The Allegory Cave and the Truth (with a capital "T")

Hello.

Ok, “The Allegory of the Cave” (or “The Simile of the Cave”). I’m not sure that I agree with everything being said in this piece, though I have thought about it a lot (I honestly thought of scanning in the notes I took on the page because they show A LOT of thought), but I do know that I really like the way it’s written and the actually simile of the cave, which is described in the first half of this piece.

I think that for this one, I’m going to write my own prompt. The question that I ask myself is, “Is Truth, and seeing clearly (the “light”) better for lawmakers, or should lawmakers be in the cave, with all of their subjects? IS there anyone else?”

The first thing that I want to address about this question is the last thing in this whole piece. The very last line is “There is no one else.” This line particularly bothered me, because, in my glass-is-half-full opinion, there is ALWAYS someone else. And I think there lies the main problem I have with the philosophers. They believe that they are the only ones; they are the only ones clever enough to rule. They believe that there is no position other than that of a philosopher, who looks down on the government. This is stated on page 248, line 521, part b, roughly.

I know that it says that they believe that a man who is educated is just as bad, as a lawmaker, as one that is not educated. The man who stands in the light, is blinded in the cave, and the one in the cave is blinded by the light, neither can see both, but that is what they are saying about people who rule. A good ruler would be one who can look at the light, then come back to the cave to share what he has seen.

To the question. I think that it is better to be educated then to not be. If you are “in the cave” and leading others “in the cave”, then it is the blind leading the blind. You can’t make good decisions if you don’t have an education. Of course, I am biased. I am an American in a good school, with good grades, raised by two professors, so of course that I think that being educated is the best.

But I think that part of the reason that Plato doesn’t believe that educated people can rule well is because he believes that ALL educated people can’t return to the cave and are too engrossed in their “divine’ thoughts to come back from the sun, or the fire.

So what to take away from this piece? I don’t know, honestly. I think that it’s impossible to truly stare at the sun. No one can really know the truth, so everyone is just looking at reflections. And here, I would like to reference “The Lady of Shalott”, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. In the poem, the Lady of Shalott is locked in a tower and forced by a curse she has only heard whispers of, to look at the world only through a mirror, which is what I am trying to say here: we are all looking at the truth only through mirrors.

Ok, here’s the quote:

And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot;
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls
Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd lad,
Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad
Goes by to tower'd Camelot;
And sometimes through the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two.
She hath no loyal Knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot;
Or when the Moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed.
"I am half sick of shadows," said
The Lady of Shalott.

If you want to read the whole thing, go to this website: http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/TENNLADY.HTML. It really is a phenomenal poem, and I think that it is closely related to the Allegory of the Cave.

Alrighty, I’m done.

Goodbye.