Compensations of Old Age

Philosophers in dialogueYou now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

Grim ReaperThe Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

 

JanusWhat is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

Hospitals and Torture Chambers

We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.  We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it excel in the theory and practice of hell, to borrow a title from Eugen Kogon's unforgettable book.

Limited government and checks and balances across the board help keep power dispersed, the power that goes to the head and makes of the half-way decent moral monsters. Prospects for limited government, however, are themselves  limited in a high-tech surveillance society in which soft totalitarianism can be expected to give way to the good old-fashioned hard variety.

Freezing torture

The Source of the Normativity of the Ought-to-Be

I was working on this four years ago. It might never get finished. So here it is.

…………………………………

Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?  If so, what is the source of their normativity?  I am led to pose this question by my current study of Philippa Foot's meta-ethical treatise, Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).  If I understand her scheme, all normativity has its source in life, in living things, which would imply that in a lifeless world there are no states of affairs that ought to be or ought not to be.   

The Ought-to-Do and the Ought-to-Be

Let's begin by noting that if I ought to do X (pay my debts, feed my kids, honor my commitments, keep my hands off my neighbor's wife, etc.) then my doing X ought to be. For example, given that I ought to pay my debts, then my paying a certain debt on a certain date is a state of affairs that ought to be, ought to exist, ought to obtain. So it is not as if the ought-to-do and the ought-to-be form disjoint classes. For every act X that an agent A ought to do, there is a state of affairs, A's doing X, that ought to be, and a state of affairs, A's failing to do X, that ought not be. The ought-to-do, therefore, is a  special case of the  ought-to-be.

My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts-to-be? 

It may not be possible to prove definitively that there are non-agential oughts, but their postulation is in line with ordinary ways of thinking and talking and there seem to be no decisive arguments against their postulation.

Consider a possible world W in which there are no moral agents, but there are sentient beings who are in a constant state of pain from which they cannot free themselves. It seems both meaningful and reasonable to say that W ought not exist, that its nonexistence is an axiological requirement. And this quite apart from the power of any agent to actualize or prevent such a world. One simply intuits the disvalue of such a world. One might express the intuition in the words, ‘Such a world ought not be.’ Non-agential oughts are axiologically required, while non-agential oughts-not are axiologically prohibited.

Or consider our world, the actual world, with its nature red in tooth and claw, a world in which life lives at the expense of life. It is filled with vast quantities of natural and moral evil. Assume that naturalism is true, that there is no God or afterlife, and that the evils of this world will forever go unredeemed. If may be false, but it is meaningful to say that it would be better if this world did not exist, that it ought never to have existed. The metaphysical pessimist may be wrong, but he is not talking nonsense when he exclaims, "Better some other world or even nothing at all rather than this sorry state of things!" On the other hand, there are those who are struck by the sheer existence of things and are moved to exclaim, "It is good that there is something rather than nothing!" Such optimists are not talking nonsense when they say that things are as they ought to be even in the absence of any agent or agents who are responsible for things being as they are.

The sense of these exclamations does not seem to depend on the existence of moral agents with power sufficient to bring about or prevent the mentioned states of affairs. That something rather than nothing exists could be good even if it is no one's duty to bring it about and no one's responsibility if it obtains. That a world of uncompensated and unalleviated misery is bad does not depend on some free agent's moral failure. 

Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'?

Perhaps the following examples are clearer.  Imagine a pessimist who makes the following two-fold declaration: "In a possible world in which there are no sentient beings, things are as they ought to be, and in the actual world in which there are sentient beings, things are not as they ought to be."  He might also say, "A lifeless world is better than one containing living things."  The pessimist Schopenhauer declares that "Human life must be some sort of mistake."  That implies that a world without human beings is better than one with them.

On the optimist side, there are those who exclaim that it is good to be alive, that living as such is a good thing, or even that existence as such, whether living or nonliving, is good.  (For Thomas Aquinas, 'a being' and 'a good thing' are necessarily equivalent or 'convertible' terms: ens et bonum convertuntur.)

