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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: literacy and “the good”

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: literacy and “the

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Valerie V. Peterson

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 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION, 2017
VOL. 17, NO. 4, 273–287
https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2017.1367826

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: literacy and “the good”

Valerie V. Peterson
School of Communications, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This essay argues that “the good” is a forgotten central aspect of Received 21 July 2016
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and that this forgetfulness about the Accepted 11 March 2017
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good is partly the result of literacy and literate-mindedness. Eric

KEYWORDS
A. Havelock’s work on literacy in the ancient world informs a Plato; literacy; good; Allegory
media ecological and rhetorical approach to the allegory, “the of the Cave; media ecology
forms,” and related writings in both The Republic and secondary
literature. Analysis shows how many literate-minded readers have
taken Plato’s allegory out of its textual and media ecological
context, and underestimated the significance of “the good” as a
form and ethical idea.

The written word on any subject contains much that is playful … no work, whether in
verse or in prose, has ever been written or recited that is worthy of serious attention …
the truth is that the best of these works merely serves to remind us of what we already
know.1

Introduction
In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates utter the comments above. In the dialogue, Socrates
takes the (then) newfangled medium of writing to task in comparison with the spoken
word. Unlike conversational language, written words, stories, and arguments “roll
around.” They can be removed from their original context, played around with, and rein-
terpreted by readers in light of their own experiences and aims.
Such a fate is true of the words of Plato himself. This essay is concerned with another of
Plato’s writings, The Republic, and how a portion of it, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, has
“rolled around” in the hands and minds of its readers. I argue that many of the readers
of the Allegory of the Cave have taken it out of its context in The Republic and have for-
gotten a central and important aspect of the story: “the good.” This forgetfulness, I argue,
is partly the result of literacy and literate-mindedness.
In the following pages, I take a media ecological and rhetorical approach to Plato’s alle-
gory, steering attention away from typical philosophical and political readings of the story
and toward a more ethical reading. A media ecological perspective recognizes the signifi-
cance of media (in this case, the written word), not simply as conveyors of ideas, but as
environments shaping human consciousness. After a brief summary of the allegory,

CONTACT Valerie V. Peterson petersov@gvsu.edu

© 2017 National Communication Association
 274 V. V. PETERSON

analysis begins with “the forms” and related concerns as discussed both in The Republic
and in secondary literature. Using Eric A. Havelock’s work on literacy in the ancient
world, interest in the forms and other topics is associated with the onset of literacy and
literate-mindedness. Finally, a close reading of the allegory and other relevant portions
of The Republic provides support for claims about what Plato means by “the good” and
its centrality to the Allegory of the Cave.2

Plato’s allegory
The Republic is Plato’s treatise on, among other things, the state and statecraft, and it is his
most widely studied dialogue.3 In it, Plato discusses ideas and concepts including justice,
education, knowledge, leadership, forms of government, poetry, and the soul. Some of
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these discussions appear in that subportion of the writing typically referred to as Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave (hereafter referred to as Plato’s allegory/the allegory). In it,
“coming into the light” is used as a metaphor for learning, and it is a painful process. Pris-
oners do not go out of the cave and into the sunlight gladly or even voluntarily—they must
be compelled. This learning is described as a kind of remembering, and this remembering
is difficult.
At the outset of the allegory, people (prisoners) are chained up in a cave, their legs and
necks bound so that they cannot turn their heads around to see what is creating shadows
(images) on the wall in front of them. These people take the shadows as reality. The
shadows are cast on the wall by a fire that is blazing behind the prisoners. The bodies
of the prisoners cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners take these images of them-
selves and others as reality. Shadows are also cast by objects of all sorts, held up by puppet-
eers who carry the objects above their heads so that the objects’ shadows are projected onto
the wall by the fire. Because of an echo, the prisoners also believe that sounds are coming
from the shadows.
If unshackled, the prisoners do not want to leave their familiar surroundings. The
fire’s light is bright, and it blinds and confuses the prisoners; they cannot see the pup-
peteers or the objects, only the shadows. They turn away from the firelight, and prefer
the “reality” of the shadows. If compelled by others to leave the cave, the prisoners
again feel pain because their eyes are blinded by the light of the sun outside. They
resist ascent into the sunlight. Once out of the cave, the former prisoners’ eyes
slowly adjust and their vision allows them to see more and more—first the shadows
of things, then reflections on water, then things themselves, then moon and starlight,
and then finally the sun itself. Once the prisoners have seen the sun, they are enligh-
tened, but the story does not end here. Enlightenment means not only counting
oneself happy for seeing the sun (knowing the good), but also doing the good, even
if that means returning to the cave despite the blindness caused by re-entry into dark-
ness. When the former prisoners return to the cave, they feel pity for the unenlightened,
and share their new “vision,” with them. But this seems like a kind of blindness to those
prisoners who never left the cave. The returnees’ judgment in contests in the shadow
world seems bizarre and “wrong.” So disturbed are the unenlightened by the returnees’
inability to judge, that they would put to death anyone who would bring about such
“disorientation” and “damage.”
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 275

