Extracts of Plato’s Cave:
(Plato’s Book Republic – 514a to 517a)
Translated by: Waterfield, Robin. Republic (Oxford World's Classics) OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
(Socrates is recounting a discussion he has had previously with his friend Glaucon - regarding the education of the young - and the future leaders of the Athenian state.)
The Prisoner Ascends from the
Cave (Plato’s Republic – 514a to 517a)
514a ‘Next,’ I said, ‘here’s a situation which you can
use as an analogy for the human condition—for our education or lack of it.
Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end
of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world.
They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way
which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but
not to turn their heads. There’s firelight burning a long way further up the
cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a
road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built—like the partition
which conjurors place between themselves and their audience and above which
they show their tricks.’ b
‘All right,’ he said.
‘Imagine also that there are people on the other side of this
wall who are carrying all sorts of artefacts. These artefacts, human
statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of
materials stick out over the wall; and as you’d expect, some of the people talk
as they carry these objects along, while others are silent.’ c
This is a strange picture you’re painting,’ he said, ‘with
strange prisoners.’ 515a
‘They’re no different from us,’ I said. ‘I mean, in the first
place, do you think they’d see anything of themselves and one another except
the shadows cast by the fire on to the cave wall directly opposite them?’
‘Of course not,’ he said.
‘They’re forced to spend their lives without moving
their heads.’ ‘And what about the objects which were being carried along? Won’t
they only see their shadows as well?’ b
‘Naturally.’
‘Now, suppose they were able to talk to one another:
don’t you think they’d assume that their words applied to what they saw passing
by in front of them?
‘They couldn’t think otherwise.’
“And what if sound echoed off the prison wall opposite them?
When any of the passers-by spoke, don’t you think they’d be bound to assume
that the sound came from a passing shadow?’
‘I’m absolutely certain of it,’ he said.
‘All in all, then,’ I said, ‘the shadows of artefacts would
constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize.’ c
‘That’s absolutely inevitable,’ he agreed. d
‘What do you think would happen, then,’ I asked, ‘if they were
set free from their bonds and cured of their inanity? What would it be like if
they found that happening to them? Imagine that one of them has been set free
and is suddenly made to stand up, to turn his head and walk, and to look
towards the firelight. It hurts him to do all this and he’s too dazzled to be
capable of making out the objects whose shadows he’d formerly been looking at.
And suppose someone tells him that what he’s been seeing all this time has no
substance, and that he’s now closer to reality and is seeing more accurately,
because of the greater reality of the things in front of his eyes—what do you
imagine his reaction would be? And what do you think he’d say if he were shown
any of the passing objects and had to respond to being asked what it was? Don’t
you think he’d be bewildered and would think that there was more reality in
what he’d been seeing before than in what he was being shown now?’
‘Far more,’ he said.
‘And if he were forced to look at the actual firelight, don’t
you think it would hurt his eyes? Don’t you think he’d turn away and run back
to the things he could make out, and would take the truth of the matter to be
that these things are clearer than what he was being shown?’ e
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
‘And imagine him being dragged forcibly away from there up the
rough, steep slope,’ I went on, ‘without being released until he’s been pulled
out into the sunlight. Wouldn’t this treatment cause him pain and distress? And
once he’s reached the sunlight, he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the
things which are currently taken to be real, would he, because his eyes would
be overwhelmed by the sun’s beams?’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ he answered, ‘not straight away.’516a
‘He wouldn’t be able to see things up on the surface of the
earth, I suppose, until he’d got used to his situation. At first, it would be
shadows that he could most easily make out, then he’d move on to the
reflections of people and so on in water, and later he’d be able to see the
actual things themselves. Next, he’d feast his eyes on the heavenly bodies and the
heavens themselves, which would be easier at night: he’d look at the light of
the stars and the moon, rather than at the sun and sunlight during the
daytime.’ b
‘Of course.’
And imagine, he’d be able to discern and feast his eyes on the
sun—not the displaced image of the sun in water or elsewhere, but the sun on
its own, in its proper place.’
‘Yes, he’d inevitably come to that,’ he said.
