Why is allegory of the cave important

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. 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. This was, as I said earlier, one of Ferguson's most prescient observations cf In that respect, it stands in contrast to the realm outside of the cave in which the visible is encountered in its pure form.

What the image is comparing is not the visible and the intelligible, but the natural and the cultural. That this is what is at stake here is further corroborated by Socrates's insistence that the fire is to be likened to the power of the sun. We know from the image of the Sun that for Socrates the sun represents the offspring of the Form of the Good in the sense that, just as the Good gives being and is the cause of everything in the intelligible realm, so too the sun gives being and is the cause of everything in the visible realm.

If now the fire is to be understood as representing the sun inside the cave, then we must construe it as standing for something that, outside the cave, governs the natural visible realm, but inside the cave, governs a very different realm, namely, the cultural visible realm. I believe that this makes a lot of sense since, as I indicated earlier, fire is the symbol of culture par excellence in Greek mythology: it is the Promethean gift that allows them to transcend their merely natural condition.

Recall once again the discussion in section 4 above about the Cave's ironic targeting of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and the metaphorical connection to Heracles's labors. The fire in the cave is the power that, like the sun in the visible realm, gives being and is the cause of everything in the realm of culture.

This reading can be further confirmed if we look more closely at Socrates's account of what happens to the soul outside of the cave. Take, for example, the passage that describes the liberated soul as finally reaching the stage in which he now can see the sun itself and studies it.

Socrates remarks that, "at this point he would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see" b-c, emphasis added. I call attention to this passage because it reinstates the connection between the sun and the visible realm, and it explicitly connects the latter with the world outside of the cave. To be sure, the liberated prisoner may be here thinking of his former prison dwelling as the visible realm.

In that sense, "what he used to see" refers to the sorts of things he saw while inside the cave. But if that is the case, then it is hard to make sense of Socrates's query immediately following this remark. He asks: "what about when he reminds himself of his first dwelling place, his fellow prisoners, and what passed for wisdom there? If Socrates meant to imply that the person was thinking of the cave when he came to the conclusion that the sun governs the visible realm, then it makes no sense to ask that he now be reminded of the cave, for he must have been thinking about it all along.

That he was not should alert us to the fact that he takes the realm outside of the cave to be the visible realm. Furthermore, we should notice that in the outside world there is a kind of repetition of the cognitive moves performed by the prisoner inside the cave. This repetition serves to stress the relationship of likeness that holds between both places at the same time that it makes us aware of the dissimilarity between the life of the prisoner inside and outside the cave.

The person outside the cave begins by looking at shadows and images of things in shiny surfaces. If the outside realm were really the realm of Forms this would seem a very puzzling statement, for what place do imitations and images of this kind have within the intelligible realm? But the situation makes perfect sense if we take it to be a situation in which the prisoner is making a cognitive fresh start in a visible realm that has been purged of the manipulative aspect of human endeavors.

What Socrates seems to be saying is that in order for the philosopher to ascend to the intelligible realm, he must look at the visible realm with eyes untainted by the pernicious cultural influences of the city. The statement is thus, once again, political: only by stepping out of the political dynamics of the city and specially of democratic cities like Athens can the philosopher engage in the type of inquiry that will eventually lead him to the intelligible Forms.

Socrates compares the power of dialectic in the intelligible realm with the power sight exercises in the visible realm. He tells Glaucon that. In the same way, whenever someone tries through argument and apart from all sense perceptions to find the being itself of each thing and doesn't give up until he grasps the good itself with understanding itself, he reaches the end of the intelligible, just as the other reached the end of the visible.

Notice that the passage once again refers -this time quite explicitly-to the journey of the prisoner outside of the cave as a journey of the soul in the visible realm, a journey that is meant to stand metaphorically for that of the dialectician through the intelligible realm.

It is no wonder that the philosopher has to go outside the cave to engage in dialectic. Prior to the philosopher's return, the cave represents the contrary of the ideal city. This is important because Socrates's contention is not that culture and politics per se are bad. Instead, the claim is that culture and politics thus far, especially of the democratic variety, have been unsuitable grounds for true philosophical development and, hence, badly equipped for bringing the just society into place.

