Plato’s Cave Allegory and Dialectic
Plato’s Cave is commonly understood as an illustration of the philosopher’s progress from ignorance and opinion towards knowledge. But there is a curious problem with Socrates’ portrayal of that process. The prisoner is compelled to turn around and is eventually dragged upwards, resisting and suffering as he goes. Yet this is not how Socrates conducts dialectic in the Republic. His interlocutors do not have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards understanding. Socrates works with their existing opinions, interests and expectations, adapting his arguments to the people with whom he is speaking.
Dialectic is not merely something awaiting the prisoner at the end of the ascent: it is the process by which he is supposed to be brought from opinion towards understanding. Why, then, does Socrates’ image of that process omit an essential feature of the dialectical method which he himself employs throughout the dialogue?
The following extract considers what Socrates omits from his description of dialectic, and why the omission matters.
The Cave and dialectic
As we have seen throughout the analysis so far, Socrates adapts his terminology and concepts to those of his interlocutors. This is clearly part of Socrates’ dialectical method, yet in the Cave Analogy, which is essentially on the transition from opining to understanding achieved through dialectic, no mention is made of a dialectician adapting himself to the opinions of his interlocutors, even when the philosopher is portrayed attempting to release the prisoners from their bonds. Socrates omits this important aspect of the dialectic method precisely because dialectic requires him to use his interlocutors’ mode of thinking, their interests, their expectations, and their terminology. His account of dialectic is therefore necessarily defective, both by omission and by perversion. The timocratic bias perverting the Cave Analogy may be better understood within the context of the digression as a whole.
Extract from Chapter 6, ‘The Digression’, in Ivor Ludlam (2014), Plato’s Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well, p. 177.
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