do you ever get the sense that things are not what they seem to be and I'm not just talking about Instagram and marketing and the way that everybody kind of misrepresents themselves or exaggerates things on social media although maybe that's part of it but I'm talking about something a little deeper a little bigger do you think there are myths about the world and the way it works that aren't really true like do you ever have the sense that the world is full of Illusions Society at large or people in your life telling you well this is what life is about or this is the way life is supposed to be and you have this nagging doubt that maybe life is not supposed to be this way the Greek philosopher Plato has a response to this feeling this sense that the world around us is not as it seems today I want to talk to you about Plato's allegory of the cave this is one of the most famous stories in all of philosophy this story in a way is is a platonic response to our human suspicion that things are not what they seem to be so Plato gives us the story of the cave and maybe his most famous work of philosophy the Republic and like many of Plato's dialogues this is a dialogue about Socrates Plato's famous teacher who also became like a character in his works and in the Republic Socrates is talking to these young Athenian guys glaucon and adamantis and he's talking to them they're they're undertaking a kind of thought experiment they're image imagining what the perfect the perfectly just City would look like what would the ideal city be like just before I get into the story I want to say that the meaning of this story I think it's all in the details so I'm going to give you a quick summary of Plato's Cave and then we're gonna go back and look at the details in more specificity Story Goes Like This Socrates asked his friends to imagine a group of people living in a cave and they've lived there since childhood and in fact they don't just live there they're imprisoned there and so these people are chained up in the bottom of the cave and they're we're told they're chained by their necks and they're chained by their feet not their hands interesting details so they're chained up and they're they're kind of compelled to just watch the back wall of the cave and on the back wall of this cave they just see Shadows all the time Shadows moving back and forth across the walls of the cave and he says these prisoners because they're they're bound up they don't have anything to do they'd spend all their time playing Shadow games just you know trying to like guess which Shadow is going to appear next and then like winning these these guessing games or things like that that's what they would celebrate each other for that's that's what they would be proud of and their Shadows of people and animals and we find out later that they're being projected on the back wall of the cave by these other people who are up a little higher in the cave and standing in front of a fire and using various like statues or puppets or some something to like project like images on the back wall of this cave but the people who are chained up don't know that until one of them gets free and and climbs up out of the cave to discover these these guys like you know projecting all these images on the back wall and Socrates says when this when this guy escapes and when he sees the fire like his his eyes he'd be Blinded By the Light right because he's so accustomed to living in the shadows and then if he goes up further up and out out of the cave itself and into the rest of the world into the light and sees the sun his his senses will be totally shocked right he'd be completely Blinded By the Light of the Sun but this prisoner would then also see real things in the world you know maybe he's seen Shadows of dogs and now he's seen statues of dogs but now he sees like the dog itself and this guy would come to understand that the layers of representation and illusion right when he was tied up at the base of the cave he thought that the shadow dog was the dog that's what a dog is but now out in the world he sees a real doc he sees the thing itself and he understands that the statue of the dog is just an image of this real dog and then the shadow of the statue is just an image of an image right more levels removed from the thing itself hey it's me in the future it's an image of me actually it might be useful to know that in the context of of the Republic the the dialogue as a whole Socrates arrives at this this image of the cave within the broader context of a conversation about education and the nature of knowledge and he Likens our sent out of the cave to these different forms of knowledge we can possess so uh he talks about the visible realm and talks about like shadows and images Reflections and then actual things that we can perceive with our senses and he distinguishes these from things in the intelligible Realm which are uh things like hypotheses that we can develop uh based on things that we've observed so like rules we can we can learn and generate based on our observed experience and then those seem to be beneath even uh first principles which is really where Plato is is always trying to go and this is somewhat controversial in the history of philosophy because for Plato these these intelligible rational first principles are more real even than things that we can see and taste and touch and perceive in the world so the visible things seem to be less real more Shadow like than than the first principles that is what what he Likens to the Sun