For talk in Athens - Thursday 23rd March - 2023
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.
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
515a
‘This
is a strange picture you’re painting,’ he said, ‘with strange prisoners.’
‘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?’
516a
‘No,
he wouldn’t,’ he answered, ‘not straight away.’
‘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
at last, I 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?’
517a
‘They certainly would,’ he said.
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
