Symbolism In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

The saying goes that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that in his Allegory of the Cave, Plato uses the image of a cave to illustrate the effects of education on the human soul and how the symbolism represented in the allegory ties in to a broader discussion of one of Plato’s main philosophical ideas, the Theory of Forms. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato (who is speaking as Socrates to one of his students, Glaucon) asks us to imagine an underground cave in which a group of prisoners have lived since birth. The prisoners are chained to the ground and are positioned in such a way that they can only stare at the cave wall in front of them. Thus, the prisoners’ world has been reduced to a world of darkness, and the only thing that is real to them is the shadows and echoes of passersby as they walk past the mouth of the cave. But, Socrates goes on to say, the reality that the prisoners perceive is a false one; it is only by being dragged

out of the cave and adjusting to the light of the world outside that the prisoners can truly see and understand the real world. In order to become educated, then, it is not a matter of one’s ability to learn (or lack thereof), but of how to access that innate potential that lies within each of us if only we can be redirected to understand truth and knowledge for ourselves.
Although the Theory of Forms isn’t directly discussed in the Allegory of the Cave, it expounds upon the natures of reality and learning that are explained by the allegory. According to the theory of Forms, existence is divided into two worlds: the material world (the visible) and the world of forms (the knowable). The visible world is represented by the tangible world outside the cave, while the knowable world is represented by the intangible essence (or “formness”) of the physical objects in the visible world. In order to understand the knowable world of forms, which lies beyond ordinary thought, one must progress from basic thought to understanding, for to understand is to know, and that is what education strives towards as we struggle to move as far outside of the cave-and our own blindness and ignorance- as possible.
It is interesting to think that although Plato first wrote The Republic in 390 BCE, his philosophical ideas of education and the nature of reality still capture our imaginations today.

Novelist and essayist Susan Sontag draws a particularly interesting parallel between the Allegory of the Cave and photography in her essay In Plato’s Cave. “This very insatiability of the photographing eye,” writes Sontag, “changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe,” (3). The camera, Sontag argues, makes what one is experiencing at any given point in time real, impervious to the decay of time yet nonetheless stands as a testament to its passage. Much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave divided existence into the visible world and the knowable world, the act of taking a picture draws a line between the subject and the photographer, the image-world and the real

world.
Throughout her essay, Sontag describes a photograph as being both an object of this world and an abstract impression, blurring the lines of what we perceive to be real and what we know to be real. It seems hardly coincidental that Sontag chose photography to be the subject of her essay, as pictures are created by developing the negatives through a chemical treatment in a darkroom, which one could read as a reference to the shadows on the cave wall creating images for the prisoners in Plato’s allegory. In concluding her essay, Sontag notes that the act of taking a picture “turn(s) experience itself into a way of seeing,” (24), though in the process, our world, our history, and our memories become separate, fragmented slices of time. Although the invention of the camera has allowed us to capture and contain these moments, it seems that we are still just as blind as ever, and thus the struggle to leave Plato’s cave continues on.