1 Plato 4 · 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.
4.1Once he has been up there a while, he does not want to go down again.
4.2I said at the time that he must go down. I was forty years old when I said it.
4.3When you read the letter I wrote at seventy, you will find that I changed my mind. (cf. The Epistles of Plato 2.10)
4.4I am not striking out what I said at forty. Both stand. Judge between them yourselves.
4.5He goes down. Inside it is dark.
4.6His eyes have been in the light too long, and for a while he cannot see the dark.
4.7He takes his old place. They ask him: which shadow comes first?
4.8He cannot answer. His eyes have not come back yet.
4.9So they laugh at him and say: this man went up and ruined his eyes.
4.10And they say: let no one go up. Going up makes a man blind.
4.11Notice that what they report is accurate. He was blind, for a while.
4.12What they got wrong is not what they saw. It is the rule they made out of it.
4.13And if anyone tried to loose their chains and lead them up, they would kill him.
4.14Glaucon, my hand shook as I wrote that line. Because it is not a figure of speech.