For Ultimate Writer

Book VII

Book VII of Plato’s Republic contains the famous allegory of the cave. Many people have heard the expression “Plato’s cave,” but few people know much about what it actually refers to. Book VII begins with Socrates’ informing his friends that he is going to “make an image of our nature in its education and want of education.” That is, he is, he uses the dark depths of a cave as a metaphor for human ignorance and progress out of these depths as a metaphor for the gradual process of enlightenment.

This metaphor is much richer than a casual reading of the Republic would suggest. First, one of the things I find most interesting about it is that Socrates described the inhabitants of the cave as imprisoned in its depths. Not only are they imprisoned in the darkness of the cave, they aren’t even facing in the right direction. That is, they are facing the back of the cave rather than the mouth of it. That means it could never even occur to anyone that there was anything to reality but darkness. People can’t get out of the cave by themselves. They have to be helped out. They have to be released from chains that Socrates says bind them and “compelled to stand up, to turn …. around and look up toward the light” (p. 194 emphasis added). That’s fascinating language, isn’t it? It sounds so religious. That is, Socrates is saying that people need to be converted from ignorance to enlightenment. Even though progress out of the cave is a gradual thing, the most crucial element in the process is the conversion, the turning of the ignorant toward the light of the truth. And this is something Socrates asserts people cannot do themselves. That is, people can’t turn around of their own accord. They have to be “released” first from their bondage to ignorance and then “compelled” to “turn around” toward the truth.

This is fascinating to me for several reasons. First, because it does not cohere with Plato’s famous “doctrine of recollection” whereby we can learn everything all by ourselves because there is a sense in which, he argues, we already possess knowledge of everything we later “learn,” and hence really only “recollect those things. Second, because it suggests we have a profound need of one another. That is, no one can extricate himself from his bondage to ignorance. Everyone needs help to do this from someone else. That suggests that intellectual and moral development are, at least to some extent, social phenomena. That actually fits with the etymological origin of the English word ”idiot.” An idiot, or ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs in ancient Greek meant someone with no civic feeling or connection. That is, a "private person, single citizen (Pocket Oxford Classical Dictionary, emphasis added). People can actualize their distinctive human potential for what philosophers call rational self determination only as members of a community that encourages and mutually reinforces such a process.

Still, that leaves aside another pressing question: How did the first person become enlightened? Who turned that person around? This question is not unlike the question of how anyone ever came in the first place to learn the truth so that they could later “recollect” it. Socrates presents his famous “doctrine of recollection” as a way of avoiding what is called “the learning paradox” articulated by his friend Meno. Meno suggests that it is impossible to learn anything because either you know something or you don’t know it. But if you know a thing, then you can’t “learn” it, because you already know it. But if you don’t know it, then you can’t learn it either because you would be unable to recognize it as the thing you were trying to learn even if you did stumble upon it.

Socrates thinks this is simply Meno’s underhanded way of trying to wriggle out of an argument concerning whether virtue can be taught. He thinks, or at least appears to think, that it is possible to learn things (and it certainly does look like that’s possible), so he proposes the doctrine of recollection as an explanation for how that is possible. We can learn things, he says, because, in a way, we do know them already. It’s just that our knowledge is all hazy and needs to be refined and polished, or whatever, in order to be properly understood again. How is it that we know things already? Well, says Socrates, we learned them in another life. But if we can’t learn things in this life, unless there is a sense in which we know them already, how can we learn them in any other life, unless we know them already? The doctrine of recollection would appear to generate what philosophers would call an infinite learning regress.

If you look closely at Socrates’ account of how we originally “learned” things, you can see, however, that this “learning” was not conventional learning. According to Socrates, the soul or psyche (ψυχή, psūkhē) is immortal. It’s clearly not a material thing, anyway, like the body, so there is no reason to suppose that it would decay the way material things do. People’s souls must thus be somewhere before they are born. According to Socrates, they are in the world of eternal, unchanging truth. That’s how it is that we know everything it is we later “learn.” We were once in contact with the eternal unchanging truth. Birth, he says, is so traumatic that it causes us to forget the truth. It is, in fact, a separation from the truth. That is we live eternity and enter temporality where everything is hazy and confused. So we spend our lives struggling to recover the light we lost when we were separated from it.

The thing is, we are supposed to be able to do that by ourselves, if we are sufficiently motivated to do it. Socrates acknowledges that teachers can help, but they aren’t really necessary. The allegory of the cave, however, gives us a slightly different picture. Now Socrates is saying that we do need a teacher, but where is this teacher supposed to come from? Don’t we all need a teacher? The Judeo-Christian tradition says the “teacher” comes down to us, that the light is revealed to us and that we must spend our lives pursuing this light, just as the prisoner in the cave who has been “released” from his chains and “turn[ed] around” must struggle toward the light he is finally, for the first time, able to see.

Of course Socrates was neither Jewish nor Christian. There is a strange symmetry, however, between Socrates views and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Socrates says in the Meno that virtue appears to be a gift from the gods. That is, Socrates and Meno discuss at length whether virtue can be taught and finally arrive at the conclusion that it would at least appear that it cannot. Socrates says they just have to assume it is a gift from the gods. So maybe that first teacher, the fist person who loosened the chains of that first poor prisoner in Plato’s cave, was somehow divine. Maybe he’d been enlightened by the truth itself and then set about trying to free his brothers and sisters in bondage. Maybe he’d been imbued with supernatural powers that enabled him to loosen those chains. Maybe. Plato doesn’t say.