Slide 1

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 2

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 3

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 4

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 5

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 6

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 7

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 8

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 9

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 10

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 11

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 12

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 13

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 14

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 15

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 16

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 17

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 18

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 19

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 20

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 21

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 22

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 23

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 24

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 25

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 26

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 27

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 28

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 29

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 30

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 31

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 32

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 33

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 34

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 35

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 36

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 37

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 38

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 39

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 40

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 41

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 42

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 43

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 44

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 45

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 46

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 47

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 48

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 49

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 50

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END


Slide 51

Plato’s “The Allegory
of the Cave”
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike

Anouncements
• Those who do not have Plato must go get
a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
discussion?
• Reminder: critical reading = marking your
books.

Newman
• In “The Idea of a University,” Newman
suggests the following things:
– Liberal education produces a well-balanced
quality of mind. See “Such a power . . .” and
“This process of training. . . .” There are two
kinds of utility.

Question: What are the two types?

Two Types of Utility
• Extrinsic utility (“some definite work,
which can be weighted and measures”):
immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (“what tends to good or is
the instrument of good”): Something
cannot be put to immediate use, but it is
an end in itself because it enables
goodness, which is prolific.

Application
• Extrinsic utility: education that leads to a
specific job.
• Intrinsic utility: education that cultivates
the mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational
training strengthens the mind, and liberal
education has some direct applicability.
Perhaps it depends on your school and
your major.

Newman’s Point
about the Liberal Arts
• “I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a
good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace
to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful,
and to a greater number.
• It makes you “good members of society,”
elevates the “intellectual tone of society,” and
prepares you “to fill any post with credit, and to
master any subject with facility.”

Why Begin with Newman?
• He describes the sort of education that
Plato’s “Allegory” is about: not specific
vocational preparation but a more general
enhancement of the quality of one’s mind,
which enables you to enhance the good in
your community.

Introductory Points
•
•
•
•

Source: Plato’s Republic.
Setting: Ancient Greece.
Speakers: Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
Format: Dialectic, “the tradition of continuing debate or discussion
of eternally unresolved issues…Plato’s Dialogues exemplify this
kind of dialectic” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature).
Give and take, Q&A.
• Title: Symbolism vs. Allegory
– Symbolism: many possible referents. Example: Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily.”
– Allegory: one-to-one correspondence between a detail in the text and
something outside the text.
– Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note CANNOT be “a
symbolic moral fable.”

Diagram and Video
• http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pl
ato/caveframes.htm
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYKNAdbhQw&feature=related

Exercise for Small Groups
• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
the following details refers to:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Shackles/bonds/fetters
Shadows
Fire
“artifacts” (page 3, col. 2)
The light above (the sun)
“the things themselves” (page 4, col. 2)
Persons who view the shadows
Persons who leave the cave
Persons who return to the cave

Persons Who Leave the Cave
• Question:
– What historical persons fit this category?
– Who ARE they in our contemporary context?
people? Examples?

More Questions
• What happens when someone who knows
the truth (who has seen the light) goes
back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such
persons from history? From current
events? (See the examples on the next
slide.)

Such Persons
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Socrates (foreshadowing)
Jesus
Gandhi
Martin Luther King
RFK
Benazir Bhutto
Harriet Tubman
You?
What else do most of these figures have in
common?

The Key to Understanding
the Allegory
• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column:
“The visible realm [the everyday world] should be
likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the
fire inside it to the power of the sun.”
• In other words:
Cave/“prison”:“visible realm” (real world)::“visible
realm”:Forms (“intelligible realm,” “knowable realm” on
page 5, left)
Illusion is to reality as reality is to transcendent ideas
(the really real).

In Other Words: Hierarchy
Forms/Ideas

Reality/The Concrete World
Illusion/Shadows/Art

Point
• In allegory, something in the text represents something not in the
text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and correcting your
vision) involves two things: 1) accurate viewing of things in the
physical world (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting in
touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real) that exist prior to and
independent of things in the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light, so those of us who
live in the sunlight must seek the Forms of things.

Plato’s Hierarchy: A Gloss on
Those Who Leave the Cave
• Here is the hierarchy:
– Forms/Ideas (e.g., “the form of the good” on page 5, left col.)
– Nature (“the things themselves” on page 4, right col.)
– Art and other appearances like the false ones in the cave

• POINT: Although seeing things as they are in nature is a
good thing, the middle position is still one remove from
things in their essence or as they truly are (the
Forms/Ideas).
• POINT: Leaving the cave is progress, but there is still a
higher realm (“the intelligible realm” or “the knowable
realm” on page 5, left col.) that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows  concrete/real world  Forms.

