Allegory of the Cave
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Text length: 1,330 words
Excerpts from The Republic, Book VII
by Plato
, edited and translated by Benjamin Jowett (1901), Orignal date of work: 360 BCE
Imaginative stories can help us ask the right questions - using counter-factual or hypothetical cases can force us to question our unquestioned assumptions and, perhaps, find deeper insight
Spreading enlightenment is no easy task - communicating insight to others who are mired in established patterns of thinking can be daunting and dangerous
Keywords:
Plato, philosophy, allegory, metaphor, story, truth, perception, change, light, shadows, dialogue, reality, blindness, enlightenment
Related links:
Full text of The Republic
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Summary
Perhaps one of the most famous passages in Western philosophy, this excerpt from Book VII of Plato’s Republic is typically called the “allegory of the cave.” The speaker, Socrates, describes the scene in a dialogue with his friend and pupil, Glaucon. In the allegory, we are asked to imagine human beings who live in a cave from the moment of their birth and see only the shadows of objects and themselves projected against the wall of the cave. Of course, they take these shadows to be the objects themselves and have no conception of a different reality.
There are many philosophical questions that are explored in the allegory: the basis of knowledge, the nature of truth, and the difficulty of changing one’s beliefs. The allegory itself is a powerful strategic device – it forces us to re-imagine the world and to question the things that have never before been questioned. This sort of grand thought experiment that helps us to examine the unexamined is one of the hallmarks of a strategic mindset.
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The cave
Socrates: AND now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette-players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
Glaucon: I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
Yes, he said.
And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
Very true.
And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
No question, he replied.
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
That is certain.
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