As I was thinking about a class I'm currently teaching, I had occasion to re-read Plato's allegory of the Cave.  Set into his monumental Republic, his voluminous study of the meaning of justice and the nature of the state, the Cave is a study in the folly of perception.
     Perception is tricky.  On the one hand, it is all we have to measure and evaluate the world.  On the other hand, we do not perceive in a vacuum.  We perceive in our social and cultural context.
     Plato described a group of people who are living in a cave, a fire their only light.  All they can see are shadows, semblances of reality.  One day, however, some of these people venture into the daylight outside the cave.  And they see without shadows.  They see the world as it really it.
    We all live in caves.  We all live in caves of our own making.  And we often do not know we are.
    What can we do?  Although we will never see reality apart from who we are, we can nonetheless understand that, despite it all, reality exists.
     We can therefore pursue a much larger question:  why does reality exist?
     Outside of positing a reality out of which this reality has come, we will never know.  We're all living in a cave.