Clarification
• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) 
a correct vision of reality (sunlit world)  an
intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world:
Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
physical world)  a person has an idea that
reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
physical manifestation  someone incorporates
that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

Education
• What are the implications of this passage
from page 4, cols. 1-2?
“And if someone dragged him away
from there by force, up the rough, steep
path, and didn’t let him go until he had
dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t
he be pained and irritated at being
treated that way?”

Next Question
• What metaphors does Plato use?

What Metaphors Does Plato Use?
• “the upward journey and the study of things
above as the upward journey of the soul to the
intelligible realm,” i.e., the realm of Forms or
Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• “this turning around” (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
enables repentance.)

Contemporary Analogy
• What movie that you have all seen
illustrates this “turning around”?

Summary
• Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false
appearances (self-deception), to things as they
are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
(Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to accuracy
and then to lift us from the earthly/concrete to
the transcendental/spiritual/intellectual.
• Implication: In order to be educated, we must
turn away from misconceptions and achieve
personal transformation by coming to
understand things more nearly as they are.

A Long Process
• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly
be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed
at if you deny the new idea).

Implication for Values
• Pages 4-5:
“Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer,
that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth
as a serf to another, one without
possessions,’ and go through any
sufferings, rather than share their
opinions and live as they do?”

Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
--Achilles’s soul, in the afterlife

From The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces: Beginnings to A.D. 100,
page 359.

Distinction
• Achilles’s afterlife is in the place of the
unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields
mentioned in note 3—the place of the
happy dead.
• See also “the faraway Isles of the
Blessed,” page 6, right.

Question
• How would you paraphrase Achilles’s
statement? Here it is again:
“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

What Is the Corresponding Point?
• Achilles says that it is
better to be a
wretched servant but
to be ALIVE than to
be a king in the
afterlife. That is how
much worse it is to be
dead than to be
miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of
the chart with your
understanding of
Plato’s point:

Basketball Paper
• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these passages in
Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for WU’s basketball
team than to be a starting player for a lesser school’s basketball
team.

• Thus the excellence of WU’s team parallels the apprehension of
truth when one leaves Plato’s cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course, is that seeing
himself mainly as a basketball player was a form of deception no
matter how good a team he played for. In this respect, he might
have been a cave dweller after all, believing something to be
superior to something else when both are illusory.

Problem with Note 2
• It reads: “The shade of the dead Achilles speaks these words to
Odysseus, who is visiting Hades. Plato is, therefore, likening the
cave dwellers to the dead.”
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus visits the dead in
a meadow. He does not go down into Hades. The dead come up
from Hades to speak with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with Teiresias, the
blind seer. In other words, the journey provides illumination and
guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Plato’s cave and Homer’s Hades.
The key thing is the contrasts that arise: living vs. dead; king vs.
serf.

Irony
•

The note accurately likens Plato’s “cave dwellers to the dead [in Homer’s poem].”

•

BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homer’s poem to be analogous to Plato’s
cave, then the implication is that one must descend into the cave in order to learn the
truth because Odysseus visits the dead to gain essential information from Teiresias,
the seer, who alone among the dead thinks clearly.

•

Does Plato have it backwards?
– His allegory says that seeing what is true helps us to understand what is false.
But is it also the case that seeing what is false helps us to understand what
is true?
– And is it possible that one can live like Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in
the cave) and still see clearly?

•

Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey has three parts: descent 
encounter (e.g., descent into hell or confrontation with a monster or a villain or illusion
like the shadows on the wall)  return. The middle part of Campbell’s triad
emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

Transition
• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting
that it is better to be poor in the material
sense and yet to see things as they are
than it is to be wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why
you think that this is a false dichotomy (or
not). Cannot persons be both well off
AND enlightened? See next slide.

A Christian Analogy
• Jesus: “‘Sell your possessions, and give alms
[to the poor]; provide yourself with purses that do
not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches and no
moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also’” (Luke 12:33-34).
• Jesus: “‘Sell all that you have and distribute to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow me’” (Luke 18:22).

Transition
• Plato has been talking about persons who
apprehend the truth, but then the text turns
to ways of knowing and offers two
possibilities.

Different Models of Apprehending
the Truth
• The first one is on pages 5-6:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows
that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul
and that the instrument with which each learns is like an
eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light
without turning the whole body. … Then education is the
craft of doing this very thing, this turning around…. It
isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education
takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned
the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries
to redirect it appropriately.”