Interpretations of Plato’s allegory

Plato’s allegory has been interpreted in a variety of ways—often in relation to favored perspec-
tives or agendas. Some have used the allegory as part of “liberal education,” and/or as a means
by which readers may be encouraged to get out of their own familiar orientations to engage a
wider range of cultures, ideologies, and disciplines.4 Others come from humanistic and liberal
arts perspectives, and use the allegory to justify the kind of education that, instead of serving
immediate practical or technical purposes, results in self-understanding. Such education
makes humans “whole” and “at home with themselves.”5 In the classroom, the allegory has
been used to inspire an appreciation of the difficulties of the educational project, or
perhaps in less enlightened moments, to justify a sense of superiority over those who are
not—by means of formal, extended and/or “higher” education—“enlightened.”
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Some scholars have seen Plato’s allegory as a vehicle for commentary on the qualities
and ethics of visual media. Susan Sontag points to ethical implications of Plato’s allegory in
her opening chapter of On Photography titled “In Plato’s Cave.”6 She starts: “Humankind
lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the
truth.”7 Then she explains how photographs make matters worse. With penetrating criti-
cal observations, Sontag catalogues how the proliferation and manipulation of photo-
graphs render people even more misinformed about reality than they already are. As
social rites, defenses against anxiety, and tools of power, photographs change our relation-
ship to and amongst ourselves. “In teaching us a new visual code,” she argues, “photo-
graphs alter and enlarge out notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a
right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”8
Herbert Zettl brings a similar orientation to computer simulation in “Back to Plato’s
Cave: Virtual Reality,” in which he uses Plato’s allegory as a launching pad for a description
of virtual reality (VR) in terms of dimension, motion, kinesthesia, and sound.9 He follows
this aesthetic and ontological analysis with a discussion of ethical implications for human
actions and interactions (e.g., VR presents amoral environments, VR allows extreme behav-
ior). Across the essay, computer simulation is seen as an art form with both aesthetic and
philosophical implications. Like Sontag, Zettl uses Plato’s allegory to address ethical
issues of visual media, but does not do so from the logic taking place within the allegory
itself. In other words, both authors are concerned with “the good,” but neither author com-
ments on “the good” as it is discussed via Socrates and others in Plato’s text.

Plato, the theory of forms, and other popular ideas

Interpretations of Plato’s allegory have been affected by discussions of many ideas, most
prominently Plato’s Theory of Forms or Ideas (hereafter referred to as “Plato’s theory of
forms,” “the theory of forms” or “the forms”). These discussions exist both within Plato’s
own work, and outside his work in secondary literature. Interesting and insightful as they
are, they sometimes shape and distort the way the allegory has been read.

