![]() This is a basic explanation of the Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, but this TED video explains it better… Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Summary Plato’s Allegory of the Cave explores the tension between the imagined reality that we think is “real” (shadows) versus the reality that is the “truth” (outside the cave). Now, if he returned back to the cave and told them about what he saw, they’d probably laugh at him and think he was crazy. In this Allegory, Socrates asks, what would he think of his companions back in the cave? He’d probably feel sorry for them and their limited reality. He can now finally see the “true” forms, shapes and reality of the shadows he thought were real. Now imagine that one of the prisoner’s leaves the cave and walks outside into the sunshine.įor the first time in his life, he is exposed to sunshine and light. For them, these shadows are real and they shape their entire reality. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their head all the way around.”Įvery day, these people in the caves watched shadows projected on a blank wall. “See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. In Plato’s, The Republic (book), he writes: The “Allegory of the Cave” begins with a scene painted of a group of prisoners who have lived chained to the wall of a dark cave their entire lives. Over 2,000 years ago, Plato, one of history’s most famous thinkers, explored these questions in his famous “ Allegory of the Cave” (audiobook)-Book VII of the Republic. What is reality? Does your reality really exist? When these thoughts are observed in the material world (i.e., on the cave wall), we are observing a moral action somebody has taken, which is a reflection of some moral code or belief (the effigy that cast the shadow).“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” So (as Waterfield puts it) the shadows on the wall might represent, say, a kind of moral action, while the objects/statues/effigies themselves are a person’s thoughts on morality. This means that the shadows on the wall are reflections of reflections of types, therefore. So, as Robin Waterfield notes in his excellent notes to his translation of Plato’s Republic, the objects are ‘effigies’ of real things, or reflections of types. But the objects themselves are copies of things rather than the original things themselves: statues of humans rather than real humans, and models of animals rather than the real thing. Why is this significant? These objects cast their shadows on the walls of the cave, and the people chained in the cave mistake the shadows for the real objects, because they don’t know anything different. One detail which is often overlooked, but which is important to note, is the significance of those objects which the people on the road are carrying: they are, Plato tells us, human statuettes or animal models carved from wood or stone. There are several further details to note about the symbolism present in the allegory. ![]() So we can see how Plato’s Allegory of the Cave relates not only to the core ideas of The Republic, but also to Plato’s philosophy more broadly. In other words, those people who have seen the ideal world, have a responsibility to educate those in the material world rather than keep their knowledge to themselves. (It is curious how prophetic Plato was: his teacher and friend Socrates would indeed be ridiculed by Aristophanes in his play The Clouds, and later he would be put on trial, and sentenced to death, for his teachings.) People come to love their chains, and being shown that everything you’ve believed is a lie will prove too much (as Plato acknowledges) for many people, and even, initially, for the philosopher. ![]() The philosopher must return down into the cave and face ridicule or even persecution for what he has to say: he has to be prepared for the unpleasant fact that most people, contented with their mental ‘chains’ and their limited view of the world, will actively turn on anyone who challenges their beliefs, no matter how wrong those beliefs are. ![]() Plato insists, however, that the philosopher has a duty to return to the material world, to the world of the cave and its inhabitants (or prisoners), and to try to open their eyes to the truth. The symbolism of the cave being underground is significant, for the philosopher’s journey is upwards towards higher things, including the sun: a symbol for the divine, but also for truth (those two things are often conflated in religions: Jesus, for example, referred to himself as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ in John 14:6). The Allegory of the Cave, as Plato’s comments indicate, is about the philosopher seeing beyond the material world and into the ‘intelligible’ one. ![]()
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