Suppose it it good that things exist. It would seem to follow  that the existence of thing is as it ought to be.  What makes this state of affairs good or such that it ought to be.  That things exist is a fact.  That things ought exist goes beyond the fact.

Facebook

That's where the MavPhil political punch-back is these days until such time as I am de-platformed for my quotidian violation of 'community standards.'

I will consider your 'friend' request if I can see from your page that you have the Right stuff.

Conspiracy Theories?

The Language Nazi doesn't much cotton to the loose lingo that leftists love.

Hillary spoke of a "vast right wing conspiracy" directed against her husband.  Maybe that's where the linguistic mischief started. How can a conspiracy be vast and composed of half the population?

A conspiracy is a clandestine agreement among a small group of people to achieve a nefarious end, typically by means of treason or treachery. The members of a conspiracy are called conspirators. They meet in secret and in small numbers.   Hillary's abuse of English is plain: conservatives do not form a secret organization; they are not few in number; and their opposition to Bill Clinton and his policies was not nefarious, treasonous, or treacherous. 

A conspiracy theory alleges that a conspiracy is under way or has occurred to bring about some event. An example is the theory that 9/11 was an 'inside job.' Some conspiracy theories  are true, and some false; some are well-supported by evidence, others are not.  None of the 9/11 conspiracy theories are well- supported in my opinion. But that in not the present point. The present point is that it is a mistake to assume that every conspiracy theory is false or baseless.

It is also a mistake to refer to any theory or any  bit of groundless speculation as a conspiracy theory.   Not every theory is a conspiracy theory.  A conspiracy theory alleges a conspiracy where 'conspiracy' is  defined as above.

Finally, it is a mistake to oppose theories to facts, as if no theory can be true. 

Kant on Capital Punishment

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members–as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world–the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is an interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

Identity Politics as a Deformation of Christianity

This First Things article by Joshua Mitchell is well worth reading. Excerpts:

Marxism could never take hold in America because Americans believed in private property. Because property is the cornerstone of our republic, and cannot be removed, Marxism failed. Postmodernism could never really take hold in America because Americans believe that history has a meaning—and even that America has a special place in history. The reason identity politics has taken hold is because Americans suffer deep and abiding guilt, from two main sources: Christianity itself, and the legacy of slavery in this country. What the left could not do through Marxism or postmodernism, it now is doing through identity politics—namely, undermining every institution and every venerable historical memory in America.

[. . .]

Donald Trump was someone who, literally, could not exist in the world identity politics constructs. That is why the left needed “Russian collusion” to explain his election in 2016. Russian collusion was the deus ex machina that made it possible for Trump to infiltrate their world. The left had to destroy Trump if identity politics was to continue its reign of perverted righteousness. Many of us saw that clearly. That is why we voted for him. We wanted to contribute to the end of its reign.

[. . .]

Identity politics is a profound deformation of Christianity, a ghastly and crippled derivative that seeks the redemption of the world through the scapegoating of one group by another. For the moment, it has in its sights heterosexual white males. It will not stop there. White women will be next; followed, I suggest, by “heteronormative” black men. Like all revolutionary movements, it will eventually come for its early proponents, in a final reign of terror.

How does the current terror end? The identity politics reign of righteousness will end when we return to the orthodox Christian understanding that only the divine scapegoat, Christ, can take away the sins of the world. That insight once transformed the world. It can do so again.