Of course, as we know from Book X, reforming the city in the way Plato envisioned would require major cultural restructuring. A lot of what the Greeks took to be representative of their culture in the form of tragedy, music, and poetry would have to go.

Yet, it is clear from Socrates's discussion that some forms of imitative art admittedly somewhat more austere ones would remain cf Burnyeat I hope that by now a different interpretation of the Cave is more forcefully recommending itself to us. The image is not making the epistemological claim that our natural cognitive situation is suspect, but the political claim that educators and their methods have thus far been detrimental for philosophical development; so much so that as Socrates comments on Book vi, "if anyone is saved and becomes what he ought to be under our present constitutions, he has been saved -you might rightly say- by a divine dispensation" e ; which, let us remark in passing, resonates strongly with the manner Socrates describes the first "miraculous" release of one of the prisoners.

Through the image of the Cave Plato advances further his critique of Athenian society and politics. The cave itself is an extended metaphor for the city. Plato is making a political statement about the dreadful effects that corrupt cultures, especially those with a democratic bent, have on the philosophical soul. That is why he claims that it is only by means of a complete restructuring of government that the ideal city will come into effect.

The philosophical soul that miraculously manages to surmount the obstacles posed to him by the cultural milieu and becomes what he ought to be must return to the cave in order to reform it. Only then, Socrates tells us, "the city will be governed, not like the majority of cities nowadays, by people who fight over shadows and struggle against one another in order to rule [ The Cave, then, is a political allegory about the experience of the philosopher in relation to the city.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, however, in suggesting the preeminence of the political over the epistemological reading of the Cave, I do not mean to deny altogether the presence and the significance in this image of epistemological themes. After all, by Socrates's own admission the primary function of the Cave is to illustrate the effects of education on our nature cf a , which immediately places concerns with knowledge and truth at the center of this image's description.

The pedagogical program and the epistemological steps outlined in the Line turn the soul in the right direction so that it can acquire the sort of knowledge that, I have said, is requisite for governing properly: the enlightened state that results from the right pedagogical program is what allows the prisoner to stop fighting over shadows of justice and instead keep true justice in sight, even as he is forced back and made to reside once again among the other prisoners within the sun-deprived cave.

To that extent one cannot really draw a sharp distinction between the epistemological and the political in the allegory. The only person who can liberate the city from evil and ignorance, and institute the correct system of government is the philosopher who has seen the truth by following the epistemological plan outlined in the Line.

But this emphasis on the liberating effects of the educational program described by the Sun and the Line can be badly misleading if one fails to hear the special accent that, as I have argued, the Cave places on the political situation of the philosopher with respect to the city. For we may be led to believe that this educational program begins the moment the prisoner in the cave is liberated from his bonds and turns around to start his ascend out of the cave.

We would then fall prey, once again, to the mistaken belief that we ought to find a one-to-one correspondence between the various segments of the Line and the prisoner's journey in and out of the Cave. It is this emphasis on an epistemological parallelism that my reading has called into question.

And here, I believe, it is legitimate to introduce a relevant distinction between the epistemological and the political in the Cave. It is highly telling that, when discussing the way in which education can redirect a person's soul and orient it toward the truth, Socrates insists that a precondition of this kind of turning is that the person be rid of the bonds that have come to fasten to him due to overindulging his appetitive side, which can happen only if those bonds have been relentlessly "hammered at from childhood" a-b.

Such hammering away can proceed with relative ease, if we suppose that the person is living under the political regime of the ideal city that Socrates builds in speech.

But what happens if the situation is as the one described at the onset of the Cave? If instead of chipping away at said chains since childhood, the prisoner had throughout all his life been subjected to a political regime that cf a , as the Cave suggests and I have argued above, is dominated by cultural and pedagogical forces that pander to our appetites and tighten those bonds more firmly instead of loosening them?

Then the prisoner's release, upon which his turning around is predicated, can happen only if he somehow escapes these oppressive political dynamics. This is the real, and very political, moral of the Cave. A moral that, of course, we are supposed to take to heart, so that instead of waiting for divine intervention cf.

