Plato

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Platos The Allegory of the Cave

• HMXP 102
• Dr. Fike

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Anouncements

• Those who do not have Plato must go get a text.
• Visit from Writing Center Tutor.
• Optional paper proposals due.
• Who will volunteer their papers for class
  discussion?
• Reminder critical reading marking your books.

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Newman

• In The Idea of a University, Newman suggests
  the following things
• Liberal education produces a well-balanced
  quality of mind. See Such a power . . . and
  This process of training. . . . There are two
  kinds of utility.
• Question What are the two types?

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Two Types of Utility

• Extrinsic utility (some definite work, which can
  be weighted and measures) immediate usefulness.
• Intrinsic utility (what tends to good or is the
  instrument of good) Something cannot be put to
  immediate use, but it is an end in itself because
  it enables goodness, which is prolific.

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Application

• Extrinsic utility education that leads to a
  specific job.
• Intrinsic utility education that cultivates the
  mind.
• But there is some overlap. Vocational training
  strengthens the mind, and liberal education has
  some direct applicability. Perhaps it depends on
  your school and your major.

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Newmans Point about the Liberal Arts

• I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is
  a good in itself, brings with it a power and a
  grace to every work and occupation which it
  undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and
  to a greater number.
• It makes you good members of society, elevates
  the intellectual tone of society, and prepares
  you to fill any post with credit, and to master
  any subject with facility.

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Why Begin with Newman?

• He describes the sort of education that Platos
  Allegory is about not specific vocational
  preparation but a more general enhancement of the
  quality of ones mind, which enables you to
  enhance the good in your community.

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Introductory Points

• Source Platos Republic.
• Setting Ancient Greece.
• Speakers Socrates is talking to Glaucon.
• Format Dialectic, the tradition of continuing
  debate or discussion of eternally unresolved
  issuesPlatos Dialogues exemplify this kind of
  dialectic (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to
  Literature). Give and take, QA.
• Title  Symbolism vs. Allegory
• Symbolism many possible referents. Example
  Faulkners A Rose for Emily.
• Allegory one-to-one correspondence between a
  detail in the text and something outside the
  text.
• Therefore, an allegory, contrary to the head note
  CANNOT be a symbolic moral fable.

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Diagram and Video

• http//www.users.globalnet.co.uk/loxias/plato/cav
  eframes.htm
• http//youtube.com/watch?vTYKNAdbhQ-wfeaturerel
  ated

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Exercise for Small Groups

• Get with a partner and figure out what each of
  the following details refers to
• Shackles/bonds/fetters
• Shadows
• Fire
• artifacts (page 3, col. 2)
• The light above (the sun)
• the things themselves (page 4, col. 2)
• Persons who view the shadows
• Persons who leave the cave
• Persons who return to the cave

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Persons Who Leave the Cave

• Question
• What historical persons fit this category?
• Who ARE they in our contemporary context? people?
  Examples?

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More Questions

• What happens when someone who knows the truth
  (who has seen the light) goes back to the cave?
• Why would one do such a thing?
• Can you think of examples of such persons from
  history? From current events? (See the examples
  on the next slide.)

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Such Persons

• Socrates (foreshadowing)
• Jesus
• Gandhi
• Martin Luther King
• RFK
• Benazir Bhutto
• Harriet Tubman
• You?
• What else do most of these figures have in common?

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The Key to Understanding the Allegory

• Page 5, column 1, middle of the column
• The visible realm the everyday world should
  be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light
  of the fire inside it to the power of the sun.
• In other words
• Cave/prisonvisible realm (real
  world)visible realmForms (intelligible
  realm, knowable realm on page 5, left)
• Illusion is to reality as reality is to
  transcendent ideas (the really real).

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In Other Words Hierarchy

• Forms/Ideas
• Reality/The Concrete World
• Illusion/Shadows/Art

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Point

• In allegory, something in the text represents
  something not in the text.
• In this case, the cave/prison represents the
  world in which we live.
• Thus education (i.e., getting out of the cave and
  correcting your vision) involves two things 1)
  accurate viewing of things in the physical world
  (versus the illusions in the cave) and 2) getting
  in touch with the Forms or Ideas (the most real)
  that exist prior to and independent of things in
  the physical world.
• As the cave dwellers must climb up to the light,
  so those of us who live in the sunlight must seek
  the Forms of things.

