1 Plato 5 · On the Cave and the Light. Handed down at the Academy, from his Republic
What is set down here Plato said between his fortieth year and his seventieth. In chapter 4 he records that he changed his mind, and refuses to strike out the older saying. Where he speaks of the Good, this scripture takes the smaller reading: that which makes each thing what it is, and is not itself one of the things.
5.1Glaucon, you ask what the sun outside the cave is.
5.2Let me ask you something first. If the eye is sound and the thing is there, is that enough to see it?
5.3It is not. At night your eye is just as sound and the thing is just as there, and you see nothing.
5.4A third thing is needed.
5.5That third thing is not the eye and not the object. It is what lets the two of them meet.
5.6By day, it is the light.
5.7A man looking at a thing never looks at the light. He looks at the thing.
5.8The one thing that lets him see, he does not glance at once in his whole life.
5.9I called the sun outside the cave that by which all seeing and all knowing are possible.
5.10From this some have said: then it is the Good, the one above all things.
5.11When I was young I said so too.
5.12Now I say it more carefully. It is that which makes each thing what it is, and it is not itself one of the things.
5.13It does not flow, and it makes all things flow. (cf. Prologue 1.12)
5.14You need not kneel to it. Kneeling shows you no more than standing does.
5.15You need only turn around and walk toward it. By as much as you see, by that much you are larger.