Notes On Plato’s Cave
All of us are born in a cave, Socrates teaches (Republic VII), staring at shadows cast upon the back wall by images held in front of a fire behind us. From this starting point, he explains that education is the process of turning around in our chairs to see the fire, the objects dancing before it, and the men holding those objects, and then slowly, painfully, beginning to climb up toward the mouth of the cave, and ultimately out into the true world lit by the sun. It is important to remember three truths implied by this famous allegory that are easily misunderstood.
The first is that the educational process which begins with the act of turning around and seeing the fire behind us for the first time is specifically the philosophic education. All that we ordinarily call education — the acquisition of everything from our moral attitudes to our standard of the beautiful to our scientific beliefs to our political preferences — is what Socrates means by the shadows cast on the wall of the cave. In other words, all the learning that most of us will ever do is comprised of our experience as prisoners tied to the chairs in our dark cave, our heads forcibly constrained to stare only forward at that wall. It is only the few who are sensitive to the call of philosophy who might ever develop the doubt and curiosity necessary to make that fateful turn toward seeing all our previous education and its results for what they really are, and among those few even fewer who will allow themselves to be “dragged,” as Socrates says, up to the cave opening and the sunlight outside. All of what we normally think of as learning, then — our modern word “schooling” captures this in its most reductionist and trivialized form — is a useful fiction to satisfy the needs of men who are bound to live their lives in spiritual fetters.
The second truth essential to understanding the cave allegory is that the cave represents political community as such, and hence that the initial (and for most people permanent) stage of sitting bound in a chair is not the result of an oppressive regime, but rather the basic and inescapable reality of all human social existence. That is, we are all born and raised in such conditions, and must be, because human spiritual development can only begin at the level of immediate appearances interpreted by way of explanations provided from without, which foundation becomes the contextual frame, the invisible bias, informing one’s subsequent psychological maturation. The only difference between one cave and another in this regard lies in the choice of shadows to be cast upon the cave wall. Will they be images conducive to the eventual loosening of the fetters for the benefit of those few with the natural potential to turn around? Or will they be images calibrated to thicken the ropes and tighten the knots, such that the psychological advance of “turning around” becomes impossible for all but the rarest minds, and even for such rare cases, perhaps, not without near-fatal delays, distortions, and an abiding sense of groundlessness, the self-imposed constraint of feeling that there is nowhere to go? The chief means to such a thickening and tightening of the fetters, to put it somewhat abstractly (so as not to offend anyone alive in the advanced world today, least of all our own shadow-puppeteers), is to narrow the range and simplify the shapes of the imagery presented on the cave wall, until everything seems more or less uniform, well-fitted, and obvious, thereby assiduously avoiding the appearance of any anomalies within the shadow play that might be confusing, complicating, or likely to cause questions, quiet musings, or the slightest shade of doubt or wonder in the cave-dweller’s intellect. To explain one metaphor by way of another, we might ask of any society’s popular indoctrination whether it is designed with secret ladders for those with the nature to climb out, or with secret trap doors to drop nature’s wandering souls into dark holes. Those holding the objects before the fire make all the difference, and this, therefore, becomes the issue that defines political theory — to the great shame of our enlightened late modernity, which identifies its enlightenment primarily with smug self-certainty concerning what may be comfortably discarded.
The third indispensable truth about the cave allegory, implied but easily overlooked, is that the key to true education lies in understanding, and never forgetting, that each journey to the universal truths begins in a particular chair, within a particular cave, which means that any climb towards the sunlit world must by necessity proceed from where a person is now. The proper next step, and how to take it, must always be determined in relation to one’s present location and terrain. The destination is the same for all. The paths, however, are various, and must always be tended by guides capable of understanding the current position or “perspective” of each initiate, and the most natural and proper route to take from that peculiar and individuated position toward the ultimate goal.
