The Allegory of The Cave
“The sun is the true source of light in the world, the cause of the seasons and the annual cycle of things. And he would come to feel sorry for those who remain behind in the cave and are content to believe that the shadows on the cave wall are reality”
THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE SUMMARY
This much-discussed (and much-misunderstood) story is a key part of Plato’s Republic, a work which has the claim to be the first ever literary utopia. In The Republic, Plato and a number of other philosophers discuss the ideal society, focusing on education, political leadership, and the role and responsibility of the individual within society.
The Allegory of the Cave represents a number of the core ideas of Plato’s thinking in one short, accessible parable. But what is the meaning of this allegory? Before we offer an analysis of Plato’s idea, here’s a summary of what he says about it in The Republic.
One of the key ideas on Plato’s Republic is his theory of forms, where ‘forms’ means much the same as ‘ideas’. And the Allegory of the Cave represents Plato’s approach to ideas.
We are invited to imagine a group of people sitting in an underground cave, facing the walls. They are chained up and they cannot move their heads. Behind them, a fire is forever burning, and its flames cast shadows onto the cave walls.
Between the fire and the cave walls, there is a road, and people walk along this road, carrying various objects: models of animals made of stone and wood, human statuettes, and other things. The people who walk along the road, and the objects they carry, cast shadows on the cave walls.
The people who are chained in the cave and facing the wall can only see the shadows of the people (and the objects they carry): never the actual people and objects walking past behind them. To the people chained up in the cave, these shadows appear to be reality, because they don’t know any better.
Reality, to these people chained in the cave, is only ever a copy of a copy: the shadows of the original forms which themselves remain beyond our view.
But someone comes and unchains the people in the cave. Now they’re free. Let’s say that one of them is set free and encouraged to look towards the fire behind him and his fellow cave-dwellers. He can now see that the things he took for reality until now were merely shadows on the wall.
But this knowledge isn’t, at first, a good thing. The revelation is almost overwhelming. The light of the fire hurts his eyes, and when he is dragged up the slope that leads out of the cave, and he sees the sun outside, and is overwhelmed by its light.
In time, however, he comes to accept that the sun is the true source of light in the world, the cause of the seasons and the annual cycle of things. And he would come to feel sorry for those who remain behind in the cave and are content to believe that the shadows on the cave wall are reality. Indeed, the people who remain behind in the cave believe he wasted his time in going outside and simply ruined his eyes for nothing.
But the man who has been outside knows there is no going back to his old beliefs: his perception of the world has changed forever. He cannot rejoin those prisoners who sit and watch the shadows on the wall. They, for their part, would resist his attempts to free them, and would sooner killer him than be led out of the cave, as he was.
And so, if the man who has seen the sun returns to the cave, his eyes will take time to adjust back to the darkness of the cave and to the shadows on the wall. He will now be at a disadvantage to his fellow cave-dwellers, who have never left the cave and seen the light.
“It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this the must do, even with the prospect of death” – Plato
ANALYZING THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE
An allegory is a story that has a double meaning: as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory puts it, an allegory has a primary or surface meaning, but it also has a secondary or under-the-surface meaning. This is certainly true of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But what is its secondary meaning?
Although The Republic is classified as a work of philosophy, it is structured more like a dialogue or even a play (though not a dramatic one), in that it takes the form of a conversation between several philosophers: Socrates, Glaucon, Plato himself, and a number of other figures are all ‘characters’ in the Republic.
The Allegory of the Cave, as Plato’s comments indicate, is about the philosopher seeing beyond the material world and into the ‘intelligible’ one. 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).
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. It is no good leaving the cave behind. 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.
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. (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.)
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. 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.
There are several further details to note about the symbolism present in the allegory. 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.
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. 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.
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. This means that the shadows on the wall are reflections of reflections of types. 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.
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 reflects some moral code or belief. Without a moral compass we are doomed to death, literal and metaphorical. In today’s society people can travel (by car, airplane, train) to long distances. On the surface seems like freedom.
To a certain extent it is. Most of these people travel not for pure joy but for some kind of trophy as in going to weddings, parties, vacations to get away from the prison they have created where they live. But when they get back from those long trips, they get back to the same prison for them to complain again that life is so unfair. No such a thing as unfair, you must work toward your own liberation. If you get dirty, you will not clean yourself up unless you look at yourself.
