Interpreting Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s “allegory of the cave” (alternately “parable of the cave”) is a rather popular philosophical example. It’s taught in classrooms and appears often enough in internet posts and videos to outpace other philosophical thought experiments, save perhaps Zeno of Elea’s famous “Achilles and the Tortoise” problem. Ostensibly it’s taught to impart some kind of wisdom or other, and it is unfortunately many people’s first contact with philosophy — unfortunate because it’s often spoken of as imparting some common-sense knowledge, and the entire context of Plato, ancient Greek philosophy, and philosophy in general are left out.
It’s one part of Plato’s “The Republic”, known in its own time as “On Justice”, and is another use of Plato’s “fictitious” Socrates (Socrates himself has no extant writings; all we know of him are what we divine through reading Plato, which becomes difficult when we imagine Plato easily injecting his own views into the mouth of his teacher).
The usual gist is one of mysticism and erudite wisdom as we’re introduced to the allegory. Plato asks us to imagine men chained up in a cave, unable to leave and forced to stare at the side of the cave opposite the entrance.
When anything passes by the mouth of the cave the chained men see only the shadows generated by the true objects moving outside. This is how they construct their view of the world.
But what happens, Plato asks, if one of the chained men escapes the cave? He is able to roam outside and see the world for what it actually is.
But the man ultimately wants to help those in the cave, and so returns to explain to them that what they have been seeing this whole time is an illusory world of shadows, not actual reality.
The man — the sage — is ridiculed as insane. He is blinded from his time outside, and can no longer see in the dark cave. The chained men think this outside world has harmed the sage, and they believe the shadow world to be the real one which this man can no longer understand.
And so it’s usually concluded: Things are not what they seem, and those with knowledge are often ridiculed by the ignorant who don’t know any better. We can’t be sure that what we’re seeing is the shadow world, or the real world — we need to be careful about making truth claims, because we could be looking at mere shadows.
This reading is almost completely detached from Plato and is most definitely wrong. You can interpret it this way as a text, but I would argue that this is not what Plato intended to write, and makes no sense at all in the context of “The Republic” and his body of work as a whole.
What did he intend to write?
First, the thing to understand about Plato and the movement within ancient Greek philosophy beginning with Socrates is what they were trying to do. They were concerned with “ arete”, which means something like “virtue”. Socrates and Plato wanted you to practice philosophy (philo + sophia = “knowledge lover”) in order to make yourself into the best person you could logically be.
While philosophy was very different from the state religion (polytheism; think of Olympian gods; Zeus and Apollo), it is also thought that Plato’s Academy was a mystery cult — a secret club which kept an oral history reserved only for initiates. It’s thought that the majority of Plato’s teachings are then lost oral traditions, kept secret by his initiates. To put things into perspective, Pythagoras famously had a mystery cult which managed to control the political system of the Greek city-states in Southern Italy for a time. Serious business.
This is not to discredit Plato, but to illustrate the kind of force Plato exerted on Greek culture when he was alive. Today philosophy can be detached and theoretical, but in Plato’s time it was explicitly about a way of life. Plato’s connection with mysticism is another story entirely, but I want to be clear that Plato was not simply trying to prove theoretical, academic points — he was trying to convince people to live like he did.
“The Republic” then is not just a treatise about how to arrange a city — its thesis is: “It is always better to be just than unjust”. The city planning, while perhaps concrete in some ways — it was not unheard of for a philosopher to draft a new city-state’s constitution — was meant to be an easy to understand large-scale version of the individual human “soul”. Its ancient name “On Justice” is indeed more appropriate.
So, what does the allegory of the cave have to do with justice?
Plato held a view commonly referred to as the “theory of the forms”. The gist is that he wants you to think of the objects of experience as imperfect replications of ideal objects, which reside in “heaven”. The chair you are sitting on is not a perfect chair, it is an imperfect copy of the ideal chair — a thing so perfect it could never instantiate in our reality. It’s kind of like this: If you close your eyes and imagine a perfect circle, you have the idea of a circle. Now you can go around identifying circular things around you, but note that none of them are like the imagined circle — perfect circles don’t exist in nature. Yet somehow, we can imagine one. Plato thinks this must mean they exist somewhere, or somehow.
The boundary between the cave and the outside world represents the difference between “doxa” and “episteme”. For Plato, doxa refers to common belief — the word roughly translates to something like “appearance”. Episteme is knowledge, or what is known as true justified belief — this translates to “to know” and is opposite the Greek term “techne” which Plato distinguishes as mere technical knowledge, or craftsmanship.
Plato then regards “justice” in this fashion. Although it can be argued that his specific example in the allegory is education in general, its placement in the text of “The Republic” is such that it also communicates this theory of forms. Plato wants to relate to his audience what it would mean to contemplate the existence — the ontological status (onto + logy = “existence science”) — of a thing like justice, and how we could know it — its epistemic status (epistemology being the study of the nature of knowledge). Interpretations of Plato’s ontological commitments are many and byzantine, but all we need to know here is that this is the way in which he means to discuss the allegory.
The allegory of the cave is offered in this capacity. The shadows of objects inside of the cave are the objects of the forms existing imperfectly in our reality. We perceive them as such and believe them to be real. But Plato wants to insist that outside the cave are the real things, the forms themselves. Not unlike Indian and Buddhist thought, the man who becomes enlightened (a sage or a bodhisattva) chooses to return to help the people, but is regarded as insane for his knowledge of the true nature of reality.
Plato is making an ontological claim that the world around us is illusory, and that real knowledge is rational (of the mind) and not empirical (observational)— this is an epistemic claim as well as an ontological claim. Nothing in the world is real (like the shadows), and true knowledge resides in knowing the forms (the objects outside the cave).
Plato is not here prompting his readers to withhold their judgement or examine situations critically in their daily lives— rather he would like them to accept this part of his doctrine so that he may move on to another part of his argument, so that it may be grounded in this point. Plato is, while simultaneously making a point about the process of education and enlightenment, trying to change the entire worldview of his readers.
Because of this, there is little pragmatic advice to be taken from the allegory — like we might expect of the “philosophy” that we encounter today in magazines and on television. Plato is offering a kind of self-help program, but it’s of a more mystical tone than a Tony Robbins telling you to feel good about yourself. Plato wants to change your epistemic and ontological commitments in order to achieve arete (moral virtue).
