Book 7
514
Next, said I, “compare our nature in respect of education and its lack to such an experience as this. Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavernThe image of the cave illustrates by another proportion the contrast between the world of sense-perception and the world of thought. Instead of going above the plane of ordinary experience for the other two members of the proportion, Plato here goes below and invents a fire and shadows cast from it on the walls of a cave to correspond to the sun and the real objects of sense. In such a proportion our real world becomes the symbol of Plato’s ideal world. Modern fancy may read what meanings it pleases into the Platonic antithesis of the real and the ideal. It has even been treated as an anticipation of the fourth dimension. But Plato never leaves an attentive and critical reader in doubt as to his own intended meaning. there may be at the most a little uncertainty as to which are merely indispensable parts of the picture. The source and first suggestion of Plato’s imagery is an interesting speculation, but it is of no significance for the interpretation of the thought. Cf. John Henry Wright, The Origin of Plato’s Cave in Harvard Studies in Class. Phil. xvii. (1906) pp. 130-142. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 89-90, thinks the allegory Orphic. Cf. also Wright, loc. cit. pp. 134-135. Empedocles likens our world to a cave, Diels i.3 269. Cf. Wright, loc. cit. Wright refers it to the Cave of Vari in Attica, pp. 140-142. Others have supposed that Plato had in mind rather the puppet and marionette shows to which he refers. Cf. Diès in Bulletin Budé, No. 14 (1927) pp. 8 f. The suggestiveness of the image has been endless. The most eloquent and frequently quoted passage of Aristotle’s early writings is derived from it, Cic. De nat. deor. ii. 37. It is the source of Bacon’s idols of the den. Sir Thomas Browne writes in Urne-Buriall: We yet discourse in Plato’s den and are but embryo philosophers. Huxley’s allegory of Jack and the Beanstalk in Evolution and Ethics, pp. 47 ff. is a variation on it. Berkeley recurs to it, Siris, 263. The Freudians would have still more fantastic interpretations. Cf. Jung, Analytic Psych. p. 232. Eddington perhaps glances at it when he attributes to the new physics the frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows with a long entrance openCf. Phaedo 111 C ἀναπεπταμένους to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fetteredCf. Phaedo 67 E. from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet-showsH. Rackham, Class. Rev. xxix. pp. 77-78, suggests that the τοῖς θαυματοποιοῖς should be translated at the marionettes and be classed with καινοῖς τραγῳδοῖς (Pseph. ap. Dem. xviii. 116). For the dative he refers to Kuehner-Gerth, II. i. p. 445. have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets.” “All that I see,” he said. “See also, then, men carryingThe men are merely a part of the necessary machinery of the image. Their shadows are not cast on the wall. The artificial objects correspond to the things of sense and opinion in the divided line, and the shadows to the world of reflections, εἰκόνες. past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent.”
