Summary: Book VII, 514a- 521d
In Book VII, Socrates presents the most beautiful and
famous metaphor in Western philosophy: the allegory of the cave.
This metaphor is meant to illustrate the effects of education on
the human soul. Education moves the philosopher through the stages
on the divided line, and ultimately brings him to the Form of the
Good.
Socrates describes a dark scene. A group of people have
lived in a deep cave since birth, never seeing the light of day.
These people are bound so that they cannot look to either side or
behind them, but only straight ahead. Behind them is a fire, and
behind the fire is a partial wall. On top of the wall are various
statues, which are manipulated by another group of people, lying
out of sight behind the partial wall. Because of the fire, the statues
cast shadows across the wall that the prisoners are facing. The
prisoners watch the stories that these shadows play out, and because
these shadows are all they ever get to see, they believe them to
be the most real things in the world. When they talk to one another
about “men,” “women,” “trees,” or “horses,” they are referring to
these shadows. These prisoners represent the lowest stage on the
line—imagination.
A prisoner is freed from his bonds, and is forced to
look at the fire and at the statues themselves. After an initial
period of pain and confusion because of direct exposure of his eyes
to the light of the fire, the prisoner realizes that what he sees
now are things more real than the shadows he has always taken to
be reality. He grasps how the fire and the statues together cause
the shadows, which are copies of these more real things. He accepts
the statues and fire as the most real things in the world. This
stage in the cave represents belief. He has made contact with real
things—the statues—but he is not aware that there are things of
greater reality—a world beyond his cave.
Next, this prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the
world above. At first, he is so dazzled by the light up there that
he can only look at shadows, then at reflections, then finally at
the real objects—real trees, flowers, houses and so on. He sees
that these are even more real than the statues were, and that those
were only copies of these. He has now reached the cognitive stage
of thought. He has caught his first glimpse of the most real things,
the Forms.
When the prisoner’s eyes have fully adjusted to the brightness,
he lifts his sight toward the heavens and looks at the sun. He understands
that the sun is the cause of everything he sees around him—the light,
his capacity for sight, the existence of flowers, trees, and other
objects. The sun represents the Form of the Good, and the former
prisoner has reached the stage of understanding.
The goal of education is to drag every man as far out
of the cave as possible. Education should not aim at putting knowledge
into the soul, but at turning the soul toward right desires. Continuing
the analogy between mind and sight, Socrates explains that the vision
of a clever, wicked man might be just as sharp as that of a philosopher. The
problem lies in what he turns his sharp vision toward.