There is a competing view of how we got into the present identity-political mess, and what the solution is. On this alternative Right view, to which I do not subscribe, it is not a deformation of Christianity that lead us to the present pass, but Christianity itself. I now hand off to Matthew Rose:

There is no better introduction to alt-right theory than his [Alain de Benoist's] 1981 work On Being a Pagan. Its tone is serene, but its message is militant. Benoist argues that the West must choose between two warring visions of human life: biblical monotheism and paganism. Benoist is a modern-day Celsus. Like his second-century predecessor, he writes to reawaken Europeans to their ancient faith. Paganism’s central claim is simple: that the world is holy and eternal. “Far from desacralizing the world,” Benoist tells us, paganism “sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word, since it regards the world as sacred.” Paganism is also a humanism. It recognizes man, the highest expression of nature, as the sole measure of the divine. God does not therefore create men; men make gods, which “exist” as ideal models that their creators strive to equal. “Man shares in the divine every time he surpasses himself,” Benoist writes, “every time he attains the boundaries of his best and strongest aspects.”

Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient. In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth notoriously described Christian revelation as the “abolition” of natural religion. Benoist is a Barthian, if selectively. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. “Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”

Benoist’s theology is in the service of a political warning, and it is this, more than his Nietzschean posturing, that attracts the alt-right. Christianity is unable to protect European peoples and their cultures. Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.” The allegation is explosive. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless. Most perniciously, its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties. “If all men are brothers,” Benoist claims, “then no one can truly be a brother.” Politics depends on the recognition of both outsiders and enemies, yet the Christian Church sees all people as potential members, indeed potential saints.

And here we reach Benoist’s remarkable conclusion. The decadent West has never been more Christian. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own. Benoist’s ideas have reached the margins of American conservatism, perhaps no more noticeably than in the writings of the late Sam Francis. A former contributor to leading conservative publications, his thinking took a late turn toward what we would now call the alt-right. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he announced in an influential 2001 article. Francis’s essay was a lament as much as a protest (he was received into the Church on his deathbed), but his work is receiving a new hearing.

 

Divine Simplicity and Incarnation

This from a reader:

Jordan Daniel Wood . . . affirms that God does not have possibilities within himself to actualize and thus the Incarnation—God becoming a human being—must in some way [be] actual prior to its historical event; God does not become a human being but in some way already is a human being . . . .

Very interesting.

The simple God is actus purus. Purely actual, he embodies no unrealized powers or unactualized potentialities.  He is, eternally, all that he can be.  We think of the Incarnation, however, as a contingent event.  In the patois of 'possible worlds':  The triune God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds, but the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human in only some of them. The following argument suggests itself:

1) The Word became flesh and dwellt among us.

2) The Word's becoming flesh is a contingent event.

3) There is no contingency and no becoming in any of the three divine persons: the Word cannot become flesh, that is, assume human nature.

Therefore

4) The Word (Logos, Second Person) had a divine and human nature from all eternity.

How could a classical Christian trinitarian theist rebut this argument? (Part of being a classical Christian theist is accepting the divine simplicity.)

Denial of the Lapsus is the Left’s Main Lapse

My title above. A long-time reader sends us his thoughts. Here are some of them, with my  edits and a bit of commentary.

Every so often I reflect on causes of the Leftist mentality, and all the madness it leads to. If we scan across favourite activities of the current woke age, such as racialism and its attendant theories on the left (the evil of colonialism, white privilege, white fragility etc), the socialist project, trans-activism and biological denialism and so on, there lurks a common deep assumption which is that the (authentic) left does not accept the inherent and unavoidably fallen state of man.
Exactly right. As a result, leftists embrace such illusions as man's indefinite malleability and perfectibility.
This is equivalent to denying the human condition as a protracted battle to overcome our own worst instincts and live good lives. According to this assumption, it is possible to be individually sinless, one just has to find the correct Utopian ideology and practice it, and to evangelise it to others. If one thinks one can be personally morally irreproachable, one can be self-righteous, and one may sit on a higher moral plane.
And in judgment of others.  This goes together with a failure to recognize the depth of evil in the human heart, in every human heart, evil whose ultimate source is man's free will, the existence of which leftists also deny.
 
