Plato's Cave

Plato's greatest work is The Republic, a lengthy dialogue ostensibly directed toward answering two questions: (1) What is justice? and (2) Is it better to be just or unjust? Much of the dialogue, however, is taken up with Plato's theory of knowledge and being. Here, we find Plato's famous account of the "Divided Line" [VI, 509d– 511e] (an account of the order of human education and the acquisition of knowledge) and his famous "Allegory of the Cave" [VII, 514d– 516a] (an allegorical re-presentation of his theory of knowledge). At the heart of the allegory are the following analogies: 

• The shadows of puppets and of natural things in the allegory represent the way in which individual artifacts or natural things in the natural world reflect the universal Forms or Ideas of these same things.

• The sun, which preserves the life and visibility of natural things, is analogous to the Form of the Good, which, according to Plato, causes the being and intelligibility of all other things.

In the image below, I have lined up the Divided Line with the Allegory of the Cave so that it is visually possible to see the correspondence between these two central passages in Plato's Republic.

If you are curious how to cite Plato's works, including the Republic, click here.