Plato was a famous philosopher and the student of another famous philosopher, Socrates. In Plato’s writings, he often writes as if his teacher, Socrates, were the one speaking. One of his most famous pieces is known as The Allegory of the Cave. Plato uses this allegory to illustrate his views on the different levels of reality.
It begins with Socrates telling a story, or allegory, of prisoners who are held in a cave all of their lives. They are held looking at a wall and cannot turn their heads. A fire burns behind them and their captors hold objects in front of the fire that cast shadows on the wall before the prisoners. In addition, the captors make noises to accompany the cast shadows. The shadows and sounds are all that the prisoners can see or hear. Yet, behind the fire, there is a passage that leads up out of the cave.
With the setting established, Plato then writes for us to imagine what would happen if the prisoners were suddenly free and able to turn around. Would they turn, view the fire and objects, and be relieved to discover the truth? The answer is no that, in fact, the fire would hurt their eyes at first, causing them to be unable to focus on the objects. The prisoner would rather turn back to the world of shadows that he has always known. However, if the prisoner were forced to look at the fire and the objects, in time he would come to see that the fire and objects have more clearly defined reality and that the shadows he has always known were mere copies of this reality. Then, suppose that the prisoner were led to leave the cave altogether. He would be nearly blinded by the intense sunlight that he has never witnessed before. Yet, once again, eventually he would realize that the objects above ground to be even clearer forms of reality than the copies below ground. In time, the prisoner would even become able to view the sun.
The point of this allegory is to demonstrate the levels of reality in Plato’s metaphysics. The shadows on the wall correspond to mere illusions. The objects below the ground are material forms. The objects above the ground are other forms. And the sun illustrates the forms of goodness, truth, and beauty. Plat’s allegory seeks to teach us that to understand ultimate reality, we must first understand these basic forms. The sun represents our highest nonphysical, objective ideas such as justice, goodness, beauty, and truth. The objects above the ground represent true forms such as shape, size, and color. By true forms he is referring to the true thought of a circle, for instance, for it is only an idea. We cannot view a true circle, only replicas of one, for who is to say what a true circle really is? Next, the objects below ground represent material objects that usually represent other forms. For instance, a ball appears circular in shape and thus represents the idea we have of a circle. And lastly, the shadows on the wall represent illusions, such as the shadow of a circle, which is merely an appearance and not true reality.
Plato’s take on the levels of reality can appear a bit complex and hard to grasp at first but when broken down into individual ideas, it becomes clearer, which is the whole purpose of his Allegory of the Cave.
