Hello, I'm Dr. Anadale. I teach philosophy at
Mount St. Mary's University in
Emmitsburg, Maryland. Book Seven of Plato's
Republic begins with the famous Allegory
of the Cave. The allegory has five stages,
so read carefully, taking notes on what
happens at each stage, and try to answer
the questions I'm about to give you.
In the first stage, prisoners are held in an
underground cave.
The most important thing about them is
that their knowledge is limited:
they have limited knowledge of
themselves and limited knowledge of the
world around them. How is their knowledge
limited? In the second stage, a prisoner
is released and turns around to face the
fire. At first he wants to return to captivity.
Why? What does he value, and how does this
shape his desire to return to captivity?
In the third stage, the prisoner is led
up the path toward the light of the sun.
His initial reaction is to resist, but as
he ascends he begins to change. How does
he change? In the fourth stage,
the prisoner lives on the surface world,
seeing and knowing things there. Now he
has more accurate knowledge about
himself, about what he is, and about the
world around him, including the cave
world he used to value so much. Why has
his judgment about the value of the cave
world changed? In the fifth stage,
the prisoner returns to the cave and tries
to convince his old friends to join him
on the surface.
What happens to the prisoner
after he returns to the cave, and why?
Next, I want you to read carefully the
short section from 517b-c, where
Socrates compares the imagined ascent
out of the cave and into the sunlight
to "the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm." Take note of four
parallels: the prison cave is like the
material world, the light of the fire is
like the Sun in our world,
the journey out of the cave is like
philosophical education, and the sun is
like the Form of the Good. Socrates tells
us that the Form of the Good "controls
and provides truth and understanding" and
that once we see it we will realize that
"anyone who is to act sensibly in private
or public must see it." It seems that both
our personal, private happiness and the
political good of cities and nations,
the public good, depend on knowing the
Form of the Good. Then we are told that
if this allegory is a true description
of human nature, then education does not
involve adding information or powers to
the human soul. Rather, it involves
reorienting the soul's natural powers toward
new, better objects. I'll leave you
with a discussion question: Why must
anyone who wants to act well in private or
in public know the Form of the Good?
To put it a different way:
What would someone be lacking if he
acted without this knowledge?
Why would he be likely to go wrong,
according to Plato? That's my summary of
Plato's Allegory of the Cave from Book
Seven of the Republic.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.
