Imagine you are inside a cave, chained with others and facing a blank wall. All you can see are shadows cast against the wall from the light outside.
Plato tells this story in “The Republic”: “Imagine that there are people living in a cave deep underground. The cavern has a mouth that opens to the light above, and a passage exists from this all the way down to the people. They have lived here from infancy, with their legs and necks bound in chains. They cannot move.”
All these prisoners see only the shadows cast on the wall in front of them from the objects outside the cave. This is the “real world” for them.
Now imagine someone finds a way to break the chains and crawls outside. At first he is blinded by the light but eventually opens his eyes and for the first time observes the new, vibrant colors of the sky and land. He rushes inside the cave to tell those still there of what he has seen. They don’t believe him.
This is an allegory, a story told by the philosopher Plato around 380 BC to illustrate some deeper truths about human experience. Many wisdom teachers use stories to share insights about life and death, often leaving listeners or readers to reach their own conclusions — “so what do you think?”
This story of the cave is one of the most important and enduring in philosophy illustrating ideas taught in Plato’s Academy, a school that formed the basis for much of later educational efforts. Plato’s allegory illustrates how most of us are bound to live thinking the shadows we observe are the real truths, thinking that the images we see are the real ones, not understanding there is more reality outside these shadows.
The beauty of Plato’s story of the cave is that while it is centuries old it can help us make sense of the world in which we live, especially in our times in which so many shadows are cast on the wall of our cave from images and sounds projected there by social media.
Consider that with the advent of artificial intelligence the images cast will become more real to us than anything else. Like prisoners shackled with irons and chains we don’t perceive there might be realities we can’t begin to perceive after hours of screen time.
So what happens if one or two brave people venture outside our modern cave and witness a different reality than the one those visual architects produce? Probably the same reaction as the prisoners in Plato’s cave — no one believes them, the continual show of images reflected on their laptop or cellphone screens having taken over their abilities to think independently.
It amazes me how ancient stories are universal, applicable to those living today. Many today are still cave dwellers, glued to the words and images on our laptops and cellphones, shackled to our misperceptions of the realities they portray, believing these shadows to be true, indifferent to what is outside our perceived world.
Plato’s story is also about how we learn to think for ourselves, to see the shadows for what they are — imposed on us by those who would control us. For Plato, learning is about bringing forth a capacity within us we already possess, our ability to think for ourselves. “Educare,” the word from which we get education, means to bring forth knowledge we already possess not put information in our brains as if they were empty.
Actually, Plato’s story of the cave is hopeful, that human beings can escape the shadows and reach a better understanding of what is happening. As Plato writes in his story about the person who escapes the cave and sees the light: “And now, he will begin to reason. He will find that the sun is the source for the seasons and the years, and governor of every visible thing, and is ultimately the origin of everything previously known.”
Extending Plato’s story to our times, perhaps a new way out of our cave is to break free from the images and sounds of our laptops and cellphones and learn to think for ourselves — an old and tested path away from the shadows and into the light revealed by simply thinking for ourselves, using the brain power that was always ours to use and grow.
John C. Morgan, a writer and former philosophy teacher, can be reached by email at [email protected]. His column appears weekly at readingeagle.com.
