Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Plato's Allegory of the Cave · Acedra
Home
Explore
Philosophy
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
60 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:03
>> Well welcome, I'm Dr. Kleiner and I'm your philosophy professor for the day. You connections students have now all read the allegory "The Cave" a selection from Plato's "Republic" and I'm going to talk some about it today, help you unpack some of the things that are going on in it. And I hope that afterwards, you as a class and just as importantly you with your friends, talk more about it, think about different interpretations and all of the rest of it. A brief bit of background.
0:34
The "Republic" is written by Plato. The dialogue was written in around 380 b.c. Socrates is the primary character in the dialogue and there was, without doubt, a historical Socrates. There was a guy named Socrates. He was a stone cutter by trade, but a philosopher by vocation so to speak. And he had many students. One of his most famous students was Plato. So what we get though in the dialogue is a character Socrates that's in a dramatic dialogue.
1:13
Whether or not the historical Socrates had this conversation or any of the other conversations that are represented in the various Platonic dialogues is unclear. Sometimes we have reason to think that he did have these conversations. In this case, I think we have almost no reason to believe that the historical Socrates had this conversation. Instead Plato, who's obviously a great admirer of Socrates, is using Socrates here as a vehicle for putting forward some of his own ideas.
1:47
The second sort of introductory note here is the dialogue that's a passage [inaudible] the "Allegory of the Cave" is taken from "The Republic". "The Republic" is a really long dialogue, 400 or 500 pages long. The question of the overarching dialogue is what is justice? And is it better to live a just life rather than an unjust life? And they're trying to sort it out by creating a utopia. They're imagining a perfectly just city.
2:19
And then from thinking about this perfectly city they're hoping to clear up what justice is and why justice is good. This comes from book seven out of 10 books of "The Republic", so you're about three fourths of the way through the dialogue by the time this appears. But you don't really need to know much of anything about the rest of "The Republic" in order to get an awful lot out of the "Allegory of the Cave". It's probably the most famous single passage in the history of western philosophy.
2:48
Some of you have perhaps read it before in a high school class or something like this. So, all right so with that let's dig in. It's an allegory. An allegory is a kind of a story. An allegorical story is a story where the characters or the events in the story are meant to symbolize or represent something else. Very often, right, something real. Right, so something in the story is meant to stand in for something real.
3:22
Sometimes, and I think in this case, allegorical stories have a one to one relationship for a thing in a story it stands for some real thing. So an allegorical story most of you are probably familiar with is C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe", an obvious allegory. Aslan is quite obviously. >> God. >> Christ. >> Jesus, right? He dies on a stone table and all of [inaudible]. Peter is not so imaginatively, Peter, right? You know and etcetera. Yeah it's an obvious allegory.
3:54
Now not all stories are allegories. "The Lord of the Rings" that some of you might know, Tolkien was very clear that he did not want "The Lord of the Rings" to be read allegorically. The ring is not the nuclear bomb or you know isn't Satan or something like this. He didn't think it was allegorical. But this is an allegory which means that whatever characters and events are in the story, Plato thinks that there is some corresponding reality that these events and characters
4:23
in the story are meant to symbolize, okay? Well all right so, can you one of you describe -- Socrates starts off describing this image, strange image, this Glaucon who is Socrates' interlocutor here. Socrates starts off describing this strange image. What is the image? Yeah? >> There's a line of men chained together in a cave. >> Okay. >> Chained so that they cannot move their head or any other part of their body and they have to stare at the back wall of the wave.
4:55
The cave is open behind them and there's a fire like, I don't know, maybe at the mouth of the cave. And between the fire and them there's like a walkway almost. >> Yes. >> And it's [inaudible] just like a type of curtain with a walkway behind it. And people pass by on that walkway carrying like statues or like images of animals and things like that. And so what the people in the cave see are the shadows of those animals. >> Excellent. All right, now first of all, forgive the lousy drawing.
5:24
The lowest grade I got in college was in charcoal drawing. [laughter] But -- it really was. But you have these cave dwellers. They are bound up in chains such that they can't turn their heads around. And then are looking at shadows that are being cast on the wall. These shadows are being cast 'cause there's this low wall up here with a fire and people are holding things up. That's supposed to be a tree.
