When people walk along the walkway, you can see shadows of the objects they are carrying cast on to the wall.You cannot look at anything behind or to the side of you – you must look at the wall in front of you. So, imagine that you are one of the prisoners.People outside the cave walk along this walkway carrying things on their head including animals, plants, wood and stone.
Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between them is a raised walkway.These prisoners have been here since birth and have never seen outside of the cave.The prisoners are tied to some rocks, their arms and legs are bound and their head is tied so that they cannot look at anything but the stonewall in front of them. Imagine a cave, in which there are three prisoners.In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who really do see the truth. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning.
Plato allegory of the cave code#
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 is a reflection of some moral code or belief (the effigy that cast the shadow).The ‘Allegory Of The Cave’ is a theory put forward by Plato, concerning human perception. 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. This means that the shadows on the wall are reflections of reflections of types, therefore. 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. 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. 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. 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. There are several further details to note about the symbolism present in the allegory. 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. 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. (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.) 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. 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. 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. 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). The Allegory of the Cave, as Plato’s comments indicate, is about the philosopher seeing beyond the material world and into the ‘intelligible’ one.
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