Often the analogy of Plato’s Cave is told with the teller standing outside, basking in the sun. Meanwhile, everyone else is left inside, still seeing shadows on the wall. We naturally make a divide: the other country, the other party, the other culture, the other church, the other family – they are always the prisoners. They are the ones who name shadows and call them knowledge. Our own group, however, is always the one that leaves the cave and moves into the sun.

Yet this interpretation doesn’t actually mesh with what Socrates is discussing. When Glaucon says, “Strange is your image, and your prisoners strange,” Socrates responds, “Like us.” Essentially, Socrates describes himself as one of the prisoners chained in the cave, watching the puppet-like figures that dance on the wall by the fire behind them.

If Socrates puts himself into the analogy as a prisoner, who are we to claim to be the ones in the light?

The prisoners are not like the uneducated. They are not like those who have a different worldview from ours. They are like us.

Everyone has the ability to see the light or the darkness. Doing so requires guidance, but that is the process of education. “[T]he power of learning inheres in everyone’s soul,” Socrates says. “[E]ducation would be the art of turning this organ around in the easiest, most effective way – not of implanting sight, which it already has, but of contriving to turn the organ around to look where it should.”

The cave gets used today to describe other people’s thoughts or how an individual used to think in the past before they “saw the light” or “left the cave.” If this is as far as we go, though, we have made the analogy safer than it was intended to be by removing ourselves from the cave. How many of us choose to remain in a world of shadows by choosing what we view?

Anyone can be fluent in the shadows of their own side. They can stay within their sect of prisoners where the shadows have an accepted meaning. They can limit their knowledge of the shadows and believe themselves to be in the sunlight. They can even learn the vocabulary of “leaving the cave” and use it to keep from being questioned.

Instead, Plato encourages us to always seek the right direction. We are experiencing a turning of the soul to that which is most real. If we look back to where we used to be and have contempt for the unturned, it is a sign that the speaker may still be facing the wall.

The cave was never a permission slip to divide the world into prisoners and those who see because we are all in the cave to some extent – it is about how we all choose to remain partially in the dark because the light hurts. It is a blind idea to think that we each occupy the top of it or are the ones in the sunlight.

Before we decide we are out of the cave, we should ask what shadows we are still watching. If we go around looking at the shadows incorrectly, we simply have moved our seats to another point along the wall.

—

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: 4edges, CC BY-SA 4.0