any difference between the two? The answer lies in the motivation. The cave dwellers knew nothing but that the images and opinions existed, and so it was natural that they perceived them as reality. Modern society knows that there is something more substantial than images and opinions, but they choose to worship the insubstantial instead, perhaps finding it more comfortable.
Creations of light are not always insubstantial, and in cases where they reflect important issues it does not always matter how solid they are. However, most today, when given the choice of watching the image of no consequence, or the image which actually mirrors life, they will choose the former. There must be some sort of motivation for ignoring the truthful representations of the world, and of all motivating factors on earth, the one humans love the most is pleasure. It would not be unreasonable then to assume that when modern humans choose to ignore the thoughtful for the empty, they are doing so because the empty provides more enjoyment. Along these lines, then, ignorance very well may be bliss to those individuals.
Returning to the cave dwellers, they did not have the choice that modern humans have - they were only able to choose to watch those images and listen to those opinions, or close their eyes and ears and take in nothing. For a group under such restrictions, knowing whether this ignorance was truly bliss or not is impossible, for there is no frame of reference with which we may compare it. To those living in the cave, at least up until the point at which the one who had seen the world above came back to tell about it, ignorance was simply life. All emotion or feeling, good or bad, came out of the lies they experienced. Even if one should argue that upon return the one who had seen the light was scoffed at and thought of as crazy was giving them a choice when telling them about what else there was, it is no more than a choice to believe another or not.
Opinions were all they had, but it is not as if they had seen what that one man had seen, so as far as any one of them could tell, it was simply another opinion to weigh within itself. Until those in the cave were faced with the world above and then decided to stay in the dark, they have yet to really choose their own existence. The only choice they made was to believe the man who had gone away or not, and since they have no concrete proof of where he was while gone, it makes plenty of sense that they chose not to trust in what he said. In the case of these people, ignorance may be bliss, or may be miserable, likely both at different times, depending on the content of the lies they perceive.
Plato claims that ignorance is not bliss, and that it is foolish of people to think of it as so. Honestly this is a strange position to take, in light of the fact that even Plato wrote of how harsh and unpleasant the informed world of the surface was at first. Indeed, the people in the cave remain happy throughout the story, it is the one who emerges and comes back who has a rough go of it. This just goes to show the kind of person Plato was though. He obviously found more pleasure in the understanding only attained through displeasure than he did in the more direct route of going straight to pleasure to begin with. What we are dealing with, then, are two separate definitions of bliss. To Plato, enlightenment was bliss, and so ignorance was, very much by definition, not. The extremism with which he felt this was one most could not share, as was the extremist situation of ignorance which the Parable of the Cave depicted. Even then, to describe those of the cave as complete ignorants is in error. It is true that they did not have the right information, or points of view outside their own to work with, but within the confines of what they were aware of, they could think study to their hearts' contents.
