1 Plato 3 · On the Cave and the Light. Handed down at the Academy, from his Republic
From the Republic, written when Plato was about fifty, in ten books. It begins with one question — what is justice — and in answering it becomes the plan of a city and then a theory of knowledge. The cave is in the seventh book. This volume takes only the cave: the descent, the turning, the ascent, the return, and that by which one sees. For the man, see the Gospel of Plato. What is set down here runs from his fortieth year to his seventieth; in the fourth chapter he states plainly that he no longer agrees with himself, and does not strike out the older view. Where the Good is spoken of, the Order takes it in the smaller sense: that which makes each thing be what it is, and is not itself among things.
3.1The man is dragged upward. The way is steep, and it is stone.
3.2He fights the whole way, because he knows nothing of the place he is being taken to.
3.3At the mouth of the cave the daylight falls on him, and he can see nothing at all.
3.4Some suppose that a man who comes out sees everything at once. He does not.
3.5The first thing he can look at is shadows — shadows on the ground, shadows in the water.
3.6Then reflections in water.
3.7Then the things themselves.
3.8Then, at night, the stars and the moon.
3.9And last, long afterward, the sun.
3.10Look at that order. The first thing he sees outside is still a shadow.
3.11The man who has come out and the man still inside are looking, at the start, at the very same thing.
3.12There is one difference only: one of them knows it is a shadow, and the other does not.
3.13Glaucon, most men think that coming out means being given new eyes. It does not. It means being given new knowing.