Chapter 11 – Soul, Mind, Body – Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Republic has four important allegories or metaphors to bring forth the Realities and Illusions experienced by all human beings in their pursuit of true knowledge.

They are:
1. The Allegory of the Cave
2. The Allegory of the Sun
3. The Allegory of the Divided Line
4. The Allegory of the Chariot.

Of these four allegories, the Allegory of the Cave is the main concept and the other three are supplementary to the main concept and are even complementary to the main. These four allegories together bring out the fallacy of the human beings in distinguishing and also understanding the real forms from the unreal forms or shadows and also unreal speech or echoes so as to have a real knowledge about all things around. Of these four allegories, the allegory of the divided line is the most obscure and most difficult to fully assimilate and grasp the meanings that Plato wants to convey.

Now, let us deal with the allegory of the cave as expounded by Plato in the Republic Book No. VII. The entire allegory is described as a dialogue between Socrates and Plato’s brother, Glaucon.

Socrates describes the cave in great details. The two pictures published - at first page and here on the left, are the graphic drawings of the descriptions of the cave.
There are people inside the cave. These people are prisoners from their childhood. Their hands and legs are chained and they cannot move. They cannot also move their heads around. Their visions are restricted to see only the wall of the cave in front of them. Above and behind them, there is a huge fire blazing at a distance.

There is a low wall behind the prisoners. There is a walkway between the fire and the low wall. Players carry all sorts of objects – vessels, statues, figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials like a puppet show. Some of them are talking, others silent.
Hence the prisoners are only exposed to the shadows of the objects held by the players being projected on the wall of the cave in front of them and also to the echoes of the talking objects passing through the walkway.

The prisoners in chains decipher the shadows and consider these shadows to be part of the real world. They start naming each and every object. The intellects of the prisoners are being judged by their ability to know these objects from their shadows and their echoes. The idea of the world for prisoners is limited within the boundaries of the cave and they have become pseudo intellectuals due to their wrong understanding of the world based on false forms of shadows and false sound of echoes.

Then, is there any salvation for the prisoners? – Socrates himself poses this question to Glaucon and answers as well.

Socrates answers thus: Suppose a prisoner manages to escape from the cave and goes outside the cave to see the world at large. As this prisoner also is confined to the four walls of the cave with dim light previously, the sudden bright rays of the sun make him his gaze away from it. Slowly, he gets accustomed to the existence of the new world, which exposes the fallacy of that inside the cave. He now discovers the reality and becomes intellectual. He experiences the beauty of Mother Nature and a divine experience of the newly found mystical world. The prisoner has now become a philosopher.

‘Is it not the duty of the prisoner turned philosopher to awaken his other prisoners to the reality?’ – Socrates asks Glaucon thus.

Socrates then proceeds to explain the situations.

The awakened prisoner comes back to the cave and tries to persuade his companions that outside there are a more real world and what all has been seen by them are mere shadows of the real objects. He tries to point out the deep rooted ignorance of the fellow prisoners who are trapped with their own confinement of pseudo intellectualism. But the prisoners try to resist enlightenment and condemn him for the moral misconduct and loss of ethical values.

These values, which are not governed by tautologies of nature but the fallacy of shadows casted on the wall, are considered to be the truth by the prisoners of the cave.

Everything that goes beyond these values tends to lie in the domain of unconventional thoughts, which are always resisted by human beings. Majority of the prisoners, due to their long association with dim light cave, seem to be comfortable in their shackles and any new bright exposures are seen as ‘false and unethical’! Hence, the prisoner turned philosopher is able to convince only a handful of prisoners in the cave.

Real Knowledge is to be sought outside the cave, but, most of the humanity due to their preconceived wrong belief and opinion is very much ill equipped to face the truth with the torch of intelligence.

Enlightenment is not that easy.
( To be continued.)