The Allegory of the Cave and the Theory of Forms: Plato and the Intelligible World
Probably no philosophical text, in twenty-five centuries of Western tradition, has been more commented, paraphrased, glossed, and reinterpreted than the passage that opens Book VII of Plato’s Republic. In three pages of translation, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine men chained from birth at the bottom of a cave, seeing only shadows projected on a wall — and proposes that this scene describes, with startling fidelity, the common condition of human beings. This is the Allegory of the Cave, and it is at once one of the most famous pieces of philosophy and one of the most systematically misunderstood. To read it rigorously, it must be situated in its context: it is the third of three articulated images — following the metaphor of the sun and the divided line — that constitute the core of Plato’s mature thought. ...