The “forms” in Plato

In the first few chapters of The Republic, Plato’s dialogue is concerned with “justice,” and
the term is defined and used in different ways. It is easy to think of the “pure form” of
 276 V. V. PETERSON

justice as the “concept” or “definition” of justice—a concept or definition that stays con-
stant from one context to the next. It is the ideal “type” of which any real (earthly, particu-
lar) instance is but a poor representative. In this case, the “thing” at issue (justice) is a
human construct and not a physical object, but the goal remains: isolate or identify an
essence. Another idea in this camp would be “the beautiful.” This form is also discussed
in the Phaedrus and other writings by Plato. “Forms” like “the just” and “the beautiful”
seem much like the denotative definition or paradigmatic quality of any written word,
which are “ideal” in the sense that words “remain what they are” as they participate in
written contexts (e.g., text, dictionary).
There is also a section of The Republic called “the line,” which immediately precedes
Plato’s allegory. This section of the book leads some readers to see the allegory (and the
process of education) as primarily about “the forms,” while leaving the idea of “the
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good” (the “ultimate” form) in the background. In “the line,” Plato charts out a hierarchy
of different kinds of knowing, from the least impressive to the most.10 He splits a line, then
splits it again, giving each means of knowing a place along the line. These means of
knowing can be roughly translated as “images” (the least impressive), “beliefs” (more
impressive than “images”), “knowing” (more impressive than “beliefs”), and finally “intel-
ligence” (the most impressive). These means of knowing correspond to objects known by
them: images (about which we imagine), visible things (about which we have beliefs),
mathematical objects (about which we may assume or may know), and “the forms”
(about which we are intelligent or wise).
In “the line,” Socrates asserts the superiority of dialectic over those “arts” that are based on
first principles (particularly the art of geometry).11 Glaucon paraphrases Socrates’s argument:
I see that you mean to distinguish the field of intelligible reality studied by dialectic as having
a greater certainty and truth than the subject matter of the “arts,” as they are called, which
treat their assumptions as first principles … I think you would call the state of mind of the
students of geometry and other such arts, not intelligence, but thinking, as being something
between intelligence and mere acceptance of appearances.12

“The line,” and the process of education outlined in subsequent portions of The Republic,
has inspired scholarly thought and drawn attention to the value of philosophical inquiry,
dialectical arts, the process of education, and “the forms” as a set of ideals to which we
should aspire. In these discussions, however, “the good” is frequently classified with
other “forms” as just another “form” or virtue, or it drops out of the discussion entirely.

The “forms” in secondary literature

Karl R. Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies is a critical introduction to the philos-
ophy of politics and history. It draws from across the body of Plato’s work, takes on many
of Plato’s ideas, and has been widely influential.13 It does not address Plato’s allegory
specifically, but does discuss material from it, and from The Republic. Popper identifies
Plato as an enemy of “open society,” and is celebrated for doing so by significant intellec-
tuals and in respected publications (e.g., Bertrand Russell, the Saturday Review). Some of
what Popper finds so objectionable is Plato’s theory of forms or ideas.14
Popper’s critique of Plato is impressive, but he warns his readers not to expect a “‘fair’
and ‘just’ treatment of Platonism” because his attitude toward the historicist features of
Plato’s work is “one of frank hostility.”15 Popper even comments upon this hostility
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 277

(potentially amplified by the historical moment—1938–1943) in prefaces to both the first

