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Analysis of Plato's The Allegory of The Cave

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A Summary and Analysis of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Perhaps the most famous idea in all of Plato’s work is the Allegory of the Cave. This much-discussed (and much-misunderstood) story is a key part of Plato’s Republic , a work which has the claim to be the first ever literary utopia.

In The Republic , Plato and a number of other philosophers discuss the ideal society, focusing on education, political leadership, and the role and responsibility of the individual within society.

The Allegory of the Cave represents a number of the core ideas of Plato’s thinking in one short, accessible parable. But what is the meaning of this allegory? Before we offer an analysis of Plato’s idea, here’s a summary of what he says about it in The Republic .

One of the key ideas on Plato’s Republic is his theory of forms, where ‘forms’ means much the same as ‘ideas’. And the Allegory of the Cave represents Plato’s approach to ideas.

We are invited to imagine a group of people sitting in an underground cave, facing the walls. They are chained up and they cannot move their heads. Behind them, a fire is forever burning, and its flames cast shadows onto the cave walls.

Between the fire and the cave walls, there is a road, and people walk along this road, carrying various objects: models of animals made of stone and wood, human statuettes, and other things. The people who walk along the road, and the objects they carry, cast shadows on the cave walls.

The people who are chained in the cave and facing the wall can only see the shadows of the people (and the objects they carry): never the actual people and objects walking past behind them. To the people chained up in the cave, these shadows appear to be reality, because they don’t know any better.

Reality, to these people chained in the cave, is only ever a copy of a copy: the shadows of the original forms which themselves remain beyond our view.

But someone comes and unchains the people in the cave. Now they’re free. Let’s say that one of them is set free and encouraged to look towards the fire behind him and his fellow cave-dwellers. He can now see that the things he took for reality until now were merely shadows on the wall.

But this knowledge isn’t, at first, a good thing. The revelation is almost overwhelming. The light of the fire hurts his eyes, and when he is dragged up the slope that leads out of the cave, and he sees the sun outside, and is overwhelmed by its light.

In time, however, he comes to accept that the sun is the true source of light in the world, the cause of the seasons and the annual cycle of things. And he would come to feel sorry for those who remain behind in the cave and are content to believe that the shadows on the cave wall are reality. Indeed, the people who remain behind in the cave believe he wasted his time in going outside and simply ruined his eyes for nothing.

But the man who has been outside knows there is no going back to his old beliefs: his perception of the world has changed forever. He cannot rejoin those prisoners who sit and watch the shadows on the wall. They, for their part, would resist his attempts to free them, and would sooner killer him than be led out of the cave, as he was.

And so if the man who has seen the sun returns to the cave, his eyes will take time to adjust back to the darkness of the cave and to the shadows on the wall. He will now be at a disadvantage to his fellow cave-dwellers, who have never left the cave and seen the light.

An allegory is a story that has a double meaning : as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory puts it, an allegory has a primary or surface meaning, but it also has a secondary or under-the-surface meaning. This is certainly true of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But what is its secondary meaning?

Although The Republic is classified as a work of philosophy, it is structured more like a dialogue or even a play (though not a dramatic one), in that it takes the form of a conversation between several philosophers: Socrates, Glaucon, Plato himself, and a number of other figures are all ‘characters’ in the Republic .

The Allegory of the Cave, as Plato’s comments indicate, is about the philosopher seeing beyond the material world and into the ‘intelligible’ one. The symbolism of the cave being underground is significant, for the philosopher’s journey is upwards towards higher things, including the sun: a symbol for the divine, but also for truth (those two things are often conflated in religions: Jesus, for example, referred to himself as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ in John 14:6).

Plato insists, however, that the philosopher has a duty to return to the material world, to the world of the cave and its inhabitants (or prisoners ), and to try to open their eyes to the truth. It is no good leaving the cave behind. The philosopher must return down into the cave and face ridicule or even persecution for what he has to say: he has to be prepared for the unpleasant fact that most people, contented with their mental ‘chains’ and their limited view of the world, will actively turn on anyone who challenges their beliefs, no matter how wrong those beliefs are.

People come to love their chains, and being shown that everything you’ve believed is a lie will prove too much (as Plato acknowledges) for many people, and even, initially, for the philosopher. (It is curious how prophetic Plato was: his teacher and friend Socrates would indeed be ridiculed by Aristophanes in his play The Clouds , and later he would be put on trial, and sentenced to death, for his teachings.)

In other words, those people who have seen the ideal world, have a responsibility to educate those in the material world rather than keep their knowledge to themselves. So we can see how Plato’s Allegory of the Cave relates not only to the core ideas of The Republic , but also to Plato’s philosophy more broadly.

There are several further details to note about the symbolism present in the allegory. One detail which is often overlooked, but which is important to note, is the significance of those objects which the people on the road are carrying: they are, Plato tells us, human statuettes or animal models carved from wood or stone.

Why is this significant? These objects cast their shadows on the walls of the cave, and the people chained in the cave mistake the shadows for the real objects, because they don’t know anything different. But the objects themselves are copies of things rather than the original things themselves: statues of humans rather than real humans, and models of animals rather than the real thing.

So, as Robin Waterfield notes in his excellent notes to his translation of Plato’s Republic , the objects are ‘effigies’ of real things, or reflections of types . This means that the shadows on the wall are reflections of reflections of types, therefore. So (as Waterfield puts it) the shadows on the wall might represent, say, a kind of moral action, while the objects/statues/effigies themselves are a person’s thoughts on morality.

When these thoughts are observed in the material world (i.e., on the cave wall), we are observing a moral action somebody has taken, which is a reflection of some moral code or belief (the effigy that cast the shadow).

