Philosopher

Plato 's Allegory of the Cave in Republic VII

In Book VII of Plato 's Republic , the philosopher Socrates presents us with the Allegory of the Cave . The Allegory of the Cave is a meant to illustrate the process of education that the philosopher must undertake if he is to become prepared to take up his rightful position as the Philosopher King in Plato 's Ideal Republic . This process is one where the philosopher will be freed from the shackled of ignorance and progress from the realm of the invisible to the realm

of the intelligible , of the invisible world of Forms . It doubles as thinly veiled account (on Plato 's part ) of Socrates ' own life and martyrdom , as we will see below

By way of illustrating the kind of education that will make the philosopher capable of knowing and judging what is good (or just , since the original question at the beginning of the Republic pertained to the nature of Justice and whether those who are just are better off than those who are not , Socrates asks us to imagine a cave like world underground , but the opening of which is just as wide up on top . In this cave , he asks us to imagine that there are prisoners who are shackled to the ground , and who are not able to turn or look around them . They can only look directly in from of them , where there hangs a large screen , and their whole reality consists of what they see projected on the screen

Behind the prisoners there is a large burning fire , and a pathway has been carved out just behind the fire . Behind a short wall along the pathway , there are people who are carrying cut outs of figures like animals , and some make sounds while others are silent . What the prisoners see when they look directly in front of them are the shadows of these figures being carried by the people behind the wall , and the sounds the people make they come to associate with the shapes they see on their screen . We are the prisoners , Socrates remarks , kept in shackles and in ignorance of what is true and real . Most of the time we walk around in a world of shadows that we mistake for what is true and real - the good , justice , beauty , etc . From time to time , something punctures our dream state (perhaps someone near us dies , and all of a sudden reality clicks into place , as we realize that all those things we spend so much time worrying about are inconsequential . What matters in life are things that are not so immediately apparent , that are in fact invisible for the force of which is felt faintly in the ebb and flow of our ordinary lives

In fact , something like this happens to one of our prisoners , when he (or she , I suppose , though it is unlikely that Plato was writing this about a woman ) is (quite mysteriously ) freed from his shackles and...