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Platos Hierarchy A Gloss on Those Who Leave
the Cave

• Here is the hierarchy
• Forms/Ideas (e.g., the form of the good on page
  5, left col.)
• Nature (the things themselves on page 4, right
  col.)
• Art and other appearances like the false ones in
  the cave
• POINT Although seeing things as they are in
  nature is a good thing, the middle position is
  still one remove from things in their essence or
  as they truly are (the Forms/Ideas).
• POINT Leaving the cave is progress, but there
  is still a higher realm (the intelligible realm
  or the knowable realm on page 5, left col.)
  that must be apprehended.
• Illusions/shadows ? concrete/real world ? Forms.

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Clarification

• Individual persons move from illusion (cave) ? a
  correct vision of reality (sunlit world) ? an
  intellectual life (ideas/forms, the knowable or
  intelligible realm). This is a movement from a
  lower to a higher spiritual/intellectual state.
• How things manifest in the physical world
  Forms/Ideas (exist prior to and apart from the
  physical world) ? a person has an idea that
  reflects a Form/Idea and then brings it into
  physical manifestation ? someone incorporates
  that object in art (e.g., painting, literature).

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Education

• What are the implications of this passage from
  page 4, cols. 1-2?
• And if someone dragged him away from there by
  force, up the rough, steep path, and didnt let
  him go until he had dragged him into the
  sunlight, wouldnt he be pained and irritated at
  being treated that way?

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Next Question

• What metaphors does Plato use?

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What Metaphors Does Plato Use?

• the upward journey and the study of things above
  as the upward journey of the soul to the
  intelligible realm, i.e., the realm of Forms or
  Ideas (page 5, col. 1).
• Seeing, vision.
• this turning around (page 6, col. 1)
• (Very much akin to the theological concept of
  metanoia, the idea of changing your mind, which
  enables repentance.)

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Contemporary Analogy

• What movie that you have all seen illustrates
  this turning around?

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Summary

• Educations purpose is to elevate us from false
  appearances (self-deception), to things as they
  are (nature), to things as they may ideally be
  (Forms), i.e., to shift us from falsity to
  accuracy and then to lift us from the
  earthly/concrete to the transcendental/spiritual/i
  ntellectual.
• Implication In order to be educated, we must
  turn away from misconceptions and achieve
  personal transformation by coming to understand
  things more nearly as they are.

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A Long Process

• Skeptical denial (you get laughed at if you
  espouse the new idea).
• Admission that the new idea may possibly be true
• Acceptance of the new idea.
• Full-blown paradigm shift (you get laughed at if
  you deny the new idea).

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Implication for Values

• Pages 4-5
• Instead, wouldnt he feel, with Homer, that
  hed much prefer to work the earth as a serf to
  another, one without possessions, and go through
  any sufferings, rather than share their opinions
  and live as they do?

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Homer, Odyssey XI, 544-56

• Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
• for some poor country man, on iron rations,
• than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
• --Achilless soul, in the afterlife
• From The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces
  Beginnings to A.D. 100, page 359.

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Distinction

• Achilless afterlife is in the place of the
  unhappy dead versus the Elysian Fields mentioned
  in note 3the place of the happy dead.
• See also the faraway Isles of the Blessed, page
  6, right.

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Question

• How would you paraphrase Achilless statement?
  Here it is again
• Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
• for some poor country man, on iron rations,
• than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
• What point does the allusion to Homer suggest?

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What Is the Corresponding Point?

• Achilles says that it is better to be a wretched
  servant but to be ALIVE than to be a king in the
  afterlife. That is how much worse it is to be
  dead than to be miserable but alive.

• You fill out this side of the chart with your
  understanding of Platos point

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Basketball Paper

• A WU basketball player made an analogy to these
  passages in Plato and Homer in the following way.
• It is better, he wrote, to be a bench warmer for
  WUs basketball team than to be a starting player
  for a lesser schools basketball team.
• Thus the excellence of WUs team parallels the
  apprehension of truth when one leaves Platos
  cave.
• The thing that he needed to consider, of course,
  is that seeing himself mainly as a basketball
  player was a form of deception no matter how good
  a team he played for. In this respect, he might
  have been a cave dweller after all, believing
  something to be superior to something else when
  both are illusory.

