Platos Cave

Question

Platos Cave

In: 6

Answer 1

Plato’s cave allegory serves two purposes:

First, it’s a retelling of Socrates’ execution. Socrates was Plato’s teacher and mentor, while also being a notable philosopher who encouraged the citizens of Athens to question their long-held assumptions about reality to get to the truth. Unfortunately, this led to Socrates being accused of impiety and corrupting the youth the same way traditionalist conservatives often retaliate against academics who question long-held dogma. The political leadership of Athens, infuriated by Socrates’ unapologetic stance at his trial, sentenced him to death.

In the Cave Allegory, when the freed prisoner returns to tell those still chained up about the real world, he is brutally killed for his attempt to pull them out from their bondage. This is basically Plato being super salty about how his mentor was executed for the crime of trying to enlighten the people of Athens.

Second, the Cave Allegory is a way of explaining Plato’s metaphysics (the philosophical study of reality). In classical metaphysics, reality was distinguished between material objects, and ideal concepts. The chair I’m sitting on, for example, would be a material object. But there is also the ideal *concept* of a chair (something with a number of legs, with a seat for a person to rest their butt on, perhaps with a back).

For Plato, concepts were the purest, ultimate essence of reality. The concept of a chair is eternal, perfect, and unchanging. The concept of a chair is the ultimate essence of “chairness.” But a physical chair can break, decay, get worn down, etc. It is imperfect, and hence less “real” in its chairness. For Plato, a chair is a mere “shadow” of the perfect idea of a chair, the same way the shadows on the walls are imperfect representations of the objects that are held up to cast those shadows (as described in the Cave Allegory).

Furthermore, if you take this logic a step further, a painting or image of a chair is even lower on the hierarchy of reality, because it’s **two** steps removed from the pure essence of being a chair. It’s a shadow of a shadow, essentially.

While this seems like a silly distinction to our modern senses, Plato’s metaphysics had a pretty big impact on Western philosophical thought that would persist up until the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, Plato’s metaphysics is the foundation of Christian metaphysics, where the realm of the abstract and ideal (i.e. God) is “superior” to or “perfect” compared to the base material world.