so once this prisoner has been liberated he has this this Revelation he thinks back to his old life thinks about you know being chained up staring at Shadows all day playing these games where they're like guessing what shadow is going to come next he realizes that was all pointless what about when he reminds himself of his first Dwelling Place his fellow prisoners and what past for wisdom there don't you think that he'd count himself happy for the change and pity the others now there's there's multiple ways we can interpret this story I'd be curious to hear about your interpretations in the comments is this something you're studying now did you study the allegory of the cave before does it live rent free in your head since you took a first year philosophy class I would say the most common interpretation has to do with education this this journey moving from the Shadows into the light up out of the cave into the real world this is a kind of metaphor an image of what it's like to be educated to leave behind a world of illusions things that are insubstantial and to enter into a world of Truth and and reality and things of real substance and when you think about learning things this is what the experience is like when you're learning something new maybe you have these fuzzy shadowy ideas you have a rough idea about how things work maybe it's wrong and then as you acquire real knowledge you develop a firmer more solid real understanding of the thing you're learning about you could also Imagine like when you hear someone talk about something that they don't really know anything about and they're mouthing off at the party or Thanksgiving about things they do not understand when you think of their arguments the things they're saying they are like Shadows right they might bear some resemblance to something true or thoughtful you know they may use words or terms that that like are kind of right but when you push back against those arguments when you ask follow-up questions it's it's revealed that oh this this person doesn't actually have knowledge about the thing they're talking about they're just playing Shadow games just playing Shadow games so that's all good it's about education except we haven't reached the end of the story yet and the ending of this story really changes how we read it because Socrates says this guy whose Escape captivity he's going to go back down into the cave and one thing he says is his eyes will no longer be suited to the darkness of the cave he's seen the truth so he can no longer like find his way around as easily as he could before and when he gets down to his prisoner buddies what are they going to think they're actually going to think that he has been harmed by this experience of Education this experience of the light because his eyes don't work anymore he can no longer like participate in the Shadow games he can't tell a duck from a dog he seems like he's been adversely affected by his experience of the life and then Socrates says something kind of shocking if the liberated prisoner tried to free his fellow prisoners they would get hold of him and they would kill him so that's a little worrisome because if this is an allegory about education if it's an allegory about philosophy then the suggestion here is that to study philosophy to acquire Edge to educate yourself or to acquire education to acquire knowledge and then if you were to go like back home and try to share that knowledge you would be greeted with hostility and even violence and I found I've been a teacher for a lot of years now and I find my students this really resonates with them when they talk about going away to college or university and then returning back home maybe for the summer or Christmas time and and maybe trying to share with their friends and family the things that they've learned in their courses in their reading and they sort of liken it to this experience of like going back in the cave and and not being able to relate to people in the same way they could before this may be like a painful truth about the nature of of Education now the other interesting dimension of this I think of course is like one notable person who was killed for trying to educate people was Socrates Plato's teacher was executed by Democratic Athens for two reasons right one and one was corrupting the youth and the other was teaching New Gods and when you read Plato's dialogues you get the sense that that this is sort of part of the problem with Socrates in Athens that he was he was taking these young Athenian men or he was attracting these young Athenian men to the study of philosophy and then those those men who maybe had like promising careers ahead of them became like these philosophical Busy Bodies right they became argumentative they started questioning received wisdom and they became something of a problem for their families for their their influential and Powerful Athenian families and this is part of what caused Socrates his life so so the allegory of the cave is not only I think just just a metaphor or an allegory about the process of Education there's also a way in which this is a story about Socrates and in that way like it's about the cost of philosophy right like what philosophy demands that the stakes might be high in in participating in philosophy into trying trying to make people in your community see things that they don't want to see you're not going to be greeted as a liberator right you're going to be greeted with hostility let's just go back to the very beginning we find out from Socrates