and second edition.16 “Bent on destroying” what is mischievous in Plato’s philosophy,
Popper offers a brilliant critique of totalitarianism.17
J. N. Findlay takes critiques such as Popper’s to task. The Republic, he writes, has been
studied “for so long and so closely, that it may be dealt with a little more summarily than
its length and rich content would otherwise demand.” Dismissing those who would poli-
ticize, he says, “we shall, in particular, spend little time in approving or disapproving its
[The Republic’s] various Utopian proposals, and finding that they tend towards Fascism
or Communism, or are ‘in principle’ deeply democratic.”18 Findlay reminds readers
that Plato’s ideas/forms need not necessarily imply the irretrievably ideological. Much
depends upon the context in which ideas are taken.19
Wendell Johnson well illustrates another critical interpretation of Plato’s theory of
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forms:
Most of us believe, with Plato, that what we can sense and know directly is a mere shadow of
the Ideal, and that this alleged but taken-for-granted Ideal is somehow “much more real”
than our sensings. This curious mysticism appears to affect us so strongly that most of us
simply neglect our sensory equipment upon which, in fact, we do necessarily depend for
our information about ourselves and our surroundings. Individually, we seem to know
little about our sensory apparatus, and we appear to disregard very largely the role it plays
in our basic orientation to our world and to life in general. Disregarding it to the extent
we do results, of course, in some incredible beliefs and points of view, a great many of
which even become crystallized in the shape of organizations and institutions.20

In this reading of Plato’s forms, people ignore the workings and findings of their own sense
perceptions and instead orient themselves toward life using “some incredible beliefs and
points of view” (some in the shape of organizations and institutions). The forms are
“taken-for-granted Ideals,” and education has less to do with the forms (including the
form of “the good”) than it does with becoming more aware of our own sense perceptions
and the roles they play in our lives.
Finally, Havelock writes about the forms in the chapter “Origin of the Theory of Forms”
in Preface to Plato. He says Platonism poses an insistent demand that people think of iso-
lated mental entities or abstractions and that we use abstract language in describing or
explaining experience. We might grant him this. But he goes further to say
“goodness” and “rightness” (or the “principle” of good and the “principle” of right), which to us
are moral categories or imperatives describing and also informing human behavior, are for Plato
on a par with shape and dimension (size and smallness) and proportion (double and half) and the
like; that is, on a par with those simple basic mathematical categories which we use in discussing
the physical world. They are on a par because they all alike represent the same kind of psychic
effort which breaks away from the many and unifies experience into ones.21

Here, Havelock’s interest in the Platonic/Greek accomplishment of abstraction has a level-

ing effect, overshadowing what Plato says in The Republic about “the good” and how it
differs from and surpasses the other forms.

The “forms” in popular sources

A brief survey of popular educational information shows how “the forms” and related
ideas such as “reality” and “truth” have influenced and perhaps skewed the way people
 278 V. V. PETERSON

read the allegory of the cave. A few representative examples will be offered here, taken
from the top five findings of a cursory Google search of “allegory of the cave.”22 The
first source listed is Wikipedia. Other examples come from translations, syllabi, and
other education materials posted online by scholars and professors.
According to Wikipedia,
the allegory is probably related to Plato’s theory of Forms, according to which the “Forms”
(or “Ideas”), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest
and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowl-
edge or what Socrates considers “the good.”23

This summary does not identify “the good” as a form. It also equates “the good” with
“knowledge of the forms.” The entry continues: “the most excellent people must follow
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the highest of all studies, which is to behold the Good.” This condensation implies only
a few prisoners are eligible for being freed, and that “the good” is an end goal of education,
and not a part of the process.24
The second most popular “hit” on my Google search is S. Marc Cohen’s History of
Ancient Philosophy (Phil 320) webpage. His documents about Plato’s allegory fixate on
the forms and the theory of forms, and do not mention “the good” at all. He begins by
asserting the following:
Plato realizes that the general run of humankind can think, and speak, etc., without (so far as
they acknowledge) any awareness of his realm of Forms. The allegory of the cave is supposed
to explain this. In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to pris-
oners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads.25

