But our first exposure to the light is not good. The pursuit of wisdom is the pursuit of the light rather than the Cave of Shadows, which is the Cave of Opinions. As Plato recounts, the philosopher, who is simply the person the person who follows his soul toward the light of the sun, gets up and starts pursuing wisdom. The sun represents the Forms in Plato’s metaphorical analogy. He also opposes the nihilists who take an even more radical position: there is no truth and life is totally and unambiguously meaningless. This separates him from the sophists who sing the tune that we are all familiar with today: While there is probably truth, we cannot know truth, so we shouldn’t spend our time on trying to know truth, instead, we should spend our time knowing the world of social construction, because this is the only world that we can know because it is the world we’ve constructed. That is, he believes that not only is there truth in the world but that we can come to know it. So we return to what we know about Plato: he is an epistemological foundationalist. Thus, for Plato, humans naturally desire to know – but this desiring to know does not always end well. It fulfills our instinctive want for wisdom. The innate ideas are what propel the soul – which is the thinking mind – to venture toward the light of truth. Instead, we have innate ideas of the Forms within us and we need to come to understand these Forms in our lives the faint knowledge of the Forms is what compels man to leave the Cave (seek understanding). That said, Plato does not think that humans desire to remain in this Cave. It is the Cave: the cold, dark, wet, and ignorant Cave. Plato’s origo of humanity is not the state of nature of liberalism, and it is not the communion with wisdom and beauty as in Plotinus. In this post, we will briefly explore all these aspects to Plato’s most memorable metaphor. The Allegory of the Cave is doing many things for Plato, it is a commentary on humanity’s origo, it is a commentary on epistemology, it is a commentary on what the life of the philosopher is like, is an esoteric critique of the sophists, and it is also a commentary on the nature of mass society. The Allegory of the Cave is probably Plato’s most famous metaphorical story in all of his works and is certainly the most memorable moment in his Republic.
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