A Critical Analysis of Plato’s Allegory of Cave:

Perhaps the most famous idea in all of Plato’s work is the Allegory of the Cave. This much-
discussed (and much-misunderstood) story is a key part of Plato’s Republic, a work which
has the claim to be the first ever literary utopia.
In The Republic, Plato and a number of other philosophers discuss the ideal society, focusing
on education, political leadership, and the role and responsibility of the individual within
society.
The Allegory of the Cave represents a number of the core ideas of Plato’s thinking in one
short, accessible parable. But what is the meaning of this allegory? Before we offer an
analysis of Plato’s idea, here’s a summary of what he says about it in The Republic.
Allegory of the Cave:
One of the key ideas on Plato’s Republic is his theory of forms, where ‘forms’ means much
the same as ‘ideas’. And the Allegory of the Cave represents Plato’s approach to ideas.
We are invited to imagine a group of people sitting in an underground cave, facing the walls.
They are chained up and they cannot move their heads. Behind them, a fire is forever
burning, and its flames cast shadows onto the cave walls.
Between the fire and the cave walls, there is a road, and people walk along this road, carrying
various objects: models of animals made of stone and wood, human statuettes, and other
things. The people who walk along the road, and the objects they carry, cast shadows on the
cave walls.
The people who are chained in the cave and facing the wall can only see the shadows of the
people (and the objects they carry): never the actual people and objects walking past behind
them. To the people chained up in the cave, these shadows appear to be reality, because they
don’t know any better. Reality, to these people chained in the cave, is only ever a copy of a
copy: the shadows of the original forms which themselves remain beyond our view.
But someone comes and unchains the people in the cave. Now they’re free. Let’s say that one
of them is set free and encouraged to look towards the fire behind him and his fellow cave-
dwellers. He can now see that the things he took for reality until now were merely shadows
on the wall.
But this knowledge isn’t, at first, a good thing. The revelation is almost overwhelming. The
light of the fire hurts his eyes, and when he is dragged up the slope that leads out of the cave,
and he sees the sun outside, and is overwhelmed by its light.
In time, however, he comes to accept that the sun is the true source of light in the world, the
cause of the seasons and the annual cycle of things. And he would come to feel sorry for
those who remain behind in the cave and are content to believe that the shadows on the cave
wall are reality. Indeed, the people who remain behind in the cave believe he wasted his time
in going outside and simply ruined his eyes for nothing.
But the man who has been outside knows there is no going back to his old beliefs: his
perception of the world has changed forever. He cannot rejoin those prisoners who sit and
watch the shadows on the wall. They, for their part, would resist his attempts to free them,
and would sooner killer him than be led out of the cave, as he was.
And so if the man who has seen the sun returns to the cave, his eyes will take time to adjust
back to the darkness of the cave and to the shadows on the wall. He will now be at a
disadvantage to his fellow cave-dwellers, who have never left the cave and seen the light.
Allegory of the Cave: analysis
An allegory is a story that has a double meaning: as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary
Terms and Literary Theory puts it, an allegory has a primary or surface meaning, but it also
has a secondary or under-the-surface meaning. This is certainly true of Plato’s Allegory of the
Cave. But what is its secondary meaning?
Although The Republic is classified as a work of philosophy, it is structured more like a
dialogue or even a play (though not a dramatic one), in that it takes the form of a
conversation between several philosophers: Socrates, Glaucon, Plato himself, and a number
of other figures are all ‘characters’ in the Republic.
The Allegory of the Cave, as Plato’s comments indicate, is about the philosopher seeing
beyond the material world and into the ‘intelligible’ one. The symbolism of the cave being
underground is significant, for the philosopher’s journey is upwards towards higher things,
including the sun: a symbol for the divine, but also for truth (those two things are often
conflated in religions: Jesus, for example, referred to himself as ‘the way, the truth, and the
life’ in John 14:6).
Plato insists, however, that the philosopher has a duty to return to the material world, to the
world of the cave and its inhabitants (or prisoners), and to try to open their eyes to the truth. It
is no good leaving the cave behind. The philosopher must return down into the cave and face
ridicule or even persecution for what he has to say: he has to be prepared for the unpleasant
fact that most people, contented with their mental ‘chains’ and their limited view of the
world, will actively turn on anyone who challenges their beliefs, no matter how wrong those
beliefs are. People come to love their chains, and being shown that everything you’ve
believed is a lie will prove too much (as Plato acknowledges) for many people, and even,
initially, for the philosopher. (It is curious how prophetic Plato was: his teacher and friend
Socrates would indeed be ridiculed by Aristophanes in his play The Clouds, and later he
would be put on trial, and sentenced to death, for his teachings.)
In other words, those people who have seen the ideal world, have a responsibility to educate
those in the material world rather than keep their knowledge to themselves. So we can see
how Plato’s Allegory of the Cave relates not only to the core ideas of The Republic, but also
to Plato’s philosophy more broadly.
There are several further details to note about the symbolism present in the allegory. One
detail which is often overlooked, but which is important to note, is the significance of those
objects which the people on the road are carrying: they are, Plato tells us, human statuettes or
animal models carved from wood or stone.
Why is this significant? These objects cast their shadows on the walls of the cave, and the
people chained in the cave mistake the shadows for the real objects, because they don’t know
anything different. But the objects themselves are copies of things rather than the original
things themselves: statues of humans rather than real humans, and models of animals rather
than the real thing.
So, as Robin Waterfield notes in his excellent notes to his translation of Plato’s Republic,
the objects are ‘effigies’ of real things, or reflections of types. This means that the shadows on
the wall are reflections of reflections of types, therefore. So (as Waterfield puts it) the
shadows on the wall might represent, say, a kind of moral action, while the
objects/statues/effigies themselves are a person’s thoughts on morality.
When these thoughts are observed in the material world (i.e., on the cave wall), we are
observing a moral action somebody has taken, which is a reflection of some moral code or
belief (the effigy that cast the shadow).