These opening lines are followed by a semiotic-linguistic analysis of, of all items, a book.
Cohen says that if the prisoners were to say they “see a book,” they would only be using the
word “book” and would not really be talking about the real thing (they would be “talking
about a shadow”). The issue becomes referents and objects where words are simply
shadows of things—names for things we can only grasp in our minds (forms/ideas),
which should not be confused with the actual particular material things in front of us (per-
cepts), or with words. As Cohen puts it, “our very ability to think and to speak depends on
the Forms … the terms of the language we use get their meaning by ‘naming’ the Forms
that the objects we perceive participate in.”26 Cohen then claims (erroneously) that if the
prisoners are released, they can turn their heads and see real objects, thus realizing their
error.
In Cohen’s account, the sun drops out of the story completely, and the fire is the
primary source of light. The prisoners’ encounter with the book is described in wholly lin-
guistic terms. To “understand” the book is to understand that the name “book” is not the
same thing as the physical book, and neither of these things is the same thing as the “form”
or “idea” (the “ideal”) of book. Ironically, the book Cohen uses as his example is never
opened, and the writing on and in the book is never engaged, so the knowledge gained
about the book once the prisoners can turn their heads is wholly superficial.27
Another popular site is the translation and commentary on Plato’s allegory offered by
retired psychology professor George Boeree:
Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfor-
table with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 279

process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue
to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! … Once
you’ve tasted the truth, you won’t ever want to go back to being ignorant!28

Boeree’s opening comments highlight “truth” (“facing truth” seems to be equated with
facing the light of the sun). He does not mention “the good” at all.
Neither does Steven Kries. This final example comes from “The History Guide: Lectures
in Modern European Intellectual History,” in which “the real” is the main focus:
The Allegory presents, in brief form, most of Plato’s major philosophical assumptions: his
belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of
it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; his idea that knowledge
cannot be transferred from teacher to student, but rather that education consists in directing
student’s [sic] minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it
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for themselves.29

In these and other popular discussions of Plato’s allegory, there is a fixation with, or weak
understanding of “the forms.” At the same time, discussion of “the good” is inaccurate and
poor, or disappears entirely.

Plato and literacy

Scholars may be inclined to read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a philosophical treatise
about “forms,” “the real,” “the truth,” and language because they are deeply literate. Con-
cepts, percepts, abstractions, definitions, and the paradigmatic qualities of words fascinate.
Where did interests in such word qualities arise?
Plato participated in the historical moment when Greek oral traditions, such as epic
and drama, were giving way to literate ones, such as theoretic analysis.30 In Preface to
Plato, The Muse Learns to Write, and other writings, Havelock charts the details of this
communication crisis, and the invention of a conceptual language from which all sub-
sequent expression has emerged. This new language was characterized not only by a
new syntax, but also by a new vocabulary of morals.
Originally interested in Plato’s term for “justice,” Havelock broadened his project to
propose that the idea of a moral values system was both autonomous and “capable of
internalization in the individual consciousness.”31 He also proposed that this moral
values system was “a literate invention and a Platonic one, [one] for which the Greek
enlightenment had laid the groundwork, replacing an oralist sense of ‘the right thing to
do,’ as a matter of propriety and correct procedure”32
In this moral crisis, individual consciousness or “self-hood” was discovered.33 Once
there were things known separate from knowers, knowers could separate these “things
known” from themselves, and separate themselves from each other.
From this perspective, Havelock reads Plato’s attack on the poets as less about the
poems, per se, than about the medium and social function of tradition-preservation
served by orally taught and memorized poetry. Such practices needed to be replaced by
a new genre of speech suitable for a literate and analytic state of mind: prose. To put it
another way, “Plato was to demand that the traditional language of epic and drama be
remodeled and replaced by a language of theoretic analysis.”34
The shift from orality to literacy resulted in social and mental shifts.35 Mentally, it
meant the mind “thinks as it speaks.” This reduced the need to memorize and tell
 280 V. V. PETERSON

stories, and freed up the mind to do other things, such as record, abstract, theorize, and
become “selves.” But these shifts could be problematic when put into prose. Hesiod, for
example, tried to define the term “justice,” but still had to use narrative forms to
explore the topic. He could discuss what justice did, but was not able to say exactly
what justice was.36
The invention of literacy shifted attention toward papyrus (toward the eye) and away
from the acoustic flow of language (away from the ear).37 When literacy opened the door
to philosophy, history, and science; Plato and other Greeks used the word “theoria”
(related to seeing or spectating) to describe what is done intellectually when a person phi-
losophizes.38 This further established vision as a metaphor for intellectual operation.
Havelock observes: “We can now view the written word rather than just hearing it
spoken. Plato lived at the turning point of this shift from the ear to the eye, and his
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work reflects living at this borderline.”39

