Taylor Swift in Plato's Cave

Intellectual Humility, Love Triangles, and "Invisible"

Scrolling through my Facebook feed, pithy messages propounding political stances preponderate, replacing genuine thoughtful conversation about complicated questions. And it’s not just the warped discourse of social media. When I flip through news channels, politicians speak with bluster and bravado about tricky policy challenges. These insubstantial, overconfident soundbites ignore real disagreement and disregard nuance, a tendency that trickles down into the classroom, degrading the quality of conversation in my college seminars and, oftentimes, silencing those who wanted to wrestle with the real challenges posed by confusing questions that, in all honesty, lacked a clear and obvious answer.

In the face of perplexing questions, it seems like the default response is overconfidence. Rather than acknowledging the limitations of a solution or admitting the difficulty of figuring it out, dogmatic approaches seem to dominate. That’s nothing new. T.S. Eliot noted this tendency in the early 20th century, not in politics but in literary criticism. Eliot lambasted literary critics for their dogmatic approaches to criticism and their lack of intellectual humility. “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge… when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts,” he wrote.

And this problem-- emotional, overconfident responses to challenging situations-- extends beyond the bounds of the so-called intellectual. Among the most complicated of all questions, love triangles demonstrate this phenomenon well. The web of the love triangle has captured the hearts of readers through the generations. As each character pines in vain for another, each also remains blind to the secret affection of someone else, setting the stage for mixed messages and heartbreak. The complexity and confusion of such love triangles make for an emotional feast for the audience, who inevitably stakes a claim to the romance, by shipping characters (promoting a particular relationship, for my older readers) and attempting to forge a solution to the romantic web.

A tied and true trope, love triangles engrossed audiences back in the Elizabethan theater. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream creates the archetypal love triangle (or, more accurately, love trapezoid) in which Helena pines after Demitirus, while Demitrius pursues Hermia (who intends to elope with Lysander). While the audience undoubtedly rooted for certain pairs to work out, fairy Puck looks on at the lovers and sighs, “What fools these mortals be” in response to their dynamics. Puck aims to resolve the lovers' quarrel, convinced that he has The Answer. As such, he forces Demetrius to fall in love with Helena by giving him a love potion. Faced with a complicated situation, Puck doesn’t demonstrate the intellectual humility that Eliot would support; Puck figures that he has the best answer, and attempts to resolve the situation by ignoring Demitrius’ desires and perspective.

Taylor Swift plays the role of Puck in her song “Invisible.” The song sets up the typical triangle: Crushing on a boy who loves another girl, Swift agonizes about how that girl will  “never notice how you stop and stare/ whenever she walks by/ And you can’t see me wanting you the way you want her/ But you are everything to me.” Taylor’s crush’s crush doesn’t know he exists, and Taylor’s crush doesn’t know she exists.

Despite this no-win situation, Taylor Swift is convinced that she has The Answer to resolve the gordian knot of relationship drama. “Like shadows in a faded light/ Oh we’re invisible/ I just want to open your eyes,” Swift tells her crush. She wants to open his eyes to a not-obvious solution. The solution? “You just see right through me but if you only knew me/ We could be a beautiful, miracle, unbelievable/ instead of just invisible.” With real bravado, Taylor Swift tells her crush that if he could just change his mind and love her, rather than continuing to long for his crush, then everything would work out. Fundamentally, she ignores his perspective, emotions, and goals in trying to resolve the love triangle, and instead approaches a complicated solution with overconfidence. 

In complicated situations, those like Taylor Swift and Puck believe that they have superior information and judgement. In other words, they think they’ve escaped Plato’s cave. Though he’s not one for love triangles, Plato writes at length of the difficulty of convincing other people of the truth that you (think that you) know in the allegory of the cave. In the story, a group of people live chained facing the wall of a cave, and for their entire lives only see the shadows of the outside world. As such, they believe that those shadows are all there is to reality. One day, one of the prisoners leaves the cave and sees the outside world. When he returns to the cave, he tells the prisoners about the outside world: how there is a sun, sky, and other people, and that the shadows on the wall of the cave are just shadows. The other prisoners laugh at him, and don’t believe his story. 

The allegory applies to romance. Though Puck and Swift both think they have seen the light and know a broader reality-- that everything would work out if the love triangle got resolved their way-- it’s an absurd idea to those chained to the cave watching the shadows-- the lovers who have lived through completely different sets of information and perspectives.

Well acquainted with the allegory of the cave, T.S. Eliot realizes why thinkers (and potential romantic partners) don’t necessarily see the “light” when someone tries to convince them of the so-called truth after only experiencing shadows. Each person has different sets of information, different analyses of that information, and ultimately different perspectives that determine how they evaluate what is true and good.  Of course, that’s a pretty terrifying prospect: A character (or person) stakes their happiness on another who might approach the world with entirely different information and perspectives.

With this write-up of “Invisible,” I’ve now gone through all of Taylor Swift’s eponymous first album. Listening to all of her songs in depth, and reading relevant works of other great thinkers provides a mechanism through which to understand their sets of information and perspectives, and has forced me to wrestle with the limitations of my own perspectives. Eliot would be thrilled. And, in the course of these write ups, it’s been great to hear from other Taylor Swift fans, and to discuss our different interpretations of the songs and of these questions, not in the self-confident manner of Puck, but with the intellectual humility of Eliot.