5:52
People are holding up trees or monkeys or you know whatever kinds of statues and they're also, we find out later, making the appropriate sounds, right? So they hold up monkeys they're making monkey sounds. And it's echoing in the base of the cave. So these people down here are seeing these shadowy images and hearing the sounds come along with them. And then you know there is up above the real exit to the cave and the sun and all of the rest of it.
6:18
Okay so Glaucon says well that's a really strange image that you've shown us and these are really strange prisoners. And Socrates says something that I hope you found a little bit disturbing. Who are these people in the allegory? >> Like us. >> They're like us. Bottom of the first page. They're like ourselves I replied. That's us. You are, Socrate -- Plato suggesting here, a prisoner in a cave looking only at the shadows of things. All right so what ends up happening here?
6:56
Before we get to that, what are they doing down there? What are these cave dwellers spending their time doing? >> They're trying to guess the objects. >> Yeah he says I'm -- >> [Inaudible] shadows. >> Yeah he says on page two, if they were able to converse with one another, would you not suppose that they were naming what comes before them? This I think is really significant. When you name something, what you're doing is you are identifying it. You're saying what it is.
7:33
I mean I have young children, right, so and my favorite age is that kind of you know around two where language pat- speech pa- language theorists call it the language explosion right, where all of the sudden kids start naming things all over the place. And it's great fun taking them to the grocery store 'cause they're just naming, naming -- apple, orange, watermelon, banana -- right? Naming everything. Now what are they doing? They're rendering their world intelligible to them right?
8:01
This activity of naming is the activity of reason. It is our reason coming to intelligently apprehend an intelligible world. Human beings, this is a pretty unique activity in the world language, this ability to name. So they're naming the things that come before them because they desire to understand, right? There's some natural impulse that they have to render intelligible their experience, the world in which they find themselves. Now of course the trouble is, that's not a tree.
8:40
It's a shadow of a statue which is itself a copy of a real tree. Right, they're many times removed from really identifying the things, giving the things the name that properly deserve the name right? The truth for them -- this is page two -- would literally be nothing but the shadows of things on the wall. Now of course they're none the wiser because they've been down there their whole lives and they've never been able to turn around and this is their whole world as it were.
9:16
They don't know anything different. Okay so now what ends up happening in the story? >> The prisoners get released. >> One of them gets released. We don't really get told how. He gets released and what does he do? >> He leaves the cave. >> He leaves the cave. He starts, so-- >> Doesn't he stand and like feel pain because he's been stuck in the same position watching the wall? >> Yeah and it's worth noting, and this is on page two, one of them is released and disabused of their error.
9:46
At first when any of them is liberated and compelled to stand up -- you get the sense that one of them gets released but he keeps just sitting there. He has to be made to turn around. He's compelled to turn around. 0 And when he does turn around, it's painful for him because he's been, well it's like the experience when you go to a matinee movie and then if you go out the side exit where you go just immediately outside so your eyes are adjusted to the dark
10:14
and then you go outside and you're, you know, the gl- the light is dazzling to you and it's disorienting and even a little bit painful. That's the experience that he has. So he turns around and it's, you know the light from the fire is so bright that it's, he's pained, he's uncomfortable and pretty unhappy. And then he's told by the person who's taking him out, hey these things here, these things are nearer to being than the things you were seeing before.
10:48
These things are more real than the things you were seeing before. Now his, what do you expect his response is to that? >> [Inaudible] >> You're crazy, right? What kind of nonsense are you talking about? This is craziness. So then page three, suppose once more he's reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent. He's hardly a voluntary parti- dragged out and held fast, now in the sunlight. You can imagine how disturbing that is to his eyesight having had his eyes
11:22
for his whole eyes been adjusted to the dark of the cave. He's held down, you know look at it, the light, look at it. Agh! Right? And it's really traumatizing for him right? And he's pained and dazzled and irritated and really, really unhappy. Except eventually his eyes adjust, right, and he starts kind of first looking at you know things and then kind of slowly looks up, looks at the tree and then finally even though his mom told him not to he looks directly at the sun.
