‘Allegory of the cave’
is one of the most cited allegories in the history of western thought in which
Plato illustrates his dualistic theory of reality at the beginning of book VII
of the Republic. In the Allegory
of the Cave, Plato described symbolically the predicament in which mankind
finds itself and proposes a way of salvation. The Allegory presents,
in brief form, most of Plato's major philosophical assumptions: his belief that
the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of
it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; his idea
that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to student, but rather that
education consists in directing student's minds toward what is real and
important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves; his faith that the
universe ultimately is good; his conviction that enlightened individuals have
an obligation to the rest of society, and that a good society must be one in
which the truly wise (the Philosopher-King) are the rulers.
At the beginning of
the allegory, Plato asks us to imagine some men living a large cave facing the
inside wall of the cave where from childhood they have been chained by the leg
and by the neck so that they cannot move. They have never seen the light of day or the sun outside the cave. Behind the
prisoners a fire burns and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised
way on and behind the raised way there is the entrance to the cave. Along the
raised way people walk carrying all sorts of things which they hold so that
they cast shadows status of men, animals, and trees on the wall before them.
The prisoners, facing the inside wall behind them on which the object are being
carried all they can see are the shadows these objects cast on the wall of the
cave.
The prisoners live
all their lives seeing only shadows of reality and the voices they hear are
only echoes from the wall. If they were freed and able to turn around and see
the realities, which produce the shadows, they would be blinded by the light of
the fire. And they would become angry and would prefer to regain their shadow
world. But if one of the prisoners were freed and turned around to see in the
light of fire, the cave and his fellow prisoners and the roadway, and if he were,
then, dragged up and out of the cave into the light of the sun, he would see
the things of the world as they truly are and finally he would see the sun
itself. Now he would understand what he and his fellow prisoners saw on the
wall, how shadows and reflections differ from things as they really are in the
visible world and that without the sun there would be no visible world.
Each historical
generation since Plato’s time has been tantalized by the question, how does the
allegory of the cave apply to our time, to our society? The question tantalizes us too. But in fact the
Allegory of the cave remains relevant and moving for many people in our own
time. It is an allegory of sleep and waking of our time as asleep in the dark
of the cave and needing to awake to a clear vision of the world. It is an
allegory of our time as needing to be born again, to emerge from the darkness
of corruption into the light of truth and morality. It is an educational
allegory of our time as needing to ascend through stages of education from the
darkness of intellectual and moral confusion in its everyday beliefs, to the
light of true knowledge and value. It is a religious allegory of Christian
conversion from the cave of self love
and self gratification to the love of God and devotion to the truth. The
allegory of the cave may be viewed as a devastating criticism of our everyday
lives as being in bondage to superficialities and also of much of the sins of
our time. It is of course a political allegory. The life in the cave is the
life of politics. Both the leaders and the public are ignorant and corrupt,
without true knowledge of themselves, or of the world motivated by greed, power
and self gratification. They are chained in bondage to ignorance and passions,
to mysteries for or against fleeting issue believing in current ideologies
which are the illusions, the shadows on the walls of the cave.
It is an allegory of
the Philosopher king. The liberated one, having made the ascent to know the
truth and the good, has a mission to return to the cave, to bring entanglement
to bring the good news, even though he may be killed for his service.
Thus, Plato
establishes his view of appearance and reality with the help of his Allegory of
cave.