The technological shift was not immediate.
As a method of preservation, the acoustic technology of epic had been rendered obso-
lete by the technology of the written word. But in the slow march of history, it takes time
for obsolescence to be recognized, and there were rather special reasons why in this case
time had to be taken. The way was now open for the composition of the encyclopedia
without benefit of rhythm and without the setting of narrative. This would also, one
would think, enable the encyclopedia to be amplified and extended in a thousand ways,
once freed from the constrictions that the economy of mnemonic necessity had
imposed. But in fact no such liberating revolution immediately occurred. The psychic
habits of centuries could not be broken quickly.40
One significant problem was that of audience:
the full use of the written word required a condition which immensely complicated its pro-
gress … To be sure a writer can write for his own convenience in order to re-read and reor-
ganize what he has written, and we may be sure that the first Greek writers did just that … .
But writers in order to fulfill the full potentiality of their writing require readers, just as min-
strels require an audience. And these became available in quantity only as the social appar-
atus was organized behind the effort to create them. In short the “literacy” which a writer can
exploit depends on whether the educational system creates readers for him, and the degree to
which he feels able to exploit it will depend upon the degree of “readership” in his linguistic
group.41

Over time, however, this obstacle was largely overcome, and there was no going back:
[The] invention which had proved crucial in changing the character of the Greek conscious-
ness was to do the same thing for Europe as a whole and in fact could be held responsible for
creating the character of a modern consciousness which is becoming world-wide.42

Literacy continues to characterize the modern consciousness, which emphasizes words

and definition as a means to knowledge. “To define has come to mean almost the same
thing as to understand. More important still, words have enabled man to define himself
—to label a certain part of his experience ‘I.’”43
And yet, no one medium completely supplants its predecessor, especially in early stages
of adoption. Newer media carry forward elements and processes characteristic of earlier
media so that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”44 Plato’s Allegory
of the Cave is partly narrative in form, using an extended analogy made up of multiple
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 281

metaphors, which are as much poetic as they are analytic. Consider the definition of
“allegory”:
The term “allegory” (allegoria) in Greek is used to designate a trope of rhetoric in which the
speaker says one thing, but means another; that is, he “says other things” (alla agoreuei) than
his language, understood in the most obvious way, would designate … . This trope is often in
practice difficult to separate from those of irony, sarcasm, and emphasis; and it must be
admitted that … all are at best crude terms for related, poorly differentiated categories of allu-
sive or obscure language. Allegory was recognized as a strategy frequently used by the poets.45

In other words, Plato’s allegory retains some of the qualities of oral and poetic communi-
cation even as it participates in a larger treatise that attempts to spell out and define pol-
itical terms and practice. Havelock discusses such a mix when describing Plato as being a
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Greek at a particular point in history—embodying both oral culture and the literate
impulse:
When he [Plato] turns against poetry it is precisely its dynamism, its fluidity, its concreteness,
its particularity, that he deplores. He could not have reached the point of deploring it if he
had not become literate himself … . [t]he Muse, as she learned to write, had to turn away
from the living panorama of experience and its ceaseless flow, but as long as she remained
Greek, she could not entirely forget it.46

Thus, the Greek who argues against some forms of poetry in The Republic uses an
obviously poetic extended allegory in his writing. In trying to chart out an ethic for the
literate selves who his writings helped to bring into existence, Plato simultaneously
wrote about the dangers of the world of visual images including text—a visual medium
which he himself used. In trying to explain what “the good” means, he had to undo
what he was doing, to be creative and not create, to define and leave indefinite the most
important of all the “forms.”