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Problem with Note 2

• It reads The shade of the dead Achilles speaks
  these words to Odysseus, who is visiting Hades.
  Plato is, therefore, likening the cave dwellers
  to the dead.
• But this is not Hades (the underworld). Odysseus
  visits the dead in a meadow. He does not go down
  into Hades. The dead come up from Hades to speak
  with him.
• PLUS, Odysseus goes to the meadow to consult with
  Teiresias, the blind seer. In other words, the
  journey provides illumination and guidance.
• So the analogy is NOT between Platos cave and
  Homers Hades. The key thing is the contrasts
  that arise living vs. dead king vs. serf.

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Irony

• The note accurately likens Platos cave dwellers
  to the dead in Homers poem.
• BUT (!) if you consider the meadow in Homers
  poem to be analogous to Platos cave, then the
  implication is that one must descend into the
  cave in order to learn the truth because Odysseus
  visits the dead to gain essential information
  from Teiresias, the seer, who alone among the
  dead thinks clearly.
• Does Plato have it backwards?
• His allegory says that seeing what is true helps
  us to understand what is false. But is it also
  the case that seeing what is false helps us to
  understand what is true?
• And is it possible that one can live like
  Teiresias in the midst of illusions (i.e., in the
  cave) and still see clearly?
• Joseph Campbell says that the heros journey has
  three parts descent ? encounter (e.g., descent
  into hell or confrontation with a monster or a
  villain or illusion like the shadows on the wall)
  ? return. The middle part of Campbells triad
  emphasizes the value of confronting negativity.

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Transition

• In one interpretation, Plato is suggesting that
  it is better to be poor in the material sense and
  yet to see things as they are than it is to be
  wealthy but self-deceived.
• You might write a nice paper about why you think
  that this is a false dichotomy (or not). Cannot
  persons be both well off AND enlightened? See
  next slide.

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A Christian Analogy

• Jesus Sell your possessions, and give alms
  to the poor provide yourself with purses that
  do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens
  that does not fail, where no thief approaches and
  no moth destroys. For where your treasure is,
  there will your heart be also (Luke 1233-34).
• Jesus Sell all that you have and distribute
  to the poor, and you will have treasure in
  heaven and come, follow me (Luke 1822).

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Transition

• Plato has been talking about persons who
  apprehend the truth, but then the text turns to
  ways of knowing and offers two possibilities.

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Different Models of Apprehending the Truth

• The first one is on pages 5-6
• But our present discussion, on the other hand,
  shows that the power to learn is present in
  everyones soul and that the instrument with
  which each learns is like an eye that cannot be
  turned around from darkness to light without
  turning the whole body. Then education is the
  craft of doing this very thing, this turning
  around. It isnt the craft of putting sight
  into the soul. Education takes for granted that
  sight is there but that it isnt turned the right
  way or looking where it ought to look, and it
  tries to redirect it appropriately.

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Platos Meno

• This quotation makes it sound as if we have an
  inborn CAPACITY to learn, but in his dialogue,
  The Meno, he goes further. He suggests that we
  are also born with knowledge of certain things,
  and he puts forward the following theory.
• Anamnesis Learning equals remembering what the
  soul knows but has forgotten because of its
  physical incarnation. Dialectic is a means of
  uncovering this knowledge someone has to ask
  you the right questions.

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Development of Anamnesis

• What things do we remember?
• What things do we learn for the first time?
• Do you even buy Platos distinction?

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Assumption Reincarnation

• Plato believes in reincarnation. For example
• For a soul does not return to the place whence
  she came for ten thousand years, since in no
  lesser time can she regain her wings, save only
  his soul who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly,
  or has conjoined his passion for a loved one with
  that seeking.
• Plato, Phaedrus, 249a
• he that grows better shall make his way to the
  better souls and he that has grown worse to the
  worser, and so, in life, and throughout the
  series of deaths, do and have done to him what it
  is meet the like-minded should do to their likes.
  This doom of heaven be sure neither thyself nor
  any other that has fallen on ill ways shall ever
  claim to have escaped tis that which the
  fashioners of doom have established before all
  others and that which should be shunned with
  utter dread.
• Plato, Laws X, 905a

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A Clearer Translation

• O youth or young man, who fancy that you are
  neglected by the Gods, know that if you become
  worse you shall go to the worse souls, or if
  better to the better, and in every succession of
  life and death you will do and suffer what like
  may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is
  the justice of heaven (my emphasis).