Other people have their own dirt to clean up, some may tell you that you are dirty, but nobody will tell you “Here, you are dirty, I’m going to clean you up”. Nobody can save/liberate you. You have to save yourself and you can only do that after you realize that you are inside the prison of your own thoughts.
“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out” – Plato
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One response to “The Allegory of The Cave”
Fantastic article!!!
If I may add:
In his book from Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest, T.Z. Lavine illustrates Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave from Book VII of Plato’s Republic. Now then says Socrates, as he introduces the allegory, imagine mankind as living in an underground cave which has a wide entrance open to the light. Deep inside are human beings facing the inside of wall of the cave, with their necks and legs chained 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 which a low wall has been built, such as is used in puppet shows as a screen to conceal the people working the puppets. Along the raised way people walk carrying all sorts of things which they hold so that they project above the wall – statues of men, animals, trees.
The prisoners, facing the inside wall, cannot see one another, or the wall behind them on which the 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.
But the prisoners cling to the familiar shadows and to their passions and prejudices, and 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 the 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.
What would this person think now of the life in the cave and what people there know of reality and of morality? And if he were to descend back into the cave, would he not have great difficulty in accustoming himself to the darkness, so that he could not compete with those who had never left cave? Would he not be subject to their ridicule, scorn, even their physical attack? Of the many allegories in the history of Western thought, the Allegory of the Cave is the one most cited. But what is an Allegory?
An allegory is a kind of story in which what is talked about is being compared to something else which is similar, but what that something else is, is left unstated. An allegory is accordingly defined as an incomplete simile – the reader must supply what is similar to the events described. What, then, is the Allegory of the Cave compared with?
The people in the cave are living out their lives in semidarkness, chained by their necks and legs, unable to turn around, never knowing that what they see before them on the wall of the cave are only shadows. They are in bondage, but unaware of it. They remain ignorant of themselves and reality. With whom may they be compared?
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? To what may the cave be compared in our lives? The question tantalizes us too: What is the relevance of the Allegory of the Cave to our present world? With what in our lives may it be compared?
The following broad and general interpretations of the allegory have been made for generations and remain 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 needing to awake to a clear vison 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 states of education from the darkness of intellectual and moral confusion in its everyday beliefs, to the light of true knowledge and values.
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 truth. Lavine states that there are also interpretations of the allegory which are specifically relevant to our own society and to the present time.
(1) The Allegory of the Cave may be viewed as a devastating criticism of our everyday lives as being in bondage to superficialities, to shadow rather than substance. Truth is taken to be whatever is known by the senses. A good life is taken to be one in which we satisfy desires. We are unaware that we are living with illusion, superficial knowledge, and false and conflicting ideals.
Our lives are dominated by the shadow-play on the walls of our cave made by newspaper headlines, by radio broadcasts, by endlessly moving shadows on the television screen, by the echoing voices of opinion makers.
(2) The Allegory of Cave may be taken as an equally devastating criticism of much of the science of our times, with its emphasis upon that which is known by the senses. Science, too, is chained so that it can see only shadows. Its basis is in sensory observation, its conclusions are only in the form of correlations of observations. It does not venture into true causes or into long-range consequences.
(3) It is of course a political allegory. The life in the cave is the life of politics. Both the so-called 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 mob hysteria for or against fleeting issues, believing in current ideologies which are the illusions, the shadows of the moment on the walls of the cave.
(4) 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 enlightenment, to bring the good news, even though he may be killed for his/her services.
(5) Finally, for us as for Plato, the Allegory of the cave is an allegory of despair and hope. Like Plato, we live in a time of loss of meaning and commitment, of crumbling standards of truth and morality, of corruption in political life and decline in personal integrity.
Comparing the allegory of the cave to our present society, we are in agreement with Lavine’s five points presented above. The political allegory goes deeper which includes both human and non-human control over humanity since ancient times. We may in our weekly blog articles descend deeper into the black sorcery that has saturated the planet. We believe one needs to know self above all but also know the enemy.
Self mastery, will lead to the awakening of the Kundalini/Serpent. This awakening is multidimensional, an awakening of the true self. With no control over proper diet, lust, mind, and the desires of the body, humanity remains chained in the dark cave.