11:57
[laughter] And when he looks at the sun, he sees the truth of everything. This is page three. Last of all he'll be able to see the sun and not mere reflections of him in the water. But he will see him -- he's kind of personalizing the sun here -- in his own proper place and not in another and he will contemplate him as he is and he'll see the sun as the thing who gives the seasons of the years and the years and is in a certain sense the cause of everything else that is.
12:30
The sun somehow what he gets to here is like the first principle of everything else. And having apprehended the first principle of everything else, he's become wise. He has knowledge. He understands everything. And he's overjoyed and he looks back at his former comrades in the base of the cave and he feels sorry for them. But he doesn't get to stay out there, he's made to go back down. And what is his experience when he returns?
13:05
Yeah? >> Well he's chained up again and he goes back to like playing the game of like naming the things that are on the wall. He's terrible at it because his eyes aren't adjusted to the dark. And so all the rest of his comrades in the cave begin to like make fun of him like oh we're never going to leave the cave. Like if someone comes out we're going to try to, if someone comes to get one of us we're going to turn on them and kill them so that they don't take us out.
13:28
>> Yeah so you can imagine this guy's response. He comes down, he says hey guys guess what? You've been living a lie your whole lives. Nothing that you believe is really true. But I've seen the light, literally right? You know the allegory here's pretty obvious. I've seen the light, I've seen the truth, and come with me you've got to check this out. And they -- you're crazy right? Well all right let's see how great you are and they play like a cave dwellers jeopardy game [laughter].
13:55
It's like a knowledge bowl. Who can name the most things that come in front? And you'll see around campus, you'll see -- it must be in some you know forestry class or something -- you'll see students on campus walking around with a clipboard looking really closely and intently at trees. And I presume what they're doing is who can sort of identify the various species of tree around campus? And the students that know the most will be able to name the greatest number of trees
14:20
as they walk around with their little clipboards. I mean that's what it is to have knowledge in a certain sense is to know the name of a thing. That's why when somebody says something rotten about us or something we say well that person, she doesn't even know my name, right? She doesn't know me 'cause she hasn't named me. She doesn't know my name. So these people down in the base of the cave, they're like well all right let's--
14:39
smartypants, let's see how much wisdom you've actually acquired and he does terribly right? Because he has the reverse problem. You have this, sometimes your roommate, like you're getting ready to go to bed and your roommate flips off the light without warning you and if you're staring up at the ceiling you get those like starbursts in your eyes and you're disoriented just in the opposite direction. So he does terribly at the game and it's not just that they laugh at him,
15:03
they think look this guy's dangerous. He's coming down, upsetting everybody's kind of conventional opinion about things. And so yeah, they say at the bottom of page four, if anybody else tries to pull what this guy's pulled, we'll catch them, we'll kill them. Plato's clearly referencing Socrates here because Socrates was tried, found guilty, and ultimately executed in Athens for practicing philosophy. For upsetting people by challenging their conventional opinions and there's no doubt
15:36
that Plato is thinking of Socrates there, right? Because this was written about 20 years after Socrates had died. Well okay, let's think of it more about the allegory. The sun is you know the truth of everything in some sense. It's a first principle of everything else. We know these people are supposed to be like us. He didn't ever tell us who these people were. Who do you think those people might be? Any ideas? Yeah? >> Maybe those in power. Those who like to keep others in the dark.
16:21
>> So these people are most definitely in a position of extraordinary power, right? Because whatever they hold up determines the opinions and beliefs and attitudes of everybody else. They are in a position of incredible power. In our society who might these people be? Who are the opinion makers? That's what these people are, they're the opinion makers. >> Maybe like the government [inaudible]. >> Yeah the government which shapes opinions by making laws that, right,
16:57
that encourage certain behaviors, discourage other kinds of behaviors, encourage certain attitudes, discourage others. So the state. >> Teachers or mentors. >> Teachers. You could really get into a kind of Pink Floydy kind of interpretation here of teachers you know leave those kids alone, stop indoctrinating them into whatever ideology it is that the teachers are trying to indoctrinate them into. And of course parents. Good parenting is just another way to say brainwashing your children, right?
