Plato's Cave

A recent Philosophy class lecture spurred thoughts on the application of Plato's story of the cave to modern society.. 

Plato, in his most famous allegory, describes a cave containing people who are chained to the floor facing a blank wall. They know nothing other than the shadows they see on the wall, cast by objects and people moving past the mouth of the cave. They have lived this way for their entire lives, and most of them are content to sit peacefully staring at the shadows.

But in Plato’s story one individual escapes from his chains and climbs out of the cave. Confronted with sunlight and three-dimensional objects, he is overwhelmed for a while, but eventually he wanders around in wonder and delight. He realizes that the shadows were a hopelessly poor rendition of reality, and that, without knowledge of this outside world, his life up to this point has been of little value.

He feels it is his obligation to return to the cave to alert the others – they must be helped to break their own chains and escape from the world of shadows. So he climbs back down into the darkness. His efforts to communicate are in vain, though, because the people in the cave believe their world to be real. He represents a threat to their reality, so they sentence him to death.

This tale carries the same meaning today that Plato intended for it to carry when he invented it two millennia ago – that philosophers with new ideas will be rejected by a society founded upon older ideas. It is unlikely that today’s western culture would actually kill the bearers of new theories – it is simply quite adept at ignoring the theories themselves if they would undermine the established order. Examples include the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who feared the government’s implicit power over the lives of individuals, and Georgetown professor John Hasnas, who challenges the government’s right to claim a monopoly over law. These people are followed by some and respected by many, but for the most part they are ignored by society at large. It is not certain, though, that people with revolutionary ideas are ignored because their ideas challenge the fabric of relations between the individual and the government. More probably, the pressure for acceptance of the status quo is maintained because of the sheer complexity of alternative theories like those of Foucault or Hasnas. This factor, in addition to a perceived danger, is probably present in all modern or ancient examples of Plato’s cave.

Of course, Plato’s intended significance might have been slightly less extensive – he was probably focusing on his own theory of forms as the light outside the cave which would bring people closer to reality. But his allegory does reveal something of human nature. Most people tend to see the world in as few dimensions as possible, to cling to this vision with all of their might, and to fight those who they perceive as threatening it. Only recently and only in some parts of the world have the bearers of new ideas easily escaped the death Plato predicted.

The best application of Plato’s theory is in religion. A basic summary of the history of Christianity, particularly in medieval Europe, will reveal that it has silenced or killed voices of dissent. The same applies to several modern Middle-Eastern Islamic cultures. It is the nature of most religions to believe that they are correct and that no further explanation is necessary – thus, worries about undermining their authority through alternative thought are particularly well founded. This is especially the case when the religion has been morphed to conform to the channels of power utilized by the state. In such cases – when the state is the tool of religion and/or when religion is the tool of the state – the legitimacy of both is undermined, and it becomes necessary to preserve the legitimacy of authority by exercising raw and direct power in its most violent form. Very few cultures have ever entirely escaped from this phenomenon. In this example of the cave, the chains of the prisoners are held in place by the will of the state and of religious institutions. Such imprisonment can only be accomplished with the passive consent of the prisoner, though.

Carl Sagan expressed the extent of the applicability of Plato’s allegory when he said:

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

There are certain issues toward which people are extremely dogmatic. This becomes a problem for the independent philosopher when those people decide it is their duty to ensure that their dogmas are shared by the world. This is the case in politics when morals are transformed by popular consent into laws, as well as in religion when the state is used to guarantee membership of religious institutions.

Plato’s metaphor is often only a description of people’s perception of each other, though, especially when applied to the most basic form of philosophy. Many people believe they have seen things the way they actually are and that everyone else is staring at shadows on a wall. It is never possible to be entirely certain of whose shadows are closest to reality, though it is fairly certain that nobody has found the exact answer. Thus, we live in a world where people are constantly struggling to tear each other away from one set of illusions and focus them instead on another. Those "prisoners" who killed the explorer in the original tale may simply have been overzealous prophets of their own world-view.