In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells the famous allegory of the cave. In general, the allegory can be divided into three parts: inside the cave, release from the cave, and return to the cave. Socrates goes on to interpret the allegory from the perspective of education by arguing that “education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around . . ., [and] education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately” (Plato 1136).

Socrates’ interpretation compares people’s sight to their instruments of learning. Accordingly, just as normal people have the ability to see things, they are also born with the proper instrument of learning and knowing. The problem, for Socrates, is where to look. Miseducated people are like those fettered prisoners in the cave who are prevented from turning around from darkness, or the visible realm, to light, or the intelligible realm, and they need to be freed and turned to the latter. Education thus serves as such a means of freeing and redirecting people to the invisible yet intelligible realm outside the cave.

Questions can be raised in terms of both the allegory itself and Socrates’ interpretation. First of all, the release of one of the prisoners seems rather peculiar. According to Socrates, this particular prisoner “was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light” (1133; emphasis added). Here Socrates seems to suggest that the release is not at all actively initiated by the prisoner himself; instead, he is passively freed and compelled to go to the light. If so, does this suggest that prisoners by themselves are not able to achieve freedom? Furthermore, if taking the allegory literally, one might also wonder why this particular prisoner gets to be released but not anyone else. On the one hand, this could suggest that freedom and truth are not for everyone, and there are people who are destined to be fettered forever in the cave. On the other hand, however, it might simply suggest that this turning around can be “reached only with difficulty” (1135) so that not everyone is able to succeed in the end.

Moreover, when Socrates tells the third part of the allegory, he says that “as for anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?” (1134). Here perhaps Socrates is both referring to himself as the returning prisoner and foreseeing his destiny of eventually being condemned and killed. Therefore, when it is related to Socrates’ later remark that “we mustn’t allow them to . . . stay there and refuse to go down again to the prisoners in the cave” (1137), it begs for the question of how these returning prisoners are able to rule the inferior communities with their superior awareness without getting killed in the first place.

Finally, one might also interpret the allegory from an idealist perspective as saying that we do not directly and immediately know real external objects; instead, we immediately know only the shadowy inner mental images of real external object. If that were the case, it begs for the question whether we are ever able to penetrate the appearance and know things as they are in themselves.

Works Cited

Plato. Complete Works, ed. John Cooper. Hackett Publishing Company. 1997.