Plato's Allegory of the Cave

What is reality? Could it be different from what we perceive? These are the questions addressed by Plato, the Greek philosopher who lived 2500 years ago, in his Allegory of the Cave.

Plato asks us to imagine a group of people chained in a cave since birth. The chains prevent them from moving their heads so they can only see the wall of the cave in front of them. A fire is kept burning behind them. Other people pass back and forth between the fire and the prisoners, carrying things. These peoples’ shadows and the prisoner’s shadows are cast onto the wall that the prisoners can see. Understandably, because it is the only thing they see, the prisoners believe that the shadows are reality.

The prisoners can talk to each other; they form all sorts of theories and philosophies and scientific hypotheses about the shadows. But the truth is the reality they think is so real is actually just a shadow-world. The real world exists, but they can’t see it.

In my terminology, they are deluded about what is real; they are out-of-touch with reality; they are insane. But within the prisoners’ consensual reality, within the “truth” of their society, to be “sane” you must believe that the shadow-world is objective reality.

Plato then asks us to imagine that a prisoner escapes the chains, makes it out of the cave, and sees objective reality. After a difficult period in which his eyes adjust to the light of the sun, this person realizes that the shadow-world is an illusory, delusional reality. When this person tries to enlighten those still in chains as to the truth, he is ridiculed.

But in fact he is more in touch with objective reality than those who believe the shadows are reality. He is the relatively sane one.

This allegory is exactly to the point of the message of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity. Our perceptions are like the shadows on Plato’s wall. Yet we mistakenly believe that our subjective point-of-view is actual reality.

Lately I have been wondering what brought about the so-called Post-Modernist worldview, which began to appear in the 1960s. In a major shift from earlier times, when it was accepted that there was only one correct worldview, people began to recognize that everyone has a subjective point-of-view.

While watching a collection of films made by Thomas Edison’s studio between 1901-1906, it occurred to me that the advent of film played a role in this shift. We take it for granted today, but imagine what it was like one hundred years ago to go into a dark theater and see on the flat screen something that seemed so real. Of course people had been attending stage-plays for centuries, but these could never approach the simulation of reality that is true of movies.

In addition, in an age when many people never traveled farther than 50 miles from home, the images of life in far-off places and of people behaving differently than the norms of the local society must have been startling and revelatory. (The film “Cinema Paradiso” is a fascinating look at the influence movies had on a small town in Sicily.)

While I was looking for online versions of Plato’s Allegory, I came across a version posted by someone at Washington State University, with this commentary:

If he were living today, Plato might replace his rather awkward cave metaphor with a movie theater, with the projector replacing the fire, the film replacing the objects which cast shadows, the shadows on the cave wall with the projected movie on the screen, and the echo with the loudspeakers behind the screen. The essential point is that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy representation of it.

The essential point here, in this blog, is that when we are confuse our shadow representation of reality with actual reality, we are delusional, we are insane.

In an earlier version of We Are ALL Innocent Arthur and I used a movie analogy for the concept of “mind-generated reality.” We wrote: imagine a one-seat theater in our minds in which we watch the film of our life. This film is scripted, edited, and directed by the beliefs and assumptions of our culture, time, family, and personal experience, and is projected on an internal screen of awareness.

Arthur wrote a song about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

PLATO’S CAVE

by Arthur Hancock

In Plato’s cave a prisoner dreams of a place he knows is true

High above this shadowed darkness that was once all that he knew

In Plato’s cave a chanced escape sent him wandering from that wall

That he'd studied for a lifetime that he'd never learned at all

In Plato’s cave everyone was chained with their faces to the stone

And their shadows were reality not just ghosts the light had thrown

In Plato’s cave all the others said that a life in shadowed chain

Was the most that one could hope for there was nothing else to gain

In Plato’s cave he escaped his chains and he stumbled to the light

And he saw the wherefore and the why and he saw the prisoner’s plight

So to Plato’s cave he returned to tell of the truth he’d found above

But there his words of hope received more fear and hate than love

In Plato’s cave maybe life ain’t much but it’s all we’ve ever known

We’re secure in this reality so won’t you please leave it alone

In Plato’s cave maybe life ain’t much but it’s all we’ve ever known

We’re secure within our misery so won’t you please leave us alone