that these prisoners are chained around the neck and around the feet and their hands aren't chained and I don't know if like who knows about the nature of these these restraints but if you were tied up and your hands were free don't you think you might try and free yourself so the fact that their hands are untied in this image actually I think kind of suggests something about their their willing participation in their own imprisonment on some level these people who are imprisoned are content with the Shadows that's that's why when when the the liberated prisoner comes back down they they kill him they don't want to go up they don't want to see the light and in fact this this was true of the initial prisoner as well one of the strangest details I haven't mentioned this yet the prisoner doesn't actually just escape on his own and if someone dragged him away from there by force up the rough steep path and didn't let him go until he had dragged him into the sunlight wouldn't he be pained and irritated at being treated that way and when he came into the light with the sun filling his eyes wouldn't he be unable to see a single one of the things now said to be true so this prisoner who is liberated he seems to be liberated against his will he's compelled to stand up and turn around and look at the fire it hurts his eyes he doesn't want to go he's dragged up the Steep path up and out of the cave and made to see the Sun so then like if we're thinking about this allegory like who are these people like why why is he being dragged out right like if we're trying to map that on to Real World Experience does this suggest that like the role of a teacher is is you're gonna have to be kind of rough with the student certainly education is like kind of uncomfortable at times when like we learn things especially when we learn things we don't want to learn what our our beliefs and our biases and our preconceptions are challenged that can that can be uncomfortable but what do we make of this this process of being a forcibly dragged out of the cave of ignorance and into the light maybe it's the case like you know as a teacher educating things that students have to do are unpleasant you got to get up for class you gotta read books maybe you don't want to read you got to write papers meet deadlines like everybody likes this sort of idea of studying philosophy or studying literature you know these things like oh yeah I'd love to just like sit around all day and philosophize maybe that's not how it works maybe you got to be like dragged by your caller right write the papers read the pages maybe there's something to that maybe education is dragging you against your will out of the Cave the last thing about this story I think you want to think about is is the guys by the fire the like the puppeteers or the people with the statues who are projecting the Shadows I to me they are maybe the most interesting people in this this whole little image because again as we're trying to like map this on to to our Real World Experience who are these people supposed to represent they seem to be um manipulators right and they're they're masters of images who are the people who project the Shadows there's a case to be made I think for Socrates maybe poets fit that role elsewhere in Plato's Republic Socrates expresses some some concern about poets and the kinds of myths the kinds of stories that they feed to the Youth of Athens and and putting bad ideas in their heads so maybe we understand these masters of shadowy images to be artists however in insofar as the whole thing is also in some way about Socrates and if we think about you know this liberated prisoner being a kind of Socratic figure who goes back into the cave and and tries to teach New Gods right and and corrupts the youth or educates the youth in that way the cave seems to be a political image as well right so that that this is about the relationship between philosophy and politics so that when you try to speak truth to power or when you try to argue or say something that that contradicts the received wisdom the established truths that everybody in the community believes when you challenge those you're going to be met with hostility and if it is a kind of political image then then we might want to rethink these puppeteers are they instead political leaders who who use myths to keep people in prison are the myths necessary like the people who are in prison seem to be content do people need these myths that the the politicians circulate or do we just take pleasure in the myths that are being circulated about the world and the way it works in the modern world that Plato wouldn't have thought in precisely these terms but I think in our contemporary environment it's interesting to think about the media we often talk about media as as circulating myths images ideals feeding us with with Lifestyles and narratives about the way things work or the things we ought to want and we take great pleasure in those those narratives and those myths we happily consume them and if someone came and said I'm going to take all these away you're not going to get to enjoy these anymore I think we would feel attacked but maybe those narratives those myths that were being fed constantly now maybe those aren't good for us maybe they conceal from us the truth I hope this story makes you think if you want to learn more about Plato or about Socrates and his execution by Democratic Athens you should check out this video over here on Plato's crito I will see you there and I'll talk to you soon