Now that the political significance of the Cave has been brought to the fore, we may perhaps begin to appreciate somewhat more clearly the way this image fits with the others. In my view, the images hang together in something like the following way: the first -that of the Sun-, introduces the contrast between the intelligible and the visible realms.

The second -that of the Line-, further develops this contrast along epistemological lines, by explaining what is cognitively required to reach the Forms. The third -that of the Cave-, completes the analogies by clarifying what is politically required to carry out the cognitive project successfully: namely, that the philosophically inclined soul refrain itself from politics until it has reached the enlightened stage that can allow it to return to the cave in order to govern with justice. Spelling out these relations in more detail reaches beyond the scope of this paper.

Let me just say by way of conclusion that I think this way of interpreting the relationship is not only more promising than the one that stresses the epistemological side, but also helps us make better sense of the admittedly strange and nonetheless powerful image of the Cave. Adam, J.

The Republic of Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Annas, J. An Introduction to Plato's Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, Aristophanes, 3: The Suits, Clouds, Birds. David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Bloom, A. New York: Basic Books, Brann, E. The Music of the Republic.

Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, Burnyeat, M. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Cross, R. Plato's Republic: A Philosophical Commentary. New York: St. Martin's Press, Ferguson, A. Part I. The Similes of the Sun and the Line. Part II. The Allegory of the Cave Continued. Ferguson, J. Fine, G. Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Gould, J. The Development of Plato's Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , And why does it work so well in the context of filmmaking?

Virtually all philosophy descends from Plato. And this particular piece of philosophy routinely comes up in discussions of how humans perceive reality and whether there is any higher truth to existence. This is a concept pondered and considered for thousands of years and we're still nowhere closer to an answer. Naturally, this is great material for literature and film. We'll go through this allegory in detail with examples from movies that were clearly inspired by Plato's cave.

The allegory states that there exists prisoners chained together in a cave. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. This casts a shadow on the other side of the wall.

The prisoners watch these shadows, believing them to be real. Plato posits that one prisoner could become free. He finally sees the fire and realizes the shadows are fake. This prisoner could escape from the cave and discover there is a whole new world outside that they were previously unaware of. This prisoner would believe the outside world is so much more real than that in the cave.

He would try to return to free the other prisoners. Upon his return, he is blinded because his eyes are not accustomed to actual sunlight. The chained prisoners would see this blindness and believe they will be harmed if they try to leave the cave. Despite being centuries old, the allegory is appropriate for filmmaking. After all, the audience watches images on a screen.

Numerous movies utilize this concept in their plots and themes. You can likely think of plenty of films where a character believes one reality and then becomes exposed to another, greater reality and is never the same. This first stage of freedom is further enhanced as the former prisoner leaves the cave they must be forced, as they do not wish to leave that which they know , initially painfully blinded by the bright light of the sun.

The liberated one stumbles around, looking firstly only at reflections of things, such as in the water, then at the flowers and trees themselves, and, eventually, at the sun. They would feel as though they now have an even better understanding of the world.

Yet, if this same person returned to the dimly lit cave, they would struggle to see what they previously took for granted as all that existed. They may no longer be any good at the game of guessing what the shadows were — because they are only pale imitations of actual objects in the world. The other prisoners may pity them, thinking they have lost rather than gained knowledge. If this free individual tried to tell the other prisoners of what they had seen, would they be believed?

Could they ever return to be like the others? The remaining prisoners certainly would not wish to be like the individual who returned, suddenly not knowing anything about the shadows on the cave wall! Socrates concludes that the prisoners would surely try to kill one who tried to release them, forcing them into the painful, glaring sun, talking of such things that had never been seen or experienced by those in the cave.

There are multiple readings of this allegory. The text demonstrates that the Idea of the Good Plato capitalises these concepts in order to elevate their significance and refer to the idea in itself rather than any one particular instantiation of that concept , which we are all seeking, is only grasped with much effort. Our initial experience is only of the good as reflected in an earthly, embodied manner.

It is only by reflecting on these instantiations of what we see to be good, that we can start to consider what may be good in itself. The closest we can come to truly understanding such Forms the name he gives these concepts , is through our intellect. Human beings are aiming at the Good, which Medieval philosophers and theologians equated with God, but working out what the good life consists of is not easy!