The Forms and The Cave

As we’ve learned, Plato believed in something called the noumenal world. In this world, perfect forms of every earthly thing existed. See the chair you’re sitting on? It’s actually a sad imitation of a chair. In the noumenal world there is a “perfect chair.” The person who made that chair knew to make it that way because knowledge of the noumenal world is hidden in all of our souls and allow us to imitate the designs of the forms. So Plato would say there is indeed a perfect chair floating up in the sky somewhere, and a perfect horse, and a perfect dog, and a perfect blender, and a perfect everything else. Plato constructed the Allegory of the Cave to explain the concepts of the nominal world, the theory of the forms, and absolute Truth.

Plato invites the listener (who is very likely trapped against his will) to imagine a cave. There are prisoners shackled to the walls of this cave and have been for their entire lives; they know nothing but the walls of their prison (anyone else wonder who feeds these people? Because I do). They can’t even move their heads left or right and can only look straight ahead at a wall. Outside of the cave is a path that the people in the outside world often take. There is a fire behind the prisoners, so they see the shadows of the figures on the walkway on the wall in front of them. This is the only life these prisoners have ever known. This, to them, is reality.

One day, one of the prisoners escapes and runs out onto the walkway. For the first time, he sees things as they really arm. He sees light, feels the heat of the sun on his skin, and sees passerby, animals, and plants. He is amazed at this new, true reality. Ecstatic, he runs back into the cave to tell the others, but they are unmoved. He is mocked. He comes away disillusioned, disgusted by the artificial world he once knew.

This escaped prisoner is Plato, the philosopher king. The enlightened one freed from the prison of this world, one who knows the truth and must aid others in discovering it too. The cave represents our temporal world. The land outside the cave represents the noumenal world, and its inhabitants are the perfect, real forms. The shadows on the walls represent our imitations of the forms. Like the escapee, a Philosopher King can expect to be mocked and misunderstood. Very few in our world can be on such an elevated intellectual level, and not everyone can reach Plato’s idea of enlightenment; the jeering cave-dwellers represent those that cannot.