Significance of Plato’s Theory of an Allegory of the Cave:

‘Allegory of the cave’ is one of the most cited allegories in the history of western thought in
which Plato illustrates his dualistic theory of reality at the beginning of book VII of the
Republic. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato described symbolically the predicament in
which mankind finds itself and proposes a way of salvation. The Allegory presents, in brief
form, most of Plato’s major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by
our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be
apprehended intellectually; his idea that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to
student, but rather that education consists in directing student’s minds toward what is real and
important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves; his faith that the universe
ultimately is good; his conviction that enlightened individuals have an obligation to the rest
of society, and that a good society must be one in which the truly wise (the Philosopher-King)
are the rulers.
At the beginning of the allegory, Plato asks us to imagine some men living a large cave facing
the inside wall of the cave where from childhood they have been chained by the leg and by
the neck so that they cannot move. They have never seen the light of day or the sun outside
the cave. Behind the prisoners a fire burns and between the fire and the prisoners there is a
raised way on and behind the raised way there is the entrance to the cave. Along the raised
way people walk carrying all sorts of things which they hold so that they cast shadows status
of men, animals, and trees on the wall before them. The prisoners, facing the inside wall
behind them on which the object are being carried all they can see are the shadows these
objects cast on the wall of the cave.
The prisoners live all their lives seeing only shadows of reality and the voices they hear are
only echoes from the wall. If they were freed and able to turn around and see the realities,
which produce the shadows, they would be blinded by the light of the fire. And they would
become angry and would prefer to regain their shadow world. But if one of the prisoners
were freed and turned around to see in the light of fire, the cave and his fellow prisoners and
the roadway, and if he were, then, dragged up and out of the cave into the light of the sun, he
would see the things of the world as they truly are and finally he would see the sun itself.
Now he would understand what he and his fellow prisoners saw on the wall, how shadows
and reflections differ from things as they really are in the visible world and that without the
sun there would be no visible world.

Each historical generation since Plato’s time has been tantalized by the question, how does
the allegory of the cave apply to our time, to our society? The question tantalizes us too. But
in fact the Allegory of the cave remains relevant and moving for many people in our own
time. It is an allegory of sleep and waking of our time as asleep in the dark of the cave and
needing to awake to a clear vision of the world. It is an allegory of our time as needing to be
born again, to emerge from the darkness of corruption into the light of truth and morality. It is
an educational allegory of our time as needing to ascend through stages of education from the
darkness of intellectual and moral confusion in its everyday beliefs, to the light of true
knowledge and value. It is a religious allegory of Christian conversion from the cave of self
love and self gratification to the love of God and devotion to the truth. The allegory of the
cave may be viewed as a devastating criticism of our everyday lives as being in bondage to
superficialities and also of much of the sins of our time. It is of course a political allegory.
The life in the cave is the life of politics. Both the leaders and the public are ignorant and
corrupt, without true knowledge of themselves, or of the world motivated by greed, power
and self gratification. They are chained in bondage to ignorance and passions, to mysteries
for or against fleeting issue believing in current ideologies which are the illusions, the
shadows on the walls of the cave.
It is an allegory of the Philosopher king. The liberated one, having made the ascent to know
the truth and the good, has a mission to return to the cave, to bring entanglement to bring the
good news, even though he may be killed for his service.
Thus, Plato establishes his view of appearance and reality with the help of his Allegory of
cave.

Sanjida Siddique Monomi

Session :2021-22(16th batch)
Department of Political Science,
University of Dhaka