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The Allegory of the Cave, also commonly known as Myth of the Cave, Metaphor of the Cave or the Parable of the Cave, is an allegory
Allegory

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of Mimesis, or representative art....
 used by the Greek
Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
 philosopher Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
 in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education". (514a) The allegory of the cave is written as a fictional dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates
Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
 and Plato's brother Glaucon
Glaucon

Glaucon son of Ariston , was the philosopher Plato's older brother. He is primarily known as a major conversant with Socrates in the Republic , and the questioner during the Allegory of the Cave....
, at the beginning of Book VII (514a–520a).

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall.






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The Allegory of the Cave, also commonly known as Myth of the Cave, Metaphor of the Cave or the Parable of the Cave, is an allegory
Allegory

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of Mimesis, or representative art....
 used by the Greek
Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
 philosopher Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
 in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education". (514a) The allegory of the cave is written as a fictional dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates
Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
 and Plato's brother Glaucon
Glaucon

Glaucon son of Ariston , was the philosopher Plato's older brother. He is primarily known as a major conversant with Socrates in the Republic , and the questioner during the Allegory of the Cave....
, at the beginning of Book VII (514a–520a).

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

The Allegory is related to Plato's Theory of Forms
Theory of Forms

Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that Forms , and not the material world of change Plato's allegory of the cave, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality....
, wherein Plato asserts that "Forms" (or "Idea
Idea

An idea is a form formed by consciousness through the process of Ideation . Human capability to contemplate ideas is associated with the ability of reasoning, human self-reflection, and of the ability to acquire and apply intellect, intuition, inspiration, etc.....
s"), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. In addition, the allegory of the cave is an attempt to explain the philosopher's place in society.

The Allegory of the Cave is related to Plato's metaphor of the sun (507b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line
Analogy of the divided line

Plato, in his dialogue Plato's Republic Book 6 , has Socrates explain the literary device of a divided line to teach basic philosophical ideas about the four levels of existence and the corresponding ways we come to knowledge about what exists, or come to mere opinions about what exists....
 (509d–513e), which immediately precede it at the end of Book VI. Allegories are summarized in the viewpoint of dialectic at the end of Book VII and VIII (531d-534e). This relates to the idea of forms as people struggle to see the reality beyond illusion.

Presentation


Inside the cave

Socrates
Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
 begins his presentation by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon
Glaucon

Glaucon son of Ariston , was the philosopher Plato's older brother. He is primarily known as a major conversant with Socrates in the Republic , and the questioner during the Allegory of the Cave....
 to imagine a cave
Cave

A cave is a natural underground void large enough for a human to enter. Some people suggest that the term cave should only apply to cavities that have some part that does not receive daylight; however, in popular usage, the term includes smaller spaces like sea caves, rock shelters, and grottos....
 inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire
Fire

Fire is the oxidation of a combustion material releasing heat, light, and various Chemical reaction products such as carbon dioxide and water....
, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway
Walkway

A walkway is a composite or umbrella term for all formal surfaces which support the act of walking. This includes sidewalks, trails, paths, stairs, ramps and open paseos or passageways....
, along which puppets of various animal
Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the Kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life....
s, plant
Plant

Plants are Life organisms belonging to the Kingdom Plantae. They include familiar organisms such as trees, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae....
s and other things are moved. The puppets cast shadows
Shadow

File:Shadow, Ronald Reagan Building - Washington, D.C..jpgA shadow is an area where direct light from a light source cannot reach due to obstruction by an object....
 on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.

Socrates asks if it isn't reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real
Being

In ontology being is anything that can be said to be, either Transcendence or Immanence.The nature of being varies by philosophy, given different interpretations in the frameworks of Parmenides, Leucippus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre....
 things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality
Reality

Reality, in everyday usage, means "the state of things as they actually exist". In a sense it is what is real. The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that being, whether or not it is observation or comprehension....
, since they are all they had ever seen. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?

Release from the cave

Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up (Socrates does not specify how). If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.

Suppose further, Socrates says, that the man were compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true", viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?

After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the sun
Sun

The Sun , a G V star, is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Earth and other matter orbit the Sun, which by itself accounts for about 98.6% of the Solar System's mass....
. He would understand that the sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing" (516b–c). (See also Plato's metaphor of the sun
Plato's metaphor of the sun

Plato, in Plato's Republic , uses the sun as a metaphor for the source of "illumination", arguably intellectual illumination, which he held to be The Form of the Good, which is sometimes interpreted as Plato's notion of God....
, which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI)

Return to the cave

Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?" (517a)

Remarks on the allegory

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be taken with what was said before, viz. the metaphor of the sun
Plato's metaphor of the sun

Plato, in Plato's Republic , uses the sun as a metaphor for the source of "illumination", arguably intellectual illumination, which he held to be The Form of the Good, which is sometimes interpreted as Plato's notion of God....
, and the divided line
Analogy of the divided line

Plato, in his dialogue Plato's Republic Book 6 , has Socrates explain the literary device of a divided line to teach basic philosophical ideas about the four levels of existence and the corresponding ways we come to knowledge about what exists, or come to mere opinions about what exists....
. In particular, he likens
"the region revealed through sight" — the ordinary objects we see around us — "to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the sun. And in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the soul's journey to the intelligible place, you not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region of the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good
The Form of the Good

Plato describes "The Form of the Good" in his dialogue, the Plato's Republic, speaking through the character of Socrates. The Helios is described in a simile as the child or offspring of the Platonic realism of the Good , in that, like the sun which makes physical objects visible and generates life on earth, the Good makes all other Univ...
; but once seen, it must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful — in the visible realm it give birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence — and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it" (517b-c).


After "returning from divine contemplations to human evils", a man "is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when — with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness — he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?" (517d-e)

External links

by students at American University
American University

American University is a Private university United Methodist Church-affiliated research university in Washington, D.C., United States, the main campus of which comes to a corner at the intersection of Nebraska and Massachusetts Avenues at Ward Circle, straddling the Spring Valley, Washington, D.C., Wesley Heights, and American University Par...
 on YouTube
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 at Washington State University
Washington State University

Washington State University is an American public school research university in Pullman, Washington, Washington. WSU is the state's largest Land-grant university university and offers more than 200 fields of study....
 at Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg

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 at University of Washington
University of Washington

University of Washington, founded in 1861, is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, Washington, United States. Also known as Washington and locally as UW or the U, it is the largest university in the northwestern United States and the oldest public university on the west coast....
 - Faculty at Shippensburg University