Now of course, only some individuals can attain moral perfection. Leftism is fundamentally  about a two level society: those who know and control the doctrine of the one true way, and those who need to be controlled. If certain chosen individuals can be perfect, there's no need for God, indeed they can create their own church. In Leftist thinking, this is usually something called 'the Party'. Those not in the Party or completely deferential to it are against it and to be castigated, publicly flogged or imprisoned.
 
From the rejection of inherent human baseness and the delusion of perfectibility spring a torrent of other terrible ideas, starting with the idea that everyone can, if correctly enabled, be equal. The idea of innate difference – of intelligence, ambition, diligence, or any other capability – is simply unacceptable. But if a person can be perfect, given the right help, all persons can be equally perfect, and thus perfectly equal. Anyone rejecting difference and thus equality is against the church, and must be punished.
This is crucially important for understanding the mentality of the Left, and in the USA, the mentality of the Democrat Party which is now an openly hard-Left party.  (Its crypto-leftism under the Clintons and Obama is now manifest and brazen.) My type of conservatism accepts the equality of persons as rights-possessors on the normative plane, but insists on the obvious fact of empirical inequality, both of individuals and of groups, on the factual plane.  While we are equal in respect of such rights as the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to acquire (not be given) property, and others, we are manifestly not equal in respect of abilities and virtues and their implementation. We are not all equally intelligent, ambitious, diligent, conscientious, self-controlled, high-minded, sensitive to art and music, respectful, temperate, prudent, courageous, just . . . . It is therefore a fallacy to infer racism from inequality of outcome.
 
Leftists, denying these obvious differences, show no respect for reality. They want to re-make reality in their own image. They confuse the world as it is with the world as they would like it to be.  Hence their vacuous talk of imagining and re-imagining, re-imagining policing, for example, which starts, absurdly, with defunding the police.  Their inability to understand the need for the necessary evil of policing shows  a lack of understanding of human nature, which is not surprising given their denial of human nature  by their acceptance of the notion of indefinite malleability.

On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

Error Invincibilis

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #691:

Spiritual blindness differs from physical blindness in this, that it is not conscious. That is the essence of error invincibilis.

Compare Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to reply, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

Happy Thanksgiving

This annus horribilis of 2020 makes my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:

And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

Still and all, we still have much to be grateful for.  But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, our liberty, our "sweet land of liberty."

Thanksgiving-images

Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

Kierkegaard stampThe following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justified only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

 

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws and their enforcement.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.  But the overlap will always only be partial.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example, the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Palestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and often misused.  Communist governments murdered some 100 million during the twentieth century alone. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.  The Founders of the United States of America understood this. It is an understanding that is approaching its nadir as 2020 fades.

We don't know whether God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and coalescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

This coalescence is a mystical unity that cannot be achieved by human effort. The Eschaton cannot be immanentized. If this divine mystical unity exists, it does not exist in the here and now, or in the future of the here and now.  If this unity does not exist, it cannot be for us an ideal.  Only what is realizable by us can serve as an ideal for us.

Kierkegaard the Corrective is an anti-Hegel and an anti-Marx. Hegel held that the unity existed already, here below. Marx, recognizing the professorial bluster for what it was, turned Hegel upon his head, urging that it be brought about. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.)  But the conception itself was fatally flawed, already in Hegel.

We saw the sequel. It was a road to slavery and the gulag.

Horribile dictu, having learned nothing, we are about to repeat the same mistakes.

There is no heaven on earth and there cannot be. Because there cannot be, heaven on earth cannot without disaster be pursued as an ideal. If there is heaven, it is Elsewhere, beyond the human horizon. 

Believers and unbelievers can live in peace, or at least in the absence of war, if the unbelievers on the Left eschew their totalitarianism, which is a perversion of the dogmatic certainties of the Age of Belief.  But they cannot be reasonably expected to do so. It is  not 'who they are' in their silly way of speaking.

We who love liberty are in for the burden of a long twilight struggle against forces of darkness in the gloaming.

Is Religion Escapist?

Escapist LadderEscapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it. 

You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.

Image credit.