Professor Michael Sudduth

Philosophy 110

Plato: Handout #1

The Allegory of the Cave

 I. The Allegory

An allegory is a fictional story in which meaning is communicated symbolically through various metaphors. It is a kind of extended metaphor. Socrates says that the allegory represents "education and its effect upon our nature." The story represents symbolically the movement from ignorance to enlightenment.

In the story, people are shackled deep within a cave. Their heads are fastened and able to gaze only in the direction of one of the walls of the cave. These prisoners have been there since birth. Behind them is an upper walkway, on which people are carrying various objects. There is a fire behind and above this walkway and it casts shadows of the objects being carried along the walkway. These shadows are cast on to the wall upon which the prisoners gaze. The voices of the people walking along the pathway above the prisoners bounce off the wall. The prisoners, able only to see the shadows on the wall, are unaware of what is happening in the rest of the cave. They interpret the voices to be coming from the shadows. They also take the shadows to be reality. All they know, even concerning themselves, is confined to the shadows

Socrates then speculates on what would happen if one of the prisoners were forced to stand up and look in the other direction. He also inquires as to what would happen if a prisoner were forced up the walkway to the top and exit of the cave and forced to walk outside the cave. Socrates indicates that at each stage the freed prisoner would experience some discomfort. But he would eventually become accustomed to the new experiences. The freed prisoner eventually would make it to the outside world and see things that he could not see while inside the cave. The objects he would now see would be the real objects only represented by the objects carried along the pathway and in the form of the shadows on the cave wall. Eventually, Socrates says, he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see it, the source of all things in the visible, external world outside the cave.

In the last part of the story, Socrates speculates on what would happen if the freed prisoner were to return to the cave. He would experience a similar disorientation and temporary lack of sight when going from the light to the darkness, in much the same way as he did when moving from the darkness to the light. The prisoners would also be opposed to being freed. He goes as far as to say that they would seek to kill the person trying to free them.

II. The Allegory and Perspective

The allegory suggests several things about perspective - how we see the world.

A. Everyone has a perspective, though these perspectives differ in various ways.

B. The perspective of the prisoners represents a perspective that is limited and unclear in various ways. These deficiencies of perspective imply a gap between the perspective and reality. In the allegory the perspective of the prisoners is far from being a perspective of reality (represented by the things in the world outside the cave).

C. These deficiencies in perspective are the result of certain shackles, e.g., things that hold our minds down or fixed in one direction or away from reality.

D. Education is the means of bettering one's perspective in the sense of getting closer to reality, or narrowing the gap between perspective and reality.

E. Confusion or lack of clarity may be an indication that one is on the verge of insight or enlightenment or it may be an indication that one is regressing in some way. Socrates distinguishes two causes or contexts in which we experience confusion, moving from darkness to light and light to darkness.

III. Shackles and Freedom

What sort of thing shackle our mind? Prejudice, lack of experience, too much of the wrong sort of experience, etc.? Are these shackles internal or external to the mind itself? Are there shackles that can be generated from within one's own perspective, shackles that the mind can impose upon itself?

How do we get free? The answer may very well depend on what sort of things shackle us. In the allegory, another person is responsible for initiating the freedom. Socrates at least suggests that freedom comes only by an encounter with something outside ourselves. Perhaps it is a teacher. Perhaps this teacher is the real itself in some way that penetrates the darkness of the mind. The only question then is this: how do we identify the real thing that comes to us? How will we know it when it finds us?

Socrates says that the things that hold the mind down and shackle it are sensual or physical pleasures of various sorts. This is because he thinks that if our sight is fastened only on these things, we will not see the other aspects of life that are either as important or more important than these things. In fact, Socrates (as well as Plato) believed that everything in the physical world is only a representation of what is real. The real transcends the physical world. Hence, whatever keeps your mind locked on things within the physical world holds the mind back from coming to know what is real.

IV. Metaphysical Presupposition of the Allegory

The allegory of the cave has one crucial metaphysical assumption, namely that there is a distinction between appearances and reality, a distinction between the way we see things and the ways things are. Of course, they may often overlap. The allegory is not opposed to that. What the allegory is committed to, though, is that there is a distinction between them; they are not necessarily the same. This is clearly exemplified from the contrasts drawn between the shadows, representational objects, and the things on the outside world. These represent a movement toward reality. Things within the cave are either not real or less real in some way than what is found on the outside of the cave.

Is Socrates correct in this assumption? It is crucial to distinguish this assumption from questions concerning what the real happens to be, or whether we can know in any particular situation that such and such is real and not an appearance. People can disagree about what the real is and they can also disagree about whether we can know in a particular situation that such and such is reality. But both of these disagreements is logically consistent with agreement that there is a distinction between reality and appearances.

What would have to be true if Socrates were incorrect in this assumption? If there is no distinction between reality and appearances, then either everything is only an appearance OR everything is real. In the first case, how things seem to us would never be the way they actually are AND in the latter case how things seem to us would always be the way things actually are. Socrates can only be correct if both of these possibilities are false, and if both are false, then Socrates is correct. Hence, we can assess the plausibility of the assumption of the allegory by examining the plausibility of its logical implications. This is in fact a general principle for examining any position.