Plato,
The Cave
This is a very brief selection from Plato’s massive work, The Republic, in which he outlines his
description of how we might build a perfect (Utopian) society. Here, in the section known as The Cave, he is
describing the condition most people live in, and what it takes to bring us out
of it, into the world of true knowledge / wisdom.
Since very few of us these days read much Plato, and almost
none of us have read The Republic,
we’re working without much context, which makes this tiny sliver of the work
even more difficult to understand.
A little background: Plato is a student of Socrates – one of
the main speakers here. In all of the
dialogues Plato wrote, he uses Socrates as his main speaker.
The dialogues are called dialectics.
This is a formal inquiry into the truth
of some question or proposition. Thus,
in theory at least, in each of the dialogues or dialectics, Plato shows
Socrates investigating some question – usually a moral question, though not
always. In the Meno, Socrates investigates virtue, and whether it is innate or has
to be taught; in Lysis, he investigates friendship. And so on.
In the Republic, which as I note above is a huge work, Plato
has Socrates inquire into both the true nature of justice and how, once we
understand what justice is, we might use that knowledge to create just polis – a just city-state.
Knowledge, for Plato has a specific meaning. Plato is careful to separate what he calls
“true opinion” from knowledge. You only
truly have knowledge, says Plato, when three things are true:
True
Knowledge requires
·
The thing must be true
·
You must have good cause to believe it is true
·
You must be able to explain why it is true (that
is, show me how you know it is true)
Take, thus, for instance, the fact that the world is
round. Is this true? Why, yes it is.
Do you have good cause to believe that this is
true? I imagine that most of you
do. Can you show me how you know it is
true?
With actual evidence, I mean? Prove to me that the world is round? I’m guessing that most of you can’t.
(Don’t get hasty here and say you have
pictures. I have pictures of Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star, after all.)
This doesn’t mean you’re wrong about the world being
round. It is round, almost
certainly. You just don’t have True
Knowledge about its roundness. What you
have is a True Opinion about its
roundness.
In fact, as you will find after a little reflection, you have
True Knowledge of only a very few things – how to get to Tulsa, how to make a
good cream sauce, what that little binging noise in your car means. Mostly what most of us have is True Opinions
about things.
Why does this matter?
It matters because what we mostly do is move through life – as
Plato notes, here in the cave – in that shadow world. We form our opinions and make our decisions
based on these True Opinions, these shadows and echoes. And it’s mostly okay, mind you.
But that is, in fact, what we’re doing, and we should realize
that.
Most of us, Plato says, are like these prisoners, chained in a
dark cave. We live like them, seeing
nothing but those shadows and hearing only echoes. If someone were to unchain us, and drag us up
into the light – this is an allegory, you’ll notice, for literal enlightenment,
forced education – we would not be grateful.
We’d be angry, in fact.
Because light hurts the eyes of someone used to dark.
This is how most people react when they’re given
knowledge. They don’t act happy! They get angry when they’re forced to realize
that what they think is knowledge is actually only opinion!
(You would think, Plato says in mock bewilderment in The Apology, that people would be
pleased when you point out that they are wrong about something.
Wouldn’t you think that?
How lovely to learn that you’re mistaken! Now you can learn how to get the thing
right! But no! People get so angry when you show them they
are wrong! How very odd!)
And this is what happens when you drag someone up from the
darkness of the cave, and show them the true forms – the trees, the rocks, the
people – that his shadows are only shapes of.
He is angry; he can’t even recognize them. He can’t really see them. He wants to go back to his cave. Maybe, Plato says, he looks at their
reflection in a puddle instead, since that’s the closest to the shadows he can
get.
Only eventually does he see the things themselves; only
eventually does he realize that the sun is the source of light.
This, says Plato, is like us.
We think we are in the real world.
In fact, we are in the cave. We
think we are acting for virtue (arête) and justice – but in fact the things we
compete for, money and power, are only shadows.
We have to be dragged out of the cave by force (because we
won’t go willingly) and forced to understand what true arête is, what real
justice is.
And then we have to be made to drag other people out too.
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