...Here's the symbolic story that Plato gives us, imagine a cave that contains prisoners. Groups of people are held down by chains so that they can only look in one direction, at a wall. Behind them is a fire, providing light for the cave, and between the fire and themselves are a series of objects that pass back and forth. Now, the object are real but they're not directly experienced by any of the prisoners who can only see the shadows cast by the light of the fire and the objects passing as shadows on the wall of the cave. 

If that's all you've experienced you would tend to think the shadows were reality. So here's part of the punchline, what Plato is saying is that ordinarily in our daily lives we experience nothing but shadows being cast on the wall of the cave and we accept that as being the reality of the world. We accept the shadow world for the real world. And Plato points out that it's possible, if you had a rebellious prisoner who broke away from the chain, they could turn around and not only see the shadow of a horse, but they could turn around and see a horse, and recognize the difference between the shadow experience and the possibility of experiencing the objects that were the ultimate cause of the shadows.

And he carries this further, he thinks that if a prisoner really broke away, he could get up and walk out of the cave into the bright sunshine of the outer world and he would experience the intense light of the sun shining down on them as a free man. But here's the sad fact according to Plato, almost none of us have the inclination to break away from the chains and to discover that the shadows are merely shadows. There are greater and deeper truths that we can discover if we summoned up the motivation and the courage to break out of our chains and experience things as viewed directly in the light of the fire, or to walk out into the wider world and see things in the brightness of the sunlight.

Why don't we do this? First of all, it takes effort. And most of us are satisfied not spending the effort to do that. It's hard work. Think of the experience of trying to figure out calculus. You'd probably rather play a video game. You'd probably rather watch TV. You'd rather roll over and go back to sleep. "Leave me alone, it's Sunday morning, I drank too much last night, don't open the curtains and let the sun in, I just want to sleep." And from the perspective of Plato that's how we lead our lives, we don't want to get up and open the curtains, we would rather stay asleep, or play a video game, or hang out and talk about gossip, and deal with things that are easy. To face the truth is difficult. We may not like all of the truths that we discover because they may force us to do things, and behave in ways we really don't want to.

And here's the sad truth about the ending of the life of Socrates. Socrates was prosecuted, criminally, for corrupting the morals of minors. When you hear that today you think of some pervert in the bathroom messing with kids. But Socrates' crime was that he caused the youth to start questioning the status quo. He started stimulating young people to think for themselves and not just parrot back the official word of the society. That's a dangerous man isn't it? It's okay for a teacher to come and tell you that you have a multiple choice test next Monday and that you have to memorize the capitals of the 50 states. That's not dangerous. To get you to think for yourself and to question the moral values of the system you live in can be dangerous. So he was condemned to death for making the youth think on their own. 

Socrates was ordered to drink a poison, and he was offered the chance to escape because I suppose the powers in Athens felt a little funny about putting this man to death for making their children think. They gave him a chance to slip away to the next town, but Socrates said no. Socrates believed that if he was really to be a citizen of this city, and this city condemned him to death by drinking a poison, he should then drink the poison. So Socrates offered to voluntarily drink the poison. And I think that there's a sense in which that is the beginning of the idea of civil disobedience. This really is a model for the likes of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King. The idea of being civilly disobedient, and standing up for what one believes. When I say he was civilly disobedient I'm not saying he was disobedient about drinking the poison, but that idea of civil disobedience has always followed from this Socratic notion that if you defy the civil regulations of your society as a function of conscience, you accept the consequences for doing so.  

Civil disobedience does not mean breaking the law surreptitiously and hiding from the authorities. It means facing the authorities and accepting as a matter of conscience the consequences of what you have done. So that's a tradition I think really goes back to Socrates.

I want to give you a glimpse into the life of arguably the greatest mind the world had ever seen. The German polymath, the genius' genius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Goethe's collected works totaled 142 volumes and touched on nearly every field. Goethe was a physicist, lawyer, chemist, biologist, botanist, anatomist, evolutionist, writer, poet, painter, statesman, and philosopher. He is the founder of morphology (a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features), founder of human chemistry a pioneer following Newton in the study of light and color, a forerunner to Darwin and his evolution theory, the reason Freud went to medical school, and the intellectual mentor to none other than Albert Einstein.

Einstein not only kept a bust of Goethe in his study, but also for those who have been to Einstein's Princeton home, "what looms the largest in Einstein's personal library are the collected works of Goethe in a thirty-six volume edition and another twelve volumes, plus two volumes on his Optics, the exchange of letters between Goethe and Schiller, and a separate volume of Faust."

Goethe holds the record for having the words largest active vocabulary, three times that of Shakespeare. In 1850, Goethe was categorized by American philosopher  Ralph Waldo Emerson as one of the six greatest all time geniuses in history.

At age seven, Goethe wrote a novel where members of a family in various parts of the world wrote letters to each other in six different languages and styles. At age twenty, he had published his first volume of poems, and had studied enough medicine to qualify as a physician.

By twenty-one he had prepared a PhD dissertation on history. By twenty-two he prepared and defended sixty-five thesis' , received his law degree, and began practicing. By twenty-four he had written his great tale Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, and by twenty-six he was world famous. 

By thirty-one he had worked out the basics of evolutionary theory, a theory he called biological metamorphosis where he argued that humans not only evolved from lower animals, but that humans evolved from lower chemicals.

At thirty-six  Goethe demonstrated through comparative osteology that humans possess  an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, as found in other animals as proof for his evolution theory. At forty-seven Goethe gave his first description of affinity. At the age of fifty Goethe conceived his theory that humans are large types of chemicals whose passions, relationships, choices, and free will are governed by the forces of chemical affinity.

At the age of sixty he became the founder of human chemistry. At sixty-one he published his theory of colors, rival to Newton's theory of colors to explain light and perception. At eighty-two, the year of his death, Goethe finished the work he is best known for, Faust. Faust is a story of a man who is striving to learn everything that can be known and who in fact sells his soul to the devil so he could obtain the ultimate in knowledge possession.

Towards the end of his life, his personal library totaled over five-thousand books. " Among us smart folk, Einstein is considered "a little slow", and Hawking "means well", but you have to be a little clever just to appreciate the accomplishments of Goethe." I will end with a few quotes by Goethe.