Plato's Cave, Master Metaphor # 1

Imagine being chained to a wall of a cave. Your head is shackled so that you can only look to the back of the cave where shadows cast by a fire illuminate the wall. This is what you know, it is all you know. But then you are loose. You turn around and see the fire and the things making the shadows. You leave the cave and are blinded by the light of the sun. Your eyes adjust and at last you can see the things around you and the sun itself. Now, with this new understanding of reality, your return to tell your fellow prisioners what is true. 

This is the metaphor of Plato's cave. 

Here is the text to read: 

Dr. Schulz suggests the following engagement with Plato's Cave Metaphor: 

1. Read Plato’s Cave from Book 7 of his famous Republic. It will work to google “Plato’s Cave in Republic text”. I recommend either Thomas Sheehan’s translation or Robin Waterfield’s. Plato’s text is a must-read! Read it twice, please.

 

1. Consider how Plato has pre-explained what he is up to with The Cave in his earlier parables of The Sun and the Line by mapping the following diagram of those two parables onto the narrative of The Cave. Notice that there are four types of progressively better types of thinking (according to Plato) by which we can think of progressively more enduring objects until we reach The Good by thinking more and more abstractly.

1. Email a like-minded friend this hand-out and then talk or text to figure out how Plato’s Cave could be “re-baptized” to suit a biblical worldview. Hint: The Good is an idea that Plato says is “beyond being” and therefore is an eternal verity, a never-changing ultimate standard for us.

 

1. Have a look at my chapel sermon where I recommend a major re-working of Plato’s Cave in light of Christ as God Himself incarnate. The sermon is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzEkydimmDU

 

1. For further thought read and think through Plato’s Doctrine of Truth by the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger at http://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/WWW/Sheehan/heideggertranslationonline.html(As a bonus, this includes the Greek text of Plato’s Cave.)

 

1. Compare and contrast what Jesus says of Himself in John 14:6 and the way He teaches us to know Him (as in Psalm 22, for a major example) with Heidegger’s use of The Cave.

accessed January 2016 at bing.com/images

Here is our conversation about Plato's Cave:

Plato's Cave is a captivating image. The arduous and heroic trek from darkness to light, ignorance to enlightenment. 

Dr. Schulz asserts that the key point of helpfulness is Plato's fighting against post-modernism, that is the "wild and pushy relativism" that denies the existence of truth, or at least its accessibility. This is helpful, but the helpfulness of the cave metaphor fairly quickly comes up short. 

Plato was a gnostic (in fact, as Dr. Schulz identifies him in our conversation, the "patron saint of gnosticism"). Plato, therefore, overestimates the capacity of humanity to strive towards the truth. Plato has an abstract understanding of truth disconnected from the physical world. 

The Gospel is not the assent of man through reason or contemplation to some divine reality, but rather the decent of God to us and the darkness of our sin. 

I found most challenging part of our conversation to be the conflict between Relativism and Gnosticism. Gnosticism, Dr. Schulz reminded me after we recorded our discussion, still has some hope of finding the truth. It is optimistic. Relativism has abandoned even that hope. I have been in the habit of lumping gnosticism and relativism together as part of the same piece, and it will take some time for me to pull them apart. 

Plato's Cave, in the end, is most helpful as a contrast to the Gospel. the humiliation and death of God. "The Good", it turns out, does not scorch our eyes like the shining of the sun, but assaults our reason with the picture of Jesus, God and man, hanging dead on the cross. 

Lord's Blessings, 
Pr Bryan Wolfmueller