Plato's Cave

I went to another HKSHP talk on Wednesday. It was a talk on Plato's Allegory of the Cave by Dr. Chan Chi Kwan  This allegory was used by Plato in Book VII of his masterpiece The Republic, in which he set out his ideal of what a perfect state should be, one in which society is governed by what has been called a "philosopher king".

In this allegory, Plato describes in dialogue form an imaginative conversation between Socrates and his brother Glaucon to illustrate how are our natures are enligthened or unenlightened.  In this story, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine a group of people who have lived all their lives being chained immobile from childhood to a wall in cave in which they could only look in one direction towards another blank wall. Above and behind the people was an enormous fire and in front of the fire pass along a raised walkway various people carrying "all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals made of wood, stone and various materials" the shadows of which are thus projected on to the blank wall in front of the chained people. Some of such men were talking and others silent. and "like ourselves, they only see their own shadows or the shadows of one another", which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave." There are also echoes off the wall  which they think comes from the voices of the shadows of those passers by on the walkway. To them, truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images." All through their lives, they would guess what would happen next based upon the echoes they hear which they would link to the form of the shadows they see on the blank wall.

Then one of them was freed. He walks up a path towards the entrance of the cave and as he walks past the fire, he sees how the shadows on the blank wall were caused by those figures and things in front of the fire and as he nears the entrance of the cave, he feels an excruciatingly painful sensation because his eyes are not accustomed to so much light and when he walks outside of the cave, he sees a completely different world, the real world with its flowers, trees, animals, the sun and the splendour of everything. Socates says: "At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eyes is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?", asked Socrates. "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 refuge 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?"

Socrates speculates in the allegory "Suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun itself is he not likely to be pained and irritated? And when he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anythhng at all of what are now called realities....He will require to grow accustomed to the light of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflection of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon, and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?...Last of all, he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in the water, but he will see it in its own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate it as it is....And if they were in the habit of conferring honors amongst themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer 'Better to be the poor servant of a poor master"' and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? ....And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death." 

Once the man is outside of the cave for a sufficiently long time, his eyes will adjust to the new reality and he will see more and more things as they really are and he could then look even at the sun and will understand that the sun is the source of the seasons and the years, and is the stewart of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing.Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the one who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on him, would they not kill the man who attempts to release and lead them up, wouldn't they kill him?  What he sees outside of the cave are the true forms of reality, not the mere shadows of things and figures seen by the prisoners in the cave.

Socrates compares "the region revealed through sight" to " the prison home and the light of the fire in it to the power of the Sun. He says, "the prison house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun".  And in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the soul's journey to the intelligible place, you not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region of the knowable the last things to be seen and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good, but once seen, it must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful--in the visible realm it gives birth to light and its soveregin; in the intelligble realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence--and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it." .

He speculates further on how the benighted men would act in a court room. He says that a man "is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when--with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkensss--he is compelled in the court rooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?"  About "the journey upwards ...the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world", he asks people to consider that "Whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all and is seen only with an effort; and when seen, is also inferrred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed. ....You must not wonder that those who attend to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted."  

To Plato, the freed prisoner's journey towards the true source of light, the sun, the source of  power of knowledge is a journey towards enlightenment. According to Dr. Chan, a number of conclusions may be drawn from Plato's Allegory of the Cave:

1. Man is very much a creature of habit. What he perceives is very much affected or influenced by the conditions under which he grows up and the kinds of information which were then available to him to enable him to perceive the "truth". In that sense, we are chained to the prejudices and preconceptions of our own mind and are prisoners of our own mind. We beleive that certain ideas are true because they are what we have been told by our teachers, our peers, our society and we have not yet thought them through critically and offer alternative viewpoints. To this extent, we are prisoners of our own past knowledge or ignorance.

2. When confronted with unfamiliar facts, his former beliefs will interfere with his perceptions of such new and unfamiliar facts and it takes time for his eyes to get adjusted to the new facts. Learning is process, we must take it step by step. We may lose our bearings under the new circumstances or lose our centre

3. To know reality is a painful process. We need to face uncertainty and we have to be very critical of our own and our group's accepted views, with no firm guidelines as to what is right or what is worng.. Thus some people may prefer to continue to live in the dark because it feels more comfortable to remain unchanged. We may be considered to be a traitor to our groups. Often we may have to be dragged to confront new facts

4. It may even be dangerous for an enlightened man to insist on teaching a crowd whose members are not prepared to listen to reason if what is taught goes against their accepted beliefs to which they have become attached, rightly or wrongly. We may encounter resistance from our social group, our society eg. our parents, our teachers, our church or our political, intellectual or spiritual leaders.

Plato however interprets the allegory slightly differently. He says: "Ïs there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplation to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?...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 eyes, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den".

Plato connects the Allegory of the Cave to his ultimate concern: what is good, just and beautiful. He says, "Whereas our argument shows that 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 can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words of the good."

To me, the purpose of Plato's allegory is to illustrate in a vivid form the passage of a man from a state of ignorance to that of knowledge which he believes is inherent in man and that education is merely the process whereby what is in him but clouded by bad habits is again restored to him. The kind of knowledge that Plato is concerned with is knowledge of what is just, what is true, what is beautiful and ultimately what is good and the difficulties of what may be encountered in the passage from one state to the other, the kind of knowledge which, in a later passage, he says, would "draw the soul from becoming into being.". But it also forms part of a much larger argument of what is the best form of government ie. one to be ruled by the philosopher king.  To bim, what is good is the source of all that is right and beautiful. We must all learn to come out of our respective caves before we can emerge into the light of all that is true, all that is beautiful and all that is good. But ultimately it is part of his theory of forms (ideas) under which what is transient is imperfect and only that which is permanent and not related to particular examples of the relevant things's ideal form is real and should form the subject of our knowledge.