‘After that, he’d start to think about the sun and he’d deduce
that it is the source of the seasons and the yearly cycle, that the whole of
the visible realm is its domain, and that in a sense everything which he and
his peers used to see is its responsibility.’ c
‘Yes, that would obviously be the next point he’d come to,’ he
agreed.
‘Now, if he recalled the cell where he’d originally lived and
what passed for knowledge there and his former fellow prisoners, don’t you
think he’d feel happy about his own altered circumstances, and sorry for them?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Suppose that the prisoners used to assign prestige and credit
to one another, in the sense that they rewarded speed at recognizing the
shadows as they passed, and the ability to remember which ones normally come
earlier and later and at the same time as which other ones, and expertise at
using this as a basis for guessing which ones would arrive next. Do you think
our former prisoner would covet these honours and would envy the people who had
status and power there, or would he much prefer, as Homer describes it, “being
a slave labouring for someone else—someone without property”, and would put up
with anything at all, in fact, rather than share their beliefs and their
life?’ d
‘Yes, I think he’d go through anything rather than live that
way,’ he said. e
‘Here’s something else I’d like your opinion about,’ I said.
‘If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn’t the
sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by
darkness?’
‘Certainly,’ he replied.
‘Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time,
and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn’t seeing
well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at
identifying those shadows. Wouldn’t he make a fool of himself? Wouldn’t they
say that he’d come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that
it wasn’t even worth trying to go up there? And wouldn’t they—if they could—grab
hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there, and kill
him?’
‘They certainly would,’ he said. 517a
The Escaped Prisoner Must Go Down Into The
Darkness Again To Help The Others
(Republic-519c/d to 520e):
‘Our job as founders, then,’ I said, ‘is to make sure that the
best people come to that fundamental field of study (as we called it earlier):
we must have them make the ascent we’ve been talking about and see goodness.
And afterwards, once they’ve been up there and had a good look, we mustn’t let
them get away with what they do at the moment.’ e
‘Which is what?’
‘Staying there,’ I replied, ‘and refusing to come back
down again to those prisoners, to share their work and their rewards, no matter
whether those rewards are trivial or significant.’
‘But in that case,’ he protested, ‘we’ll be wronging them:
we’ll be making the quality of their lives worse and denying them the better
life they could be living, won’t we?’
‘You’re again forgetting, my friend,’ I said, ‘that the point
of legislation is not to make one section of a community better off than the
rest, but to engineer this for the community as a whole. Legislators should
persuade or compel the members of a community to mesh together, should make
every individual share with his fellows the benefit which he is capable of
contributing to the common welfare, and should ensure that the community does
contain people with this capacity; and the purpose of all this is not for
legislators to leave people to choose their own directions, but for them to use
people to bind the community together.’ e
520a
‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting.’ b
‘I think you’ll also find, Glaucon,’ I said, ‘that we
won’t be wronging any philosophers who arise in our community. Our remarks, as
we force them to take care of their fellow citizens and be their guardians,
will be perfectly fair. We’ll tell them that it’s reasonable for philosophers
who happen to occur in other communities not to share the work of those
communities, since their occurrence was spontaneous, rather than planned by the
political system of any of the communities in question, and it’s fair for
anything which arises spontaneously and doesn’t owe its nurture to anyone or
anything to have no interest in repaying anyone for having provided its
nourishment. “We’ve bred you, however,” we’ll say, “to act, as it were, as the
hive’s leaders and kings, for your own good as well as that of the rest of the
community…..
You’ve received a better and more thorough education than
those other philosophers, and you’re more capable of playing a part in both
spheres. So each of you must, when your time comes, descend to where the rest
of the community lives, and get used to looking at things in the dark. The
point is that once you become acclimatized, you’ll see infinitely better than
the others there; your experience of genuine right, morality, and goodness will
enable you to identify every one of the images and recognize what it is an
image of.
And then the administration of our community—ours as well as yours—will be in the hands of people who are awake, as distinct from the norm nowadays of communities being governed by people who shadow-box and fall out with one another in their dreams over who should rule, as if that were a highly desirable thing to do. No, the truth of the matter is this: the less keen the would-be rulers of a community are to rule, the better and less divided the administration of that community is bound to be, but where the rulers feel the opposite, the administration is bound to be the opposite.”’ c d
end
