Hello I'm Dr. Anadale and our topic
today is A First Look at Plato's Cave.
This is a short excerpt from the
beginning of book 7 of Plato's long
dialogue, The Republic, and in it we get a
story, an extended metaphor, about
prisoners in a cave. Very briefly:
these are prisoners chained in a cave,
hand and foot; they face the wall and
they see only shadows on the wall. They
don't know that these are shadows,
however; they take the shadows for all of
reality. In the story a prisoner is
released and is taken up to the surface,
reluctantly and with great difficulty, to
see objects outside of the cave in the
surface world, in the light of the Sun.
The released prisoner then is able to know
the truth about herself and about the
cave world for the first time.
This is an allegory ultimately about
the nature of the philosophical education
and with that in mind I want to raise
three points for you to think about in
preparing to discuss this material in
class. First point: the ascent out of the
cave, this process of education, is
difficult; in fact, it requires assistance
and even requires coercion sometimes. My
question for you: how is this insight
relevant to the nature of education
today, right now in the 21st century? My
second point: the person who is outside
of the cave is able to understand
herself and to understand the cave
situation and what it truly is like. That
is, she's able to understand her own past
and to say "I used to be somebody who saw
shadows on the wall but now I see real
things," so she's able to have a kind of
autobiography, to give an autobiographical
account of herself and her own progress
towards knowledge of the truth.
This is an account that the person who
is still in the cave is not able to give.
The person still in the cave is skeptical
about the existence of anything outside
of the cave. In a similar way, the person
who has escaped is able to criticize the
value system of people who remain in the
cave with some authority. She's able to
say that giving awards to the king
prisoner for being able to identify the
shadows on the wall
accurately and quickly is really not
that great a feat to recognize because it
ignores that the whole reality lies
outside of the cave. But the criticism
that the people in the cave would make
of the values of the escaped prisoner do
not have a basis in reality. They are
ignorant of, or skeptical about, the
existence of the outside world, so their
critiques don't carry any weight with us.
Again, what is the value
of this sort of framework for thinking
about education today, thinking about
your own personal development towards
being an educated person. My third and last
point: philosophical education says Plato
at the end of this exercise, requires a
reorientation of the whole self. It is a
transformative experience, and here's how
Plato describes it through the voice of Socrates at 518c:
What Plato is talking about here is that
philosophical education is not just
going to be a matter of changing some ideas
or changing some practices--it's going
to be a process that
transforms one's entire life, one's entire
outlook. Everything is at stake in the
outcome of this philosophical education
because it involves a turning of the soul
away from one set of objects towards
a totally different set of objects. It's a
complete transformation of one's value
system--you might say it that way. So I ask you to
think about what this means for the
process of education that you've just
begun with the study of philosophy and
what it means about how we ought to
approach it both as teacher and as
students in the weeks to come.
That's a first look at Plato's cave.
I look forward to talking with you about
it later in class or in the comments
section below. Thanks for watching today; goodbye.