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More on Reincarnation

• Plato believed in reincarnation.
• Do YOU?
• Someone once said that to know what you were in a
  past lifetime, look at your hobbies. Did you
  ever just KNOW that you had to do something in a
  big way?
• Do you accumulate knowledge and experience from
  lifetime to lifetime?

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Extra Information on Reincarnation

• The following finds evidence for reincarnation in
  biblical quotations
• http//www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/qureinc
  r.htm
• POINT It is not possible to say that the Bible
  absolutely rules out the concept of reincarnation.

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The Other Position

• The second position is on pages 5-6
• Some believe that education involves putting
  knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting
  sight into blind eyes. Plato adds that the
  other so-called virtues of the soul are akin to
  those of the body, for they really arent there
  beforehand but are added later by habit and
  practice.
• What is Plato talking about?

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Two Models

• What, then, are the two models that Plato is
  suggesting?

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Answer

• Model one When we learn, we are remembering
  things that we already have in our unconscious
  minds or in our souls. Learning a welling up of
  what is within.
• Model two We learn through practice, habit,
  repetition. Learning imposing things from
  outside the self.
• Method In each case, learning involves focusing
  our inborn sight in the right direction.
• What are the implications of these two models?

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Possible Implications

• Re. model one You are much more capable than we
  realize. We have inner resources that have not
  yet surfaced.
• Re. model two You are insufficient and
  therefore need help (education and right reason,
  in Platos way of thinking divine grace, in a
  theological paradigm).
• Or you are somewhere in between you have inborn
  inner resources, but you also need help from
  others or from a higher being.
• What do you believe about your education?

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A Key Virtue Reason

• Page 6
• However, the virtue of reason seems to belong
  above all to something more divine, which never
  loses its power but is either useful and
  beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on
  the way it is turned (my emphasis).
• POINT Reason can be used for good or evil.
  The last column says that we should use
  reason/education for good purposes
• we mustnt allow them those who have seen the
  light to do what theyre allowed to do today. .
  . . To stay there and refuse to go down again to
  the prisoners in the cave and share their labors
  and honors, whether they are of less worth or of
  greater.
• POINT Education carries social responsibility.
  You must act.

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Writing in Class

• Write a short paragraph that sums up The
  Allegory of the Cave. What is the moral of the
  story? What message is Plato trying to convey
  about education? You have 5 minutes.
• What did you come up with?
• My summary appears on the next slide.

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Here is My Summary

• Plato says In the physical world, we must focus
  on what is real rather than on what is illusory.
  Education involves turning from illusion to
  reality, and this can be a painful process. We
  must also contemplate the original Forms/Ideas
  (the most real)Plato encourages us to become
  more intellectual. We are predisposed to learn,
  but we must exercise reason for good purposes.
  That includes helping others in the community.

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Questions about the Self

• What can Plato teach you about the selfand about
  your self?
• Are you a soul in a physical body?
• Are you a spiritual being having a physical
  experience?
• Are you a physical being that may or may not have
  an afterlife in the spirit?
• Did you exist before you were borndid you have a
  pre-existence?
• If so, did you carry over into this life any
  memory (perhaps unconscious memory) from previous
  lifetimes or from a spiritual preexistence?
• Have you ever just known something as if part
  of you is remembering, though you have never
  experienced the specific thing in this lifetime?
• Do you already have inside you all the things
  that you need, or do you need external
  reinforcement and support like education or
  divine grace? Is the answer perhaps that you
  need some of both?
• Is it possible that what we consider concrete and
  real is actually an illusion? What is reality?
• Is Platos story an allegory of going away to
  college? Of overcoming addiction? Of embracing a
  new idea?

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Writing in Class about Possible Paper Topics

• What has The Allegory of the Cave helped you to
  understand about yourself? Write for five
  minutes about this and turn in your answer before
  you leave today.
• Is Platos allegory the story of your own
  education?
• Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or
  are you striving toward the light? Discuss and
  example.
• Is it possible that all of earthy/physical
  existence is the cave? See St. Paul For now
  on earth we see in a mirror dimly, but then in
  the afterlife face to face (1 Cor. 1312).
• In short, how are we cave dwellers even though we
  would all like to believe that we see things as
  they really are? How are we self-deceived?
• Might staying in your cave actually be a good
  thing under some circumstances?
• Does Platos allegory suggest that something that
  you have always considered the Truth is merely a
  truth?
• END