“It is possible to see the life of the cave in terms of one of its furnishings: in each type of furnishing the whole structure of the cave will in a particular fashion be embodied. Thus we can see everything in the cave in its dependence on the bodily realities of the cave foreground: matter may even become ‘dialectical’ and fulfill any and every purposive, referential, social and even religious function. We can with equal ease see everything in its dependence on the interior acts which are our personal response to material and other realities: all things can become glassily inexistence in the shifting acts of the individual, momentary mind. We can likewise see everything in its connection with sense-contents or with Platonically conceived meanings or with abstracted values and requirements, or in terms of intersubjective relations or the all-pervasive power of words. We can also, if we like, practice nimbleness and conceive of things in highly mobile fashion, so that our emphasis constantly shifts from one aspect of cave-life to another. We can also, like Hegel, build these nimble dartings into an incomparably rich teleological or other synthesis. Philosophy may be said to be in part merely the changeover from a confused combination of many ill-developed ways of regarding the cave and its contents, to a single clearly focused and pregnant way, or to a sequence of such clearly focused ways, which may in their turn bring on a new deliberately blurred kind of vision, and so on. Philosophy is seeing the world under the hegemony of one or more of its constitutive furnishings. This statement could no doubt have been given a more modern sound by speaking of language-games and one-sided linguistic diet, the need to assuage linguistic cramps, and the like. These utterances I myself avoid since, whatever the legitimacy of seeing all things in the light of words, I myself find it a cramping emphasis.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 35.
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“The suggestion to be considered is, however that the idea in terms of which the human cave is to be seen should not be a single set of notions, tidily set forth and fixedly related to one another, but a set of notions that undergoes perpetual revision and perpetual deepening, that repeatedly withdraws from itself, as it were, to a new level of reflection and insight, from which it previously judged and saw and to see in its previous views implications that were not at all evident at their own level.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 77.
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“The human cave, on this view, cannot be described by a single unvarying phenomenology, but only by series of such phenomenologies: the phenomena, we may say, themselves develop and alter as we consider them, and may in the end, transform the cave into something that can no longer be counted as a cave at all.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 78.
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"We should no more regret that things can be spoken of metaphysically in a large number of distinct manners than that things can be painted in a large number of distinct styles, or life lived in a large number of distinct and different ways." Language, Mind and Value, p. 127.