The Allegory of the Cave
“Who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life.”
An allegory is an elegant way of expression by means of symbolic representation and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence. Aimed to convey deeper hidden meanings underneath. A power tool for thinking.
Plato was the descendant of a nobel and wealthy family in Athens. On course to be in the helms of top ranking politics of the state at the time. But the execution of his teacher Socrates made him change directions in life. Socrates was an open critic of the prominent Athenian politicians and the way things were headed had made him many enemies. He was charged with “impiety” and “corrupting the young”. The state saw him as a threat to their own power. He was not only the unfortunate victim of a vicious political vendetta, but a scapegoat used for an altogether more spiritual bout of self-purging within a culture. Plato moved to the outskirts of town and opened up a school dedicated to the Socratic search for wisdom. Where he would teach, write, and philosophizes on life. In Plato’s more famous writing, ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, Plato described symbolically the predicament which mankind finds itself and proposes a way of salvation. The story is told through dialog between Socrates and Glaucon. This allegory can be found in Book VII of Plato’s best-known work, The Republic 375BC.
The allegory depicts a group of men who are born and enslaved with-in a cave. Each of the men chained up allowing them only to face the blank wall before them. Behind them sat a fire and between the fire and the enslaved men a raised walkway with a low wall stood. Behind which other people would walk carrying objects or puppets. These objects and puppets casted shadows on to the wall. The shadows were all the prisoner knew, as they had never had been able to see anything else going on behind or around them. It was their only reality. They had names for the shadows and assumed the voices they heard from beyond the wall were also coming from the shadows. But one day, one of the prisoners escapes the chains which he had spent his entire existence and climbs the wall behind them where he first sets eyes to the fire. Of which hurt his eyes and he would turn away and run back to what he is accustomed to. But thinking the fire might be the sun he turns back to the light with curiosity. As he approches he begins to see things he had never seen before. He begins to question his own reality and existence of everything he had previously known. The man becomes enamored by the light. Noticing an even more fascinating light at the entrance of the cave, the prisoner takes on a long strenuous climb out until he reaches the outside of the cave and is overwhelmed by the real true source of light, the sun.
A stranger to all the new reality that lay before him, his mind raced with understanding. Although he felt safer looking at the shadows because they were more familiar to him. Later as his vision adapts to the new conditions. The man began to better understand the world around him. Objects were not as he had previously imagined. He views the sun, moon, and stars above him. Pondering what life really is. Looking into the water he sees his own reflection for the first time. He sees not just a shadow of a tree, but all the real trees among him. Realizing that the world he once lived was nothing more than illusion. He had been living in darkness, shrouded by the presence of fake shadows.
Bestowed with so much joy and agony for his fellow prisoners. He sets back to the cave to tell the others what magnificent things are beyond their chained up lives. But as the now freed prisoner re-enters the cave, he is blinded by the darkness and has not yet re-adjusted from the bright light above. The others infer from the returning man’s blindness and disorientation that the journey out of the cave had harmed him causing delusion and that they should not undertake a similar journey. The freed man tries to tell them of the truth he has seen and that they should join him. They refuse and threaten to kill him for his new thinking. Not knowing they were defending the vary chains that imprisoned them. Blinded by ignorance. And so the story ends.
The alienation of a returned philosopher is what all truth tellers can expect when they take their knowledge back to the people who have not devoted themselves to thinking. For Plato, we are all, for much of our lives in shadow. Many of the things we get excited about like fame, money, perfect partner, or statues are infinitely less real than we suppose. They are for the most part nothing more than phantoms, projected by our culture onto the walls of our fragile flawed minds. It is up to us individually to free yourself from the shackles of life.
“The journey upwards is the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world.”
According to the allegory, reality is dictated by our perception of it, and as we gain knowledge through education and self enlightenment, perception changes. But it’s important to note; the 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.
Also too remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds. Either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye.
Ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.
The process, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below to above, which we affirm to be true philosophy.
“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.”
