Plato’s Allegory of Cave, Essay Example

In striving to cognize and explain the essence of existence and to discover the basic laws and principles underlying life, people have involved in philosophy since times immemorial. Delving into the most complicated and intricate issues of being, already the philosophers of the antiquity attempted reconstructing possible models according to which the world functions. One of such efforts was undertaken by the Classical Greek philosopher Plato, who in his fundamental Socratic dialogue, The Republic, gives a brilliant interpretation of human existence in the form of the famous allegory of the cave. Since that time, the allegory has become one of the most cited ones not only in philosophy, but in other branches of human knowledge; and the reasons for it may be seen in the fact that due to its breadth it becomes possible to apply and interpret the notions and symbols present in the allegory in a variety of ways and senses, going beyond the scopes of philosophy proper to education, science, social power and influence, and other aspects of human life.

In his allegory, Plato compares the general public with people who are imprisoned in a deep and dark cave. They cannot turn their heads towards the enlightened entrance to the cave as their necks have been chained since their childhood, so they only can see before themselves. Behind the prisoners a fire is playing, so they can see their own shadows and the shadows of one another thrown by the fire on the opposite wall of the cave — in fact, shadows are their reality. Supposing one of the prisoners is freed and let go to the real world, he would at first be struck by the light coming from outside; having overcome pain in his eyes, he then deliberately moves to the open air and at first perceives what he sees there as imaginary, as his only reality so far have been shadows in the cave. But step by step he is moved forward, conceiving real life, until he is finally brought to the source of life itself, to the sun which would now be the essence of reality and the embodiment of the ultimate truth. Thus, thinking back to his former fellows in the cave, he pities them, for they do not know the truth and lead an existence in a world of imaginary things which they take for real. (Plato 219–221)

Such is the thought-provoking allegory, and the first association that is evoked by it can be that of the process of education. Initially, people possess some basic knowledge relying on their first-hand experience of life. They consider their lives and ideas of it to be perfectly right and correct, as they do not know anything else to compare them with; there are no competing ideas which could shake their convictions. As soon as additional information appears, either brought by someone else or acquired on one’s own, the old points of view are challenged, as they are compared to new ones and there emerges doubt as to the veracity and credibility of the old ones. The more information one gets, the more knowledge one accumulates, the more choice one has between multiple options, the more food for thought one receives, and as a consequence, the more doubt and vacillation one experiences.

In the painstaking search for the ‘one-and-only’ truth, one passes a long way through stages of first encounter with new facts or ideas, distrust to them, subsequent interest in them, their careful exploration and comparison to the previous ones, and their acceptance or rejection. In order to pass through this way successfully and fruitfully without overlooking some important and valuable ideas, it can turn out beneficial to have a wise guide on that way — a person who is experienced and learned enough to help one separate the wheat from the chaff and to direct one’s steps in the right way. There are multiple things to learn and the ways of learning them are countless, so are the possible interpretations of them and the value and importance one ascribes to the knowledge gained. Assuming that an unprepared mind can easily get lost in the jungle of available information, its guidance is vital for the purpose of shaping a reasonable and systematized outlook. As Barrow states, “education is a process of turning the mind in the right direction” (32). And it becomes the task and the social responsibility of philosophers (and, by analogy, educators) to ‘re-enter the cave’ and bring educational enlightenment to the broad public however resisting the latter may be.

Connected with the issue of education there is another ethical problem raised in the allegory of the cave: the issue of people’s ignorance and their prejudiced attitude to knowledge. Being totally content with what they have, with the way of life and thinking they experience, people naturally experience hostility and even fear of whatever unknown they encounter. In face of the new and the unverified, people possessing a stable way of life and a practically unshakeable outlook tend to retreat and prefer to assume an attitude of either indifference or preconception. Stable and standard opinion takes forms of stereotypes and any attempt to introduce an innovation of any kind is met with prejudice and bias. This was illustrated by Plato in his account of the ‘enlightened’ man returning to the cave, where he is met and judged not against his acquired knowledge but against his abilities to succeed in the reality of shadows to which he is not used any longer.

Keeping in that train of thought and tracing Plato’s contemplations, one arrives at the notion of science as an ideal form of thinking which could help one to differentiate between true and imaginary knowledge. Assuming the objective attitude of science, the Greek philosopher implied that the world is formed not in human imagination but there exist independent and objective ‘ideal forms’ being the highest and possibly the only true form of knowledge. The best way of cognizing such eternal forms is no other but observation, and in this observation two aspects are involved: on the one hand, sense experience is vital, and Plato supports it by saying that the prisoner who exits the cave employs first and foremost his sense of sight to perceive and recognize living creatures, objects of nature, the stars and finally, as the most noble of all visible and material things, the sun; on the other hand, subsequent analysis is an integral part of the process of cognition, as the released prisoner “would first see the sun and then reason about him” (Plato 221). Thus both sense and reason are equally important instruments of cognition, and which one is used depends on the object under consideration. Upon contemplation on the object, one derives its true meaning by clipping all the particular and incidental, and leaving the general characteristics — a trend for idealization inherent in modern science; moreover, to the idealized view of the true reality as that found only in the most common features of things Plato also added the idea that the common properties of things (i.e. the idea of form) are something objective and independent, thus possessing the quality of prior existence, irrespective of human view on them. (Lindberg 35–38)

If one undertakes to consider Plato’s allegory of the cave in a more modern context, then together with the invitation to think philosophically, to critically assess one’s environment thus involving in an endless process of (self-)education on the one hand, and to involve not only senses but also reason in the process of cognition of reality on the other hand, this allegory can be viewed, inter alia, as a first encounter between philosophy and cinema, however surprising this comparison may seem. Actually, the structure of the cinema appears to be similar to that of Plato’s cave: the audience of the movie theatre watches images produced before them on a screen. Thus, cinema is parallel to the cave in the sense that it is also a place of illusion, however sophisticatedly it may represent and reflect the reality. The difference between those two is seen in the fact that as a rule, movie-goers are fully aware of the fact that by going to the movie theatre they subject themselves to a mere projection of reality, and not to reality itself, and they do so voluntarily for the purpose of escaping from the outer world and losing themselves in the world of fantasy. Plato’s prisoners, on the other hand, are involved in a kind of deception: they do not possess sufficient information to distinguish between reality and illusion. Due to lack in information about real world, the cave prisoners are enslaved in their ignorance; their minds are stuffed with false facts which they take for true, thus turning into easily manipulated puppets. Here one can observe an important warning sent by Plato: by filling human minds with irrelevant facts and false images, it is easy to manipulate vast masses of people making them believe exactly what they want to believe and not the reality around them. (Falzon 19–23)

The meaningfulness of Plato’s allegory of the cave is endless and definitely cannot be reduced to educational, scientific and social implications only. Those are only several ways of its interpretation, and history of philosophy shows that every age provokes new viewpoints and readings of this most fruitful and seminal of philosophic images ever.

Works Cited

Barrow, Robin. Plato, Utilitarianism and Education. London: Routledge, 1975.

Falzon, Christopher. Philosophy Goes to the Movies. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Plato. The Republic of Plato. Ed. and trans. Benjamin Jowett. Elibron Classics, 2002.