Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”

HMXP 102

Dr. Fike

Introductory Points• Source: Plato’s Republic.• Setting: Ancient Greece.• Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.• Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion

of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature). Give and take, Q&A.

• Title:  Symbolism vs. Allegory – Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for

Emily.”– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and

something outside the text.– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a

symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video

• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/plato/caveframes.htm

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQ-w&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups

• Get with a partner and figure out what each of the following details refers to:– Shackles/bonds/fetters– Shadows – Fire– “artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)– The light above (the sun)– “the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)– Persons who view the shadows– Persons who leave the cave– Persons who return to the cave

More Questions

• What happens when someone who knows the truth (who has seen the light) goes back to the cave?

• Why would one do such a thing?

• Can you think of examples of such persons from history? From current events? (See the examples on the next slide.)

Such Persons

• Socrates (foreshadowing)

• Jesus

• Gandhi

• Martin Luther King

• RFK

• Benazir Bhutto

• Harriet Tubman

• You?

The Key to Understanding the Allegory

“(T)he prison-house is the world of sight, (and) the light of fire is the sun...”

• In other words:

Cave/“prison”:“world of sight” (real world)::“world of sight”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on page 5, left)

Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas (the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy

Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World

Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the

text.

• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.

• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and independent of things in the physical world.

• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on Those Who Leave the Cave

• Here is the hierarchy:– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the idea of good”)– Nature (“the objects themselves”)– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a good thing, the middle position is still one removed from things in their essence or as they truly are (the Forms/Ideas).

• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable realm”) that must be apprehended.

• Illusions/shadows concrete/real world Forms.

Clarification

• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) a correct vision of reality (sunlit world) an intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or intelligible realm). This is a movement from a lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.

• How things manifest in the physical world: Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the physical world) a person has an idea that reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into physical manifestation someone incorporates that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education

• What are the implications of this passage?

“And suppose…that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated?”

Next Question

• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?

• “the journey upward…(is) the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world,” i.e., the realm of Forms or Ideas

• Seeing, vision. • “the turning around”

Contemporary Analogy

• What movie that you have all seen illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary

• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false appearances (self-deception), to things as they are (nature), to things as they may ideally be (Forms), i.e., to lift us from the earthly to the transcendental/spiritual.

• Implication: In order to be educated, we must turn away from misconceptions and achieve personal transformation by coming to understand things more nearly as they are.

Implication for Values

“Would he not say with Homer, ‘Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,’ and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56

“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand

for some poor country man, on iron rations,

than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”

--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100, page 359.

Distinction

• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields mentioned in note 3—the place of the happy dead.

• See also “the faraway Isles of the Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question

• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s statement? Here it is again:

“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand

for some poor country man, on iron rations,

than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”

• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?

• Achilles says that it is better to be a wretched servant but ALIVE than to be a king in the afterlife. That is how much worse it is to be dead than to be miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of the chart with your understanding of Plato’s point:

Problem with Note 2

• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the cave dwellers to the dead.”

• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up from Hades to speak with him.

• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and guidance.

• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades. The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs. serf.

Irony• The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s

poem].”

• BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias, the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

• Does Plato have it backwards?

– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false. But is it also true that seeing what is false helps us to understand what is true?

– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in the cave) and still see clearly?

• Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain) return.

Transition

• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting that it is better to be poor in the material sense and yet to see things as they are than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.

• You might write a nice paper about why you think that this is a false dichotomy (or not). Cannot persons be both well off AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy

• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms [to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’” [Luke 12:33-34].)

• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition

• Plato has been talking about persons who apprehend the truth, but then the text turns to ways of knowing and offers two possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending the Truth

“Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”

The Other Position

• The second position is on pages 5-6:

Some believe that education involves “put(ting) knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implated later by habit of exercise.”

• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models

• What, then, are the two models that Plato is suggesting?

Answer

• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.

• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition. Learning = imposing things from outside the self.

• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our inborn sight in the right direction.

• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications

• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we realize. We have inner resources that have not yet surfaced.

• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).

• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn inner resources, but you also need help from others or from a higher being.

• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason

“…wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains…useful and profitable; or…hurtful and useless.”

POINT: Reason/Wisdom can be used for good or evil. The last column says that we should use reason/education for good purposes:

“…they [those who have seen the light] must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the cave, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not.”

POINT: Education carries social responsibility.

Writing in Class

• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral of the story”? What message is Plato trying to convey about education? You have 5 minutes.

• What did you come up with?

Here is My Summary

• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus on what is real rather than on what is illusory. Education involves turning from illusion to reality, and this can be a painful process. We must also contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most real). We are predisposed to learn, but we must exercise reason for good purposes. That includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?

– Are you a soul in a physical body?– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the

spirit? – Did you exist before you were born?– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious

memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence? – Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is remembering,

though you have never experienced the specific thing in this lifetime?– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you

need external reinforcement and support like education or divine grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?

– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an illusion?

– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college?

Writing in Class about Possible Paper Topics

• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your answer before you leave today.

– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?

Discuss and give an example.– Is it possible that all of earthly/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For

now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?

– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?– And, by implication, does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have

always considered the Truth is merely a truth?