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Plato: Metaphor and Myth
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Authored by Frank Redmond, 2005
In the Republic, Plato consistently, through the use of metaphor and myth, explicates a worldview in which there are two parallel, yet untouching, planes of being: the illusory and the real. The reason why Plato uses these rhetorical tropes to explicate his worldview is clear - Plato recognizes the fact that the metaphysical realm of being can only be discussed through metaphor and myth. Human language is inadequate; language has no direct access to the “real”. But, for all this linguistic ambguity surrounding the “real”, Plato surely knows how one goes about knowing this realm of being. For Plato, the way to grasp this “real” world is to live a life devoted to contemplation and justice.
However, Plato does not immediately reveal what he considers his worldview to be in the Republic; rather, he slowly, step-by-step, insinuates his way to a full comprehension and conception of this worldview with its apex being found in the Allegory of the Cave.
It is with the Simile of the Sun that Plato first begins to develop a coherent metaphor for his worldview, and even though it is sketchy, it is a metaphor which he later builds upon. Although the Simile's primary intention is to provide an account of knowledge, it serves a dual function as it also provides us with a glimpse into Plato's worldview. (For, in fact, these two intentions are closely related in Plato's mind, since knowledge is one of the means by which one can realize the “real” realm). For him, there are two worlds of reality - the visible and the invisible – with the invisible being clearly favored by Plato. The visible world is the source of all growth and light which gives visibility to sensual objects and the power for the eye to see, i.e. the faculty of sight (Lee 231). The objects of this faculty of sight are particulars which themselves can be good and beautiful; however, these particulars are objects of sight and not of intelligence and, as such, cannot be known in-and-of-themselves. In other words, their true reality cannot be directly accessed. The only way in which one can get in touch with the the “real” world, therefore, is through intelligence, since intelligence can 'see', or better 'intuit', the “real” world, which is the source of all reality and truth. This source provides intelligibility to objects of thought and provides the mind with the power of knowing, i.e. the faculty of knowledge (231). A clear picture of what the Intelligible World, i.e. the “real”, looks like is beginning to manifest itself. The Intelligible World is a place deplete of all sensual and empirical data and representations, since these are, in Plato's words, “fixed on the twilight world of change and decay” (508d), and a place where the form of the good reigns over truth and knowledge. It is the form of the good that is the “real”, not knowledge and truth, for “just like it was right to think of light and sight as being like the sun, but wrong to think of them as being the sun itself, so here again it is right to think of knowledge and truth as being like the good, but wrong to think of either of them as being the good, whose position must be ranked higher” (508e-509a). Now, it must be understood that this conceptional worldview is merely an adumbration and not a mature picture. It will reach its fully maturity in the Allegory of the Cave, as we shall see.
Plato's Divided Line metaphor more fully embellishes what Plato first adumbrated in the Simile of the Sun. Its purpose is to further illustrate the relationship of the two realms and how the make up one worldview. In short, the metaphor states that there are four different mental states: Intelligence, Reason, Belief, and Illusion. As can be easily reckoned, it is the mental state, Intelligence, that Plato considers closest to the Good. However, what Plato is trying to demonstrate by using the Divided Line metaphor is that one must move from the bottom, Illusion, to the top, Intelligence, passing through each step one-by-one, in order to reach or get in touch with the Good, i.e. the “real”. This idea of upward mobility is lacking in the Simile of the Sun.
It only makes good sense then that Plato would next proceed to explicate his famous Allegory of the Cave, an Allegory which takes the previous two metaphors and brings them to their logical conclusion. In other words, the Allegory finally provides Plato's worldview with more substance. Like in the Divided Line, Plato sets up a hierarchy where knowledge begins at the depths of Illusion and progresses all the way to the Good via Intelligence, but the Allegory is much more substantial than the Divided Line. Plato begins the Allegory with these demonstrative words, “I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human condition” (513e). Obviously, given this, the Allegory is the descriptive process of how one can attain or fail to attain the beyond.
The Allegory of the Cave begins with a bunch of people who from birth have lived deep inside a cave having never seen the light of day. This bunch is bound so they can only look in one direction, that is straight ahead, and located behind them, is a big bonfire. Behind the bunch, there are puppets which are being swayed in front of the bonfire, and these puppets become reflected on the wall in front of the bunch. This is reality for the bunch, or what Plato identifies as the mental state of Illusion, for it is only these shadows which the bunch knows as reality.
However, a bound person is provided with freedom and is forced to look at the fire, the wall, the bunch, and the puppets for himself. After initially being in excruciating pain and confusion due to this new exposure, the prisoner realizes that he has moved to a new level of understanding. He understands how the fire and the puppets come together to produce a shadow, but he makes an error of thinking that the fire and the puppets are the most real things in the world. Plato identifies this with the state of Belief. The man still does not know of a world past the cave.
The prisoner, next, is dragged out of the cave. At first, he is enamoured by the light and can only see shadows, but after a short time, he can see reflections and then real objects. He realizes that these objects are more real than the puppets. This is the state of Reason as he catches his first glimpse into the world of the permanent Forms.
And in a nod to the Simile of the Sun, the prisoner lifts his sight up towards the heavens and looks at the sun. He determines that the sun is the root of all that he sees, whether that be objects like trees or light itself. The sun represents the form of the Good and the prisoner has reached the final stage of understanding, the mental state of Intelligence.