assignment

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• To set the scene, Plato asks us to imagine people who have spent their entire lives chained up in the back of a cave. Behind them is a fire, and objects are being paraded in front of that fire. The objects case shadows on the wall, and the prisoners spend their days watching those shadows.

• One day someone escapes the chains, ventures outside the cave, and returns to tell the others what he found there. Never having seen anything but shadows, the prisoners are incredulous. The scene can be illustrated as follows:

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• The prisoners have a very limited sense of things.

• They are not completely ignorant, but neither can they be said to have an accurate understanding of the world or themselves. They are somewhere between knowledge and ignorance. Plato will describe them as having opinion.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• For all their limitations, however, the prisoners are confident that they know the world perfectly well.

• Furthermore, they are confident that they are living the most satisfying of lives. (These are the reasons that, in the end, they resist leaving the cave.)

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• The prisoner who escapes manages to rise above those limitations - he has a more accurate sense of the world, he realizes that much of his earlier certainty was misplaced, and he knows that there is a better life outside the cave.

• He returns and tries to impart these things to his fellow prisoners by showing them the way out of the cave.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• This effort to show the way out of the cave is Plato’s metaphor for the philosopher and the task of philosophy.

• We all have opinions about the world and the good life about which we are subjectively certain, and philosophy asks us to be critical of those assumptions (even when it makes us uncomfortable) for the sake of moving toward a better picture.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• Traditionally, this critical inquiry has broken down into three parts.

• Inquiry into the nature of world is called metaphysics, inquiry into the nature of knowledge is called epistemology, and inquiry into the nature of the good life is called ethics.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• As mentioned previously, however, the other prisoners resist being shown out of the cave because they are confident and comfortable. Eventually this resistance turns into physical aggression.

• For Plato, this is not simply a theoretical possibility – it is precisely what happened to his mentor Socrates.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

• In a text called The Apology Plato gives an account of the trial of Socrates brought on by Athenians who were disturbed by his efforts to get them to question themselves

• In our next unit we will be considering that text.