In a Figure

In his “Allegory of the Cave,” Plato categorizes not just the natural world, but our very conception of it— breaking down the levels at which humans perceive and the pain that comes with complete sight. By creating a strict hierarchy, he is able to establish himself as an enlightened teacher, an observer, engaged in a dialogue that grounds abstract philosophy in common sense and a tangible situation. In this position, Plato argues for the link that must be made between the “world of becoming” (296) and that “of being” (296)—for it is only when thinkers “descend among the prisoners” (298) that universal enlightenment will be achieved. However, Plato takes his categories— in both the concept and the structure of the text itself— to an extreme, losing the integrity of his idea at places, and it is only when he finds unity in such numerous divisions that his argument is clearly imparted. 

            Plato begins with prisoners in a cave—able to see only illusory shadows and not the realities behind them— and then moves to higher levels of understanding as one man emerges and slowly accepts the sun. The natural world is broken down into “the shadows… next the reflections… then the objects themselves” (294), and while this strict hierarchy allows readers to understand each level independently, something is lost in such divided progression. Readers are never fully exposed to the true, interconnected variety of life— forced to take “the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven” (294) separately— and so they cannot appreciate the natural world in its entirety, as it realistically exists. By failing to establish any sort of unity between these levels, Plato does not achieve complete cohesion, further hindered by the disjointed flow of events—the man moving in and out of the cave seemingly without cause— and his student, Glaucon’s interjections of “certainly” and “I agree” (295). The text itself is also organized into a hierarchy—readers receiving only what Glaucon understands, Glaucon understanding only what Plato shares, and Plato sharing only what the prisoner experiences. This structure distracts, the actual philosophy somewhat lost as it travels down the chain to readers.                            

            Plato is most effective when he breaks out of these levels, this hierarchy, and appeals to the senses with concrete imagery. By “show[ing] in a figure… our nature” (292), he synthesizes mankind’s vast struggle into that of a single man—clarity coming on a smaller, more personal scale. He then ties “virtues of the soul” (297) to “bodily qualities” (297), grounding what’s intangible, like knowledge, in something tangible, something physical, like eyes that can be seen and understood. Plato places readers alongside the prisoner with his repetition of the words “suppose” and “imagine” and then evokes pain, a primal sentiment that stimulates thought, with his descriptions of “dazzl[ing]… excess of light” (296), followed by sharp darkness. With these simpler images and clearer dichotomies, like that between light and darkness, Plato can move beyond grand pontification and infinitesimal division to address what’s fundamental about the process of human understanding.

He can force readers to stand at the cave’s mouth and see the sun— make us feel the pain of thought but the necessity of  “endur[ing] [this] sight of being” (296) nonetheless. He can show us a way out of the cave.