#platos cave

The Philosophy of Analogies

InThe Republic—after introducing ‘the analogy of the sun’, in which the idea of goodness ‘illuminates’ truth, and ‘the analogy of the divided line’—Plato presents ‘the Allegory of the Cave’ (depicted above).

Prisoners in an underground cave are chained by the neck and legs, their eyes fixed towards a wall onto which shadows are cast. Trusting their senses, these two-dimensional figures mark the prisoners’ reality. But this imaginary world does not represent the intelligible reality above it: the ‘world of ideas’.

Like the prisoners, we can only hope to understand reality by ascending out of the cave. Plato’s analogies are powerful. But is each story, the source, really consistent with its accompanying theory, the target of the analogy?

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