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Plato’s Myth of the Cave and Modern Information Absorption Essay

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Although antiquity, Plato’s Myth of the Cave is extraordinarily relevant today and can be interpreted in relation to how modern man absorbs information. Thus, Plato’s myth is an allegory, revealing a series of eternal philosophical ideas. Among them is the existence of objective truth, which is independent of people’s opinions; the presence of constant deceptions that make a person stay away from this truth; and the need for qualitative changes to access the truth.

Current scenarios can be easily compared with the ideas of Plato, reflected in his myth of the cave. One example is the information broadcast by the media today. This process can be analyzed through the stages of Plato’s allegory. The starting point is deception when the reality represented by the sources of information is only a shadow of reality and is filled with subjective ideas. At this stage, people consume information without even questioning it. Plato explains why people are so easily succumbed to misinformation, which is sometimes an obvious deception. According to Lawhead (2014), the point is that when people have no reason to doubt something, they do not, and lies prevail. Thus, the majority absorbs information without giving it critical analysis.

Some manage to reach the second stage, liberation, through questioning, analysis, research, and study. People become restless and insecure at this stage as beliefs are undermined and shaken. To get through this state, it is necessary to continue to move forward and discover new knowledge. Then follows the most challenging stage of acceptance, which involves rejecting old beliefs and adopting new ones. Plato considered that the past determines how a person experiences the present (Lawhead, 2014). Therefore, the philosopher suggested that a radical change in the way of understanding things leads to confusion and discomfort.

Finally, there is the spread of new ideas, which is characterized by confusion, contempt, misunderstanding, and even hatred, as the fundamental dogmas that are generally accepted by society are questioned. Thus, the meaning of Plato’s myth lies in the fact that reality can only be comprehended after a person leaves the cave and remains there, despite the difficulties that arise. Remaining in a cave, or in the modern sense, tied to a screen, one sees a distortion of reality and remains limited by the controlling forces.

Lawhead, W. F. (2014). The voyage of discovery: A historical introduction to philosophy (4 th ed.). Cengage Learning.

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Allegory Of The Cave

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Summary: "allegory of the cave".

Plato’s Republic takes the form of a series of dialogues between the first-person narrator ( Socrates , Plato's teacher) and various real-life figures. “The Allegory of the Cave ,” perhaps the most well-known section of The Republic , takes place as a conversation between Socrates and Plato’s brother, Glaucon . In this section, Socrates attempts to illustrate a point about how one can gain knowledge and wisdom and “perceive [...] the Essential Form of Goodness” (paragraph 31, line 10), via a parable .

He asks Glaucon to imagine a set of prisoners trapped in a cave since birth, shrouded in utter darkness , and chained so that they can neither move their bodies nor even their heads to look anywhere other than the wall in front of them, so that this wall is the only thing they know of life. Then, he asks Glaucon to imagine a fire lit behind them, with a sort of puppet stage in front of the fire, so that other people could project shadow figures onto the wall in front of the prisoners, recreating the forms of people and animals and objects from outside of the cave-prison in shadow form.

Rhetorically, he asks if the prisoners would not then take these shadows as the only true objects in existence, since they could not understand that they were mere shadows of objects. The shadows would be the only thing they knew, and thus would be more real than true objects, which they had never seen. Glaucon agrees that they must think this way. Socrates then asks what would happen if one of these prisoners were freed and made to turn, finally, toward the light . He would necessarily “be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see” (paragraph 15, line 5), and would believe the shadows he has seen all his life to be more real than the objects and figures themselves. He also would find the sight of the fire itself painful and would instinctually turn away, back toward the familiar darkness.

Socrates then draws this freedom a step further, hypothetically bringing the prisoner outside of the cave into broad daylight, which would be even more confusing. Instead, he suggests, it would be better to accustom the prisoner slowly, by degrees, first viewing “shadows, and then the images of men and things reflected in water, and later on the things themselves” (paragraph 21, line 3). Finally, he could look at the sun and come to the conclusions that the sun is the main source of light in the world and affects the seasons, and other scientific extrapolations. Socrates concludes the parable by imagining the prisoner re-entering the cave: were he to do so, “his eyes would be filled with darkness” (paragraph 29, line 3), and the other prisoners would not believe him, would think him blind, and would even try to kill him if he tried to free them.

The remainder of “The Allegory of the Cave” consists of Socrates’ explication of the preceding parable, while still in conversation with Glaucon. The darkness of the cave is like visual stimuli, the fire like the sun, and the outside world in the allegory corresponds to “the upward journey of the soul into the region of the intelligible” (paragraph 31, line 5). This, then, is the “world of knowledge,” and within that world, “the last thing to be perceived and only with great difficulty is the essential Form of Goodness ,” which corresponds to the wisdom necessary to govern (paragraph 31, line 9).

He continues, saying that the enlightened individual will then abhor ignorance and be unable to explain the justice he has seen through his wisdom to those who have never seen true justice, but only its shadow. He next explains that just as all the prisoners have eyes that could see the light of the outside world, so everyone has the capacity for gaining wisdom; it is merely a matter of training one’s gaze in the right direction, and coming to it gradually, by degrees.

Socrates then turns to the matter of rulers, saying that a good ruler can neither be ignorant of the “Form of Goodness,” nor can she or he remain solely in the enlightened state, divorced from the rest of unenlightened humanity, but instead has a responsibility to share that knowledge and attempt to enlighten their fellow citizens, for “the law is not concerned to make any one class especially happy, but to ensure the welfare of the commonwealth as a whole” (paragraph 47, line 1). Socrates ends the parable with the idea that good rulers must not only be wisebut must also find the act of ruling (descending from the plane of enlightenment ) to be something of a burden, since “access to power must not be confined to men who are in love with it” (paragraph 53, line 10).

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