17:28
Because you want your children to believe this and you don't want them to believe that and you do a whole bunch of things to try to encourage them to believe that it's good to share and you know be honest and don't tell lies and all of these other kinds of things. >> Religious leaders. >> Religious leaders. Priest and ministers of whatever stripes who are shaping the opinions and beliefs of their flock as it were. One more big one I think. >> I think the media.
17:54
>> Yeah. You know where do people get a lot of their opinions and ideas that they have about what love is and what marriage is supposed to look like but from you know television shows and movies and all of the r- music that we listen to. It's a powerful force in shaping people's opinions. So good. All right. So last bit of the allegory you have these sort of two worlds. You've got the base of the cave and then this world outside of the cave. What does Socrates say these two worlds stand for?
18:43
What is the base of the cave? >> [Inaudible] society. >> Society. It certainly is the world of kind of conventional opinion and conventional you know practice. >> Ignorance. >> These people are definitely ignorant. Because what is ignorance? Ignorance is misnaming things right? Saying something is X when it's not X. But he gives more of a metaphysical interpretation himself. Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy that studies reality.
19:15
And he says on page five that this world down here is the sensible world. It's, you know, the physical world. And this world up here he says is the intellectual world, the world of ideas. And there's, so there is this sort of really interesting metaphysical claim here that Plato seems to think that mental reality, the world of ideas and of intelligence, is more real than the material world where things change all the time and they come and go.
19:56
You might think of it in this way, the idea of a triangle, a triangle is the three sided enclosed figure whose interior angles sum to 180 degrees. That's an idea. Now, you know there are material triangles, but those material triangles, they come and go. They don't last very long. In that sense they're like shadows. They appear, but then they disappear. Whereas the idea, it remains always and forever so long as there's a, at least as long as there's a mind to think it.
20:32
For us though if you want to get into the cool metaphysical interpretations, take a philosophy class. For us, here's a bit, sort of a toned down interpretation of it. This is the world of conventional opinion. People here have just accepted what they've been shown. They haven't fought about it. They are very passive observers and passive inheritors of the opinions that they have. This process here as we'll talk about in a minute is the process of getting educated.
21:07
And if nothing else the person who escapes the cave is critically appropriating and inquiring into the beliefs that he has. Which is a timely thing, right? You're all about to start college. And you've inherited a whole bunch of opinions from your parents and your pastors and your priests and your friends in the media and all the whole rest of it. The super exciting thing about the thing you get to do now is think about it. I've always been told that this is true, do I think it is?
21:37
Why do I think it's true? Are there good reasons for thinking it, right? And a kind of critical assessment of those kinds of things. But really the meaning that I think is worth us focusing on, though Socrates himself focuses on it, is thinking of the allegory as telling us something about education. This is page six.
22:07
Socrates said, he's talking about two different kinds of confusion. Sometimes people get confused when they're going from the dark to the light because it takes their eyes a while to adjust, and sometimes people get confused because they're going from the light to the dark and it takes their eyes a while to adjust. But he makes actually a good practical point for students. He says don't ever be too ready to laugh at someone who's confused because people are confused for one of two reasons.
22:33
They're either going from lack of clarity to clarity, in which case you should be happy for them. Or they're going from a place of clarity to a lack of clarity in which case you should feel bad for them. But in either case, don't laugh at confused people, right? They're moving in one of the two directions. But talking about this confusion then he says on the middle of page six, but then if I'm right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge
22:59
into the soul which was not there before like putting sight into blind eyes.
23:09
Some -- Paulo Freire calls this view the banking model of education. In the banking model of education the professor has some capital -- knowledge. The students all have empty accounts. And they passively sit there while the professor distributes his capital into the student accounts. The students will every once in a while make a deposit of their own in the form of a test or a paper or a quiz, but only to make the ultimate withdrawal at the end of a degree.
23:45
But Socrates says no no no, that model of education where the student passively sits there while he just receives knowledge from his professors is wrong. He says no instead what our allegory has shown is that -- this is continuing on page six -- the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already, and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge, the mind, can only by the movement
24:19
of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming to that of being. The problem with these people in the base of the cave isn't that they've, there's something wrong with their minds. Their problem is literally they're just looking at the wrong stuff. They need to turn around. Convert is actually another translation of the verb that's used there. Turn around, reorient themselves. Not just sit there and wait for somebody to bring light down into the cave.