Plato’s “good” and its implications for and in the Allegory of the Cave
“The good,” as “supreme principle,” is written about primarily in The Republic.47 Theistic
doctrine, particularly Christian theology, has linked “the good” to “God,” and this is not
surprising, as the move toward literacy included a shift from polytheism to monotheism.
However, “the good” is neither a personal being, nor even soul nor mind at all.48 Such
factors, along with the already-existing Greek gods, the time frame (Christ had not yet
been born), and the Christian association of Christ with God, recommend against such
a reading of the term.
In The Republic, “the good” is not a synonym for “justice,” or for any other virtue, and
this is made clear in the opening chapters. “The good” is also not the same thing as “the
truth,” although there is one passage in the allegory where the good, the beautiful, and the
true are mentioned together in the same sentence. These “forms” and others also appear
together in other writings of Plato, and in secondary literature on Plato’s work. However,
listing words together (e.g., “the good, the just, and the true” or “goodness, wisdom, beauty
and justice”) does not enjoin similarity of quality or status.
“The good” is written about in a section of The Republic called “the sun” or “the sun
analogy,” immediately preceding the portion known as “the line.” “The good” is described
as unique—as a form but also different from the other forms.49 Socrates is reluctant to give
 282 V. V. PETERSON

an account of it—saying to do so would be “beyond my powers.”50 Unlike the other forms

(e.g., justice, beauty), Plato says “the good” cannot be apprehended through contempla-
tion, nor can we attempt to describe it.51 “The good” is “several times spoken of as that
toward which we aim before everything else, that without which we can never be satisfied,
and that for the sake of which we do everything we do.”52
In this part of The Republic, Socrates does at least agree to tell Glaucon what he pictures
to himself as the “offspring” of “the Good.” The Greek word tokos is also translated as
“interest on a loan,” so Socrates is saying he can give us a partial view (a “child of an
idea” or “the interest of a loan only, but not the entire amount”). Plato uses the sun as
a metaphor. He is not (as some readers believe) privileging eyesight or seeing or the
visual as a means of knowing; he is trying to explain the ultimate significance of “the
good.” In the same way that the sun is needed in order to see anything, he argues, “the
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good” is needed in order to learn the truth about anything.

For Plato, vision is the only sense that needs something else besides the sense-apparatus
and the sensed. For example, we hear a sound with our ears. There are two elements to this
equation: the sound, and the ears. But to see something, we must have “the thing seen”
“our eyes” and the light (of which the sun is the ultimate source). Without the sun, we
cannot see anything. Likewise, without “the good,” all learning is only partial, or it is
simply skill or craftiness, and is not properly directed toward wisdom. The good is that
which “shows the way”—shows the truth about things—to the soul:
This, then, which gives to the objects of knowledge their truth and to him who knows them
his power of knowing, is the Form or essential nature of Goodness. It is the cause of knowl-
edge and truth; and so, while you may think of it as an object of knowledge, you will do well
to regard it as something beyond truth and knowledge and, precious as these both are, of still
higher worth. And, just as in our analogy light and vision were to be thought of as like the
Sun, but not identical with it, so here both knowledge and the truth are to be regarded as like
the Good, but to identify either with the Good is wrong. The Good must hold a yet higher
place of honour.53

Here, Plato puts “the good” above the other forms—including knowledge and the truth. It
is the good that gives knowledge and truth. Without the good, neither knowledge nor truth
can be reached.
Taking the analogy further, Plato brings up the sun’s capacity to bring things into exist-
ence, giving them growth and nourishment. Today we speak of photosynthesis and
vitamin D, but we often do not acknowledge the extent to which our very existence is
enabled by the sun. As Plato put it:
You will agree that the Sun not only makes the things we see visible, but also brings them
into existence and gives them growth and nourishment; yet he is not the same thing as
existence [that which is not eternal]. And so with the objects of knowledge; these derive
from the Good not only their power of being known, but their very being and reality;
and Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in
dignity and power.54

