THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE HOW TO
THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE SERIES

In connection with this theme, I argue that, by disrupting the common assumption that the prisoners represent all of humanity, we are able to appreciate better the way in which the imagery in the Cave is meant to point back to the various discussions at the beginning of The Republic concerning sophistic education and culture (especially the theatrical culture of tragedy and comedy), as well as to anticipate the ending discussion on art in Book X. In section 3, I question the first assumption and suggest that we should rather interpret the prisoners as representing Socrates and his interlocutors, that is, as standing for philosophically minded people who are interested in virtue and the good life. In section 2, I will briefly present the standard story and the two main assumptions that support the alleged epistemological parallelism between the Line and the Cave: first, that the prisoners represent humankind in general, and, second, that the cave itself represents the visible world of ordinary experience while the world outside the cave represents the intelligible realm of the Forms. 3 My modest aim in what follows will be to offer a fresh new reading that may lend a little more support to this silenced minority position, in the hope that one day the tide may turn in favor of what I take to be a more adequate way to approach this famous allegory.Ĭounting this introduction, my paper is divided into six parts. In this paper, I will side with those few who take the derelict path of rejecting the parallelism between the Line and the Cave, and especially with Ferguson and his prescient view that the Cave must be read as fundamentally a political, not an epistemological, allegory. 2 The more simple and, as I hope to show, also more natural solution of desisting altogether from the task of finding this kind of epistemological correspondence between the images is rarely attempted. Since the difficulties of finding said correspondence are immediately evident to anyone who attempts the task, it has been necessary to devise ingenious, if often strained, solutions to the problem. So a fresh reconsideration of it may be warranted.įor the most part, it is unquestionably assumed that Plato intended a one-to-one correspondence between the different sections of the Line and the various stages in the prisoner's drama, leading him from his initial condition of bondage through his upward journey, after his liberation, out of the cave and into the sunlight.

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE HOW TO

It is, however, a reading that, I think somewhat surprisingly, has been relegated to a fringe position within a debate that -at least in the English speaking literature on the subject- is completely dominated by the problem of how to understand and defend the Cave's alleged epistemological parallelism to the Line.

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE SERIES

It was preceded by a series of very insightful papers written by one of this allegory's most eminent interpreters, A.S. 1 Indeed, in the case of the present essay this might seem especially pertinent, since the reading that I will be defending here is not particularly new or original. The audacity of attempting another reading of Plato's allegory of the Cave may require some kind of justification. Palabras clave: Platón, alegoría, caverna, cultura, política. La suspensión de estos supuestos posibilita una lectura que resalta los temas culturales y políticos que están en juego en esta famosa alegoría.

Sobre la base de evidencia textual, se ponen en duda las dos hipótesis principales sobre las que se funda el esfuerzo por encontrar un paralelo epistemológico entre la caverna y la línea: que los prisioneros representan a la humanidad en general, y que la caverna simboliza el mundo visible de la experiencia corriente, mientras el mundo fuera de esta representa el reino de las ideas. Keywords: Plato, allegory, cave, culture, politics.Įl artículo sostiene que la caverna de Platón es fundamentalmente una alegoría política, no epistemológica, y que solo así podremos apreciar la relación que guarda con las imágenes del sol y de la línea. The suspension of these assumptions makes possible a reading that highlights the cultural and political issues at stake in this famous allegory. On the basis of textual evidence, the article raises questions regarding the main hypotheses grounding the effort to find an epistemological parallel between the cave and the line: that the prisoners represent humanity in general, and that the cave symbolizes the visible world of everyday experience, while the world outside the cave represents the realm of ideas.

The article argues that Plato's cave is fundamentally a political and not an epistemological allegory, and that only if we see it thus can we understand its relation to the images of the sun and the line.

The allegory of the cave