24:52
They have to turn around and escape the cave for themselves. Now a condition of this he says is that they have to turn their whole soul. He says if you want to see what's behind you he says you have to turn your whole body because we're not owls, we have to turn our whole body around in order to see what's behind us. So he says you have to turn the whole soul around to turn the mind around. [Inaudible] the whole soul. You have a mind. What else do you have?
25:19
What are some other sort of basic features of the human condition? >> A body. >> You've got a mind. You've got a body. And along with the body comes?
25:30
>> Heart. >> So spirit, you know? The heart. >> Bodily passions. >> Passions. Desires. An appetite. And then you've got a mind. And he says, and you have to turn the whole soul around. Education, your capacity to get an education is as much if not more a function of your desire as it is a power of your mind. Your mind's just fine. The difference between my best students and my worst students is rarely a difference in mental capacity. It's almost always a difference in desire.
26:11
Because you've got all kinds of desires right? You want to watch CSI Anchorage Alaska [laughter] or whatever. There's so many versions of that. And if you're sitting at home and you're like well all right, I really want to watch CSI Anchorage, but I know I have this studying to do tomorrow right? That des- it's the desire. It's whether or not your desire has been turned towards the object of understanding or not. Turned towards the task of education or not, that will determine your success.
26:41
It's very rarely as a mental deficiency [inaudible] student not being capable of understanding calculus. You're all capable of understanding calculus, it's about whether or not you want to or not that separates students out. The problem with these people in the base of the cave is that they've got, they're looking at the wrong things and they've got disordered desires. They need to desire an education with their whole person because you won't succeed
27:08
in getting an education if you just think you can do that with your mind but desire everything else at the same time. And that's why he criticizes on page seven these people with excessive attachment to sensual pleasures. Too much caring about what's going on in the base of the cave. And not enough desire for knowledge itself. Well some other things I think we could say here about education. One, he rejects the banking model and instead says that students themselves have to be active.
27:45
It's not a passive reception of knowledge, you, it's your education. It isn't mine. It isn't any of your other professors. It's yours. So you have to seize it. Nobody can get an education for you. You have to get it for yourself. Now, one other thing we, conclusion we might draw is that this will sometimes be painful for you.
28:12
The guy escaping the cave, the guy who's getting an education, he's not always happy about what's happening. Because there's probably lots of other fun things to do, right, other than wrestling through a passage of Kont's first critique or trying to understand quantum mechanics, right? I mean sometimes that can be painful and fatiguing and all of the rest of it. But you know that's just, he thinks in a certain sense, a necessary part of it.
28:40
Now one last question, the other thing, he never told us who the person was, is somebody came down and released the person and guided them out, sometimes dragging them when necessary. Who was that person? Any guesses? I mean he doesn't say. He gives us actually very little in the way of a clue. My reading is that that person's a teacher.
29:11
Socrates calls teachers, he compares a teacher to a midwife. A midwife doesn't give birth. She, it's not her pain. The sweat is not on her brow. It's, the midwife has seen a lot of people give birth. She's coached a lot of people through it, but it's not her birthing process. It's not hers. And the way your teachers, it's not their education it's yours. They can coach you through, tell you when you push and push and push, and it'll be painful.
29:47
Sometimes tell you ease up for a while, take a break, you've done enough of this, now move on to this other thing. But their job is to lead you somewhere, though ultimately nobody can be led where they don't want to go. Nobody can be taken to a place where they don't desire to go, which it doesn't matter how great your professors are, if you don't desire an education yourself, you won't get it. Your education will be -- to push the midwife analogy -- aborted somewhere along the way.
30:21
And that happens sometimes unfortunately. Well all right, there's lots of other interpretations you could give of this allegory -- political interpretations, cultural interpretations. By no means would I want to insist that the reading I'd given it here is the only reading that could be given. And I hope that with your connections classes you talk about other possible interpretations, unpack these ideas more, think more about it, talk about it with your roommates and all the rest of it.
30:50
You'll be taking a quiz pretty soon so you'll also want to think clearly about the lecture and the reading and all the rest to prepare for the quiz. Have a good day, thank you.
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat