The Cave (Book VII)

Next, I said, compare our nature, in its education and lack of education, to a condition like this. Picture human beings living in an underground cave, with a long entrance open to the light along the whole width of the cave. They have been there since childhood, with their legs and necks chained, so that they cannot move, and can see only in front of them, unable to turn their heads. Above and behind them, a fire is burning at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised road, along which a low wall has been built, like the screen that puppeteers set up in front of themselves, over which they show their puppets.

Along this wall, imagine people carrying all sorts of objects that stick up above it: statues of men and animals made of stone and wood and every material. Some of the carriers, as you would expect, are talking, and others are silent.

"A strange image," Glaucon said, "and strange prisoners."

They are like us, I said. For in the first place, do you think they have seen anything of themselves and of one another, except the shadows that the fire throws on the wall of the cave in front of them? And of the objects being carried, likewise, only the shadows. And if they could talk to each other, they would think the names they used applied to the shadows they saw. And if there were an echo from the wall, whenever one of the carriers spoke, they would think it was the passing shadow speaking. To them, the truth would be nothing but the shadows of the artifacts.

Now consider what would happen if one of them were released and cured of his folly. Suppose he were suddenly made to stand up, turn his neck, walk and look toward the light. All this would hurt him, and the glare would make him unable to see the things whose shadows he had seen before. If someone told him that what he had seen before was nonsense, and that now he was a little closer to reality and saw more truly, he would be puzzled, and believe that the shadows he saw before were truer than the things now shown to him. And if he were made to look at the fire itself, his eyes would hurt, and he would turn away and flee back to the shadows.

And if someone dragged him by force up the rough, steep path out of the cave, and did not let go until he had hauled him into the light of the sun, he would be in pain and angry, and when he came into the light, his eyes would be so dazzled that he could not see a single one of the things now called true. He would need to grow accustomed. At first he would see shadows most easily, then reflections of men and things in water, then the things themselves; then he would look at the heavens at night, at the light of the stars and the moon. And last of all he would be able to look at the sun itself, not its reflections in water, but the sun in its own place, and see what it is like. And he would conclude that it is the sun that produces the seasons and the years, and governs everything in the visible world, and is in a way the cause of all the things he and his fellow prisoners used to see.

Then, remembering his first home, and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, he would count himself happy for the change, and pity them. If there were honors and prizes in the cave for whoever was quickest to recognize the passing shadows and best remembered which came first and which together, and so was best at predicting what would come next, would he envy those who were honored and powerful there? Or would he feel, as Homer says, that he would rather be a hired laborer on earth for a man without land, and endure anything, than think as they think and live as they live?

Now imagine that he went back down and sat in his old seat. His eyes would be full of darkness, coming suddenly out of the sun. And if he had to compete again with the prisoners who had always been chained there, in judging the shadows, while his sight was still dim, would he not make himself ridiculous? They would say that he had gone up and come back with his eyes ruined, and that it was not worth even trying to go up. And if they could get their hands on the man who tried to free them and lead them up, would they not kill him?

"They certainly would," said Glaucon.

This whole image, I said, must be fitted to what we said before. The prison is the visible world; the fire is the sun; the ascent and the vision of things above is the journey of the soul up to the intelligible world. And in the knowable realm, the last thing to be seen, and hardly seen, is the form of the Good. Once seen, it must be concluded that it is the cause of all that is right and beautiful in everything.

It follows that education is not what some people say it is: putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes. The power to learn is present in everyone's soul, and the instrument by which each of us learns is like an eye that cannot be turned from darkness to light except together with the whole body. So the whole soul must be turned around, away from the world of becoming, until it can bear to look at being, and at the brightest of all being, which is the Good. Education is the art of this turning.

And here is our task as founders: to compel the best natures to make that ascent and see the Good; and then not to let them stay up there, but to make them go back down to the prisoners, and share their labors and honors. "Will we not be wronging them," Glaucon asked, "making them live a worse life when they could live a better?" No, I said: the law is not concerned with making one class happy, but the whole city. And we will say to them: other cities' philosophers grow up of their own accord, and owe the city nothing; but we have bred you, like kings in a hive, to be leaders, and educated you better than anyone. So each of you must go down in turn. You will see a thousand times better than those who live there, because you have seen the truth. And a city ruled by those who least want to rule will be governed best and most peacefully.

Then we described their studies, all of which turn the soul upward: arithmetic, not for buying and selling, but to draw the soul toward being; plane geometry; then solid geometry; then astronomy, studied not for the sake of the visible heavens, but as problems; and harmonics. And above them all, the song itself, of which these are only the prelude: dialectic, which alone, setting aside all assumptions, travels up to the first principle itself.

And the order of their lives: until about twenty, gymnastics; from twenty to thirty, the mathematical studies, seen together in their connections; from thirty to thirty-five, dialectic; then fifteen years back in the cave, holding military commands and public offices, to gain experience and be tested; and at fifty, those who have come through will lift the eye of their soul to the Good itself, and, using it as a pattern, govern the city and themselves in turn for the rest of their lives, spending most of their time in philosophy, but taking their turn at the toil of politics, not as something noble, but as something necessary.

(End of Episode 7 — continued in Episode 8: The Decline of Cities)