Plato's Allegory Of The Cave Quotes

How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.

... when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance.

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light

Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.

life

Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light Plato Allegory of the Cave

True, how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

On the walls of the cave, only the shadows are the truth

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

This saying is as old as Western philosophy itself, giving expression to that fundamental experience and orientation of ancient man from which philosophy begins; ἀ-λήθεια, unhiddenness, into which philosophy seeks to bring the hidden, is nothing arbitrary, and is especially not a property of a proposition or sentence, nor is it a so-called ‘value’. It is rather that reality, that occurrence [Geschehen], into which only that path (ἡ ὁδóϛ) leads of which another of the oldest philosophers likewise says: ‘it runs outside the ordinary path of men’, ἀπ´ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸϛ πάτου ἐστίυ (Parmenides, Fr. 1, 27).

Und nicht wahr, wenn man ihn zwänge, in das Licht selbst zu sehen, so würde er Schmerzen an den Augen haben, davonlaufen und sich wieder jenen Schattengegenständen zuwenden, die er ansehen kann, und würde dabei bleiben, diese wären wirklich deutlicher als die, welche er gezeigt bekam? And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

Plato’s justification of elite rule is set out in his famous Allegory of the Cave.11 It contrasts the unreality of the images by which the Many live and the true reality that only the Few can approximate.

It is the duty of us, the founders, then, said I, to compel the best natures to attain the knowledge which we pronounced the greatest, and to win to the vision of good, to scale the ascent, and when they have reached the heights and taken an adequate view, we must not allow what is now permitted. What is that? That they should linger there, I said, and refuse to go down again among those bondsmen and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less or of greater worth.

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye;

After everything we have said it is worth considering whether, if we immediately demand a propositional explanation of the highest idea, we are proceeding in a truly Platonic manner. If we ask in this way we already deviate from the path of authentic questioning. But inquiry into the idea of the good generally proceeds along this false track. One straightaway wants to know what the good is, just like one wants to know the shortest route to the market place. The idea of the good cannot be interrogated in this uncomprehending way at all. It is thus no wonder if through this way of questioning we do not receive an answer, i.e. if our claim upon the intelligibility of this idea of the good, as something to be measured in terms of our ruling self-evidences, is from the very beginning decisively repulsed. Here we recognize – how often – that questioning also has its rank-order.

Caves have carried strong symbolic resonance for as long as there has been sacred legend. It might be tempting to say that it began with Plato’s “allegory of the cave” in The Republic, which explores the interplay between shadows and reality (or in contemporary terms, perhaps, between virtual and actual reality).

You see, all our ordinary views of things are no good, they do not lead anywhere. It is necessary to think differently, and this means to see things we do not see now, and not to see things we see now. And this last is perhaps the most difficult, because we are accustomed to see certain things: it is a great sacrifice not to see the things we are accustomed to see. We are accustomed to think that we live in a more or less comfortable world. Certainly there are unpleasant things, such as wars and revolutions, but on the whole it is a comfortable and well-meaning world. It is most difficult to get rid of this idea of a well-meaning world. And then we must understand that we do not see things themselves at all. We see like in Plato’s allegory of the cave only the reflections of things, so that what we see has lost all reality. We must realize how often we are governed and controlled not by the things themselves but by our ideas of things, our views of things, our picture of things. This is the most interesting thing. Try to think about it.

As machines increasingly do more of the work, and real-life relationships lose their allure, then the allegory of Plato’s Cave becomes real. A mass of people living inside, disconnected from those who live their lives outside, systematically unable or unwilling to participate in the competition of life because they cannot stand the unpredictability of reality.

Whatever one may think of Platonic metaphysics, the political message is also clear in the allegory of the cave: the intermediary items, the “puppets,” are used as tools of manipulation to keep the shadow-watching masses in a state of perpetual ignorance: people actually fight and die over such shadows without ever realizing that there are higher, more “real” things.

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free.

THOUGHTS AND REALITY You’ve probably heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s a story narrated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, a long work published in Greece almost 2,500 years ago. In the story, prisoners in a cave are chained up in such a way that they have nothing to look at but the cave’s blank wall. But a fire is burning behind them, and when other people hold objects up in front of the fire, the shadows of those objects are projected onto the wall, where the prisoners can see them. The prisoners’ contact with these shadows, and their own thoughts about the shadows, are all they know of reality. Eventually the prisoners are freed. Only then do they discover that the world is bigger, more complex, and much more nuanced than the flickering shadows they took for reality.

But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such enquirers do not believe in the existence of the gods. And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they were made by them in the days when you were more impressible than you are now—in childhood, or it may have been in youth—and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to answer. And hardest of all, I do not know and cannot tell the names of my accusers; unless in the chance case of a Comic poet.

Thoreau stood outside the question and judged the law itself: “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” he wrote. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”29 Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective. “Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution never distinctly and nakedly behold it,” he says. One must ascend to higher ground to see reality: the government is admirable in many respects, “but seen from a point of view a little higher they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

Initially we understand nothing at all, and for this reason we ask.

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy… will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. THE REPUBLIC (BOOK 5) We can illustrate this through his famous Allegory of the Cave and his Theory of Forms. Plato believed that the world we perceive through our senses is deceptive, whereas the ideas that survive the scrutiny of rational thought are not.

Even those modern secularists and liberals who hate the metaphysics illustrated by Plato’s allegory of the cave thrill to the idea that the common man is in the grip of illusion and ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings, even if their idea of a philosopher-king would have filled Plato with abject horror.

The point I want to emphasize is that science is about physical and biological mechanisms, about discovering how things work, about engineering, about theories that describe and can predict observations that we experience entirely through our senses or their extension through instruments. It is the instruments of science that supply us with the indirect evidence of things not seen. It is like Plato’s allegory of the ave, in which reality can only be experienced as shadows on the cave wall. An experimental physicist says that he measures the “spin” of an electron, but in actuality, he records certain effects on a screen and uses the theory (his faith) to calculate its meaning as a measurement.

The Vitruvian Man sprang from the same passion. Leonardo borrowed the Roman architect Vitruvius’s belief that the parts of the human body all exist in exact proportion to one another, in order to construct a visual allegory of man’s place in the cosmos.

Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato’s cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes

Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato’s cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes me.

In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and precepts of life, we may be tempted to reverse the game, and to paint a picture of the founders of the Academy and the Lyceum as two frightened men standing in the self-same Cave, facing the wall, chained to their places in a catastrophic age, turning their back on the flame of Greece's heroic era, and throwing grotesque shadows which are to haunt mankind for a thousand years and more.