Turned around and out of their comfort zone, they are unable to recognize the shadow-casting puppets, despite their skill at recognizing the shadows the puppets cast on the wall. cummings, for it is a world the cave-dweller is familiar with and comfortable in. It is a comfortable disease, to borrow a phrase from e. They will probably not like the experience at all, even though in being freed from their fetters they are thereby ‘cured of ignorance’ (7.515c)-not merely freed but cured, as if ignorance is a disease. When the freed prisoner is forced to look at the shadow-casting fire that until this moment they were unaware of, they will be ‘pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows they had seen before’ (7.515c). Nor is it the only time when the head-turning that constitutes education will be painful. This is not the only time Plato connects education with compulsion, with being forced to turn one’s head and gain a new perspective. There is reason to think it is the former, since the freed prisoner is ‘suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light’ (7.515c), and somebody else seems to be doing the compelling. Plato does not tell us by whom or how we are left to wonder whether the prisoner was saved by human agency or by the natural decay of their fetters. Some readers will have already noticed that Stage One is parallel to the lowest section of the Divided Line (segment a), the objects of which are images and shadows.ĥ In the second stage, one of the prisoners is freed from their bonds. They take for reality what is a mere image of it. The prisoners watch the shadow-play, ignorant of the true nature of what they see: they ‘believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts’ (7.515c). The puppets are various artifacts: ‘statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material’ (7.514b). What they see are the shadows of a sort of puppet show taking place behind them, with shadows cast by the light of a fire. They can only look straight ahead, and thus have only one perspective on what they see on the cave’s wall. While such divisions are always prey to arbitrariness and subjective preference, I hope that the division I offer sheds light on what Plato is up to here.Ĥ In the first stage, the cave’s residents are prisoners, chained to their seats and unable to move not only their bodies but-crucially-their heads. Stages in the Cave Allegoryģ I count six distinct stages in the Cave Allegory. Nonetheless, everyone has the capacity to be educated, to turn their soul from what is less real toward what is more real.
But not everyone is capable of making it out of the Cave into the intelligible world of the Forms, just as not everyone is capable of winning a Nobel Prize in Physics or an Olympic medal in Figure Skating. Everyone, Plato insists, is capable of education in this sense (7.518c). Education as turning around is a powerful metaphor, capturing the way in which learning involves gaining new perspectives, seeing everyday things and events from new points of view.
Though education sometimes requires that kind of transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, this is not its essence, which instead is ‘turning the whole soul’ (7.518d)-turning it around, ultimately toward the Form of the good. Given how visual the allegory is, many readers will find it helpful to draw themselves a diagram of it.Ģ Education, the Allegory’s topic, is not what most people think it is, says Plato: it is not ‘putting knowledge into souls that lack it’ (7.518b). Although an allegory is sometimes defined as a symbolic narrative that can be interpreted as having a hidden meaning, Plato is not cagey about the Cave Allegory’s meaning: it is about ‘the effect of education (παιδεία ) and the lack of it on our nature’ (7.514a). Although it is clearly related to the Sun and Divided Line analogies (indeed, Socrates explicitly connects the Cave and the Sun at 7.517bc), Plato marks its special status by opening Book VII with it, emphasizing its importance typographically, so to speak (he will do much the same thing in Book IX with the discussion of the tyrannical soul). Photograph by Crystallizedcarbon (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, wiki/File:Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif#/media/File:Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gifġ The Allegory of the Cave is arguably the most famous part of the Republic. Markus Maurer, drawing of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ with Wikipedia’s logo as the sun (2015).
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