Plato’s Meno
• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that
we are also born with knowledge of certain
things, and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis: Learning equals remembering
what the soul knows but has forgotten because
of its physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means
of uncovering this knowledge: someone has to
ask you the right questions.

Development of Anamnesis
• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Plato’s distinction?

Assumption: Reincarnation
•

Plato believes in reincarnation. For example:
“For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand
years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul
who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for
a loved one with that seeking.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
“…he that grows better shall make his way to the better souls and he that
has grown worse to the worser, and so, in life, and throughout the series of
deaths, do and have done to him what it is meet the like-minded should do
to their likes. This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor any other
that has fallen on ill ways shall ever claim to have escaped; ’tis that which
the fashioners of doom have established before all others and that which
should be shunned with utter dread.”
Plato, Laws X, 905a

A Clearer Translation
“O youth or young man, who fancy that
you are neglected by the Gods, know that
if you become worse you shall go to the
worse souls, or if better to the better, and
in every succession of life and death
you will do and suffer what like may fitly
suffer at the hands of like. This is the
justice of heaven” (my emphasis).

More on Reincarnation
• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you ever just
KNOW that you had to do something in a big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
lifetime to lifetime?

Extra Information on Reincarnation
• The following finds evidence for
reincarnation in biblical quotations:
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/
qureincr.htm
• POINT: It is not possible to say that the
Bible absolutely rules out the concept of
reincarnation.

The Other Position
• The second position is on pages 5-6:
Some believe that education involves “putting
knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
sight into blind eyes.” Plato adds that “the other
so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of
the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand
but are added later by habit and practice.”
• What is Plato talking about?

Two Models
• What, then, are the two models that Plato
is suggesting?

Answer
• Model one: When we learn, we are remembering things
that we already have in our unconscious minds or in our
souls. Learning = a welling up of what is within.
• Model two: We learn through practice, habit, repetition.
Learning = imposing things from outside the self.
• Method: In each case, learning involves focusing our
inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

Possible Implications
• Re. model one: You are much more capable than we
realize. We have inner resources that have not yet
surfaced.
• Re. model two: You are insufficient and therefore need
help (education and right reason, in Plato’s way of
thinking; divine grace, in a theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between: you have inborn
inner resources, but you also need help from others or
from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

A Key Virtue: Reason
• Page 6:
“However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to
something more divine, which never loses its power but is either
useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned” (my emphasis).

POINT: Reason can be used for good or evil. The last column says
that we should use reason/education for good purposes:
“…we mustn’t allow them [those who have seen the light] to do what
they’re allowed to do today. . . . To stay there and refuse to go down
again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors,
whether they are of less worth or of greater.”
POINT: Education carries social responsibility. You must act.

Writing in Class
• Write a short paragraph that sums up “The
Allegory of the Cave.” What is the “moral
of the story”? What message is Plato
trying to convey about education? You
have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

Here is My Summary
• Plato says: In the physical world, we must focus
on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
Education involves turning from illusion to reality,
and this can be a painful process. We must also
contemplate the original Forms/Ideas (the most
real)—Plato encourages us to become more
intellectual. We are predisposed to learn, but we
must exercise reason for good purposes. That
includes helping others in the community.

Questions about the Self
• What can Plato teach you about the self—and about your self?
– Are you a soul in a physical body?
– Are you a spiritual being having a physical experience?
– Are you a physical being that may or may not have an afterlife in the
spirit?
– Did you exist before you were born—did you have a pre-existence?
– If so, did you carry over into this life any memory (perhaps unconscious
memory) from previous lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
– Have you ever “just known” something as if part of you is
remembering, though you have never experienced the specific thing in
this lifetime?
– Do you already have inside you all the things that you need, or do you
need external reinforcement and support like education or divine
grace? Is the answer perhaps that you need some of both?
– Is it possible that what we consider concrete and real is actually an
illusion? What is reality?
– Is Plato’s story an allegory of going away to college? Of overcoming
addiction? Of embracing a new idea?

Writing in Class about Possible
Paper Topics
• What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand
about yourself? Write for five minutes about this and turn in your
answer before you leave today.
– Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education?
– Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?
Discuss and example.
– Is it possible that all of earthy/physical existence is the cave? See St. Paul: “For
now [on earth] we see in a mirror dimly, but then [in the afterlife] face to face” (1
Cor. 13:12).
– In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we would all like to believe
that we see things as they really are? How are we self-deceived?
– Might staying in your “cave” actually be a good thing under some circumstances?
– Does Plato’s allegory suggest that something that you have always considered
the Truth is merely a truth?

END