This added implication of the metaphor suggests that the good is not only epistemic (the
basis of knowledge) but ontological (the foundation of being). Because this discussion of
the good closely precedes the allegory of the cave, it makes sense to carry forward its impli-
cations into the allegory when making sense of its message.
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 283

Some confusion about the Allegory of the Cave comes from the fact that Plato uses “the
sun” to represent “the good,” but a “fire” to represent “the sun.” A visual metaphor equates
wisdom with “seeing the light” of the sun (en’light’enment), and yet the story simul-
taneously critiques the visual realm (the world of images and surfaces made visible by
light). Some readers conflate the two sources of light, but there is an important difference.
When in the cave, the prisoners’ “truth” is simply what they see (the “images” they have of
themselves, others, and the shadow puppets). Looking into the light of the fire is blinding
in the same way that it is blinding to look directly at the sun. In the allegory, the fire is not a
“fake sun,” the fire simply is the sun, and everything seen in the sunlight is only known
superficially by its “look.” When we see an unfamiliar person, for example, we see only
superficial qualities of that person and we may think we “know” something about that
person just from those qualities. Maybe they look like someone else we know; maybe
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we apply a stereotype. Likewise, we may think we “know” a place because we have seen
pictures or maps of it, but without a richer engagement with that place, we only know
it simplistically and without fuller understanding. In contrast, the pain of gradually
being able to look at the sun (and at things in the light of the sun) represents the pain
of learning about things “in the light of the good” (beyond superficial image-centered
ways of knowing and understanding things). Prisoners cannot see anything “right” until
they have seen the light of the sun outside the cave.
Once the prisoners become accustomed to the light of the sun, they can see not only “by
the light of the sun,” but also “the sun itself.” This is an unusual accomplishment since they
are seeing the very means by which they have come to see. There is no other sense with this
three-part situation—you cannot hear the means by which you hear, or smell the means by
which you smell. But, we can see the sun. This is probably why Plato chose sight as the
sense to feature in his allegory. With sight, there is a third thing (the sun) beyond the
“sensing being” and the “sensed object” necessary to the successful sense-experience.
Plato says it is likewise with learning. With learning, there is a third thing (the good)
beyond the intellect and the intellectual (philosopher) necessary to the successful learning
experience.
And so, the prisoners come to know the truth about things by means of the sun (the
good), and because they have been pulled out of the cave by others who have seen the
sun (know the good). “The best life,” writes Benson, “is to proceed with one’s dialogical
inquiries into the good in the conviction that there is such a thing as what the good
really is, even if it does not correspond with any of our present convictions.”55 What
is “the good” in any situation? Plato says he cannot answer this. But putting “the
good” first means not putting other things first (like knowledge or truth). This
means we all learn from each other, because we may find ourselves inhabiting the pris-
oner’s position or the enlightened person’s position in the cave, depending on the situ-
ation. At the least, it means learning would involve listening, time, and (sometimes
painful) experience.
“Turning into the light,” which must be compelled, is education. It is a capacity pos-
sessed by every soul. It is not only a primary motivation for the enlightened, but also a
total-body action for the learner. It is not a part-time or half-hearted pursuit. Partially
enlightened prisoners are not necessarily partial successes. Socrates reminds Glaucon of
the type:
 284 V. V. PETERSON

Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue—
how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind,
but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to
his cleverness?56

Consequently, “the good” is identified as the primary motivation of the ideal leader. It is
the people who pursue “the good” who should lead, not those who are unmotivated, or
those who are clever and mischievous, or those who are motivated by “truth,” or
“ideals,” or power. Because Plato’s story is an allegory, however, there is no guarantee
which role a person is playing at any particular time. We may be the prisoners in the
chains, or we may see ourselves as enlightened. We may be puppeteers for “the good”
(leading the unenlightened in the cave) or partially enlightened puppeteers who intention-
ally or unintentionally manipulate. We may all be partially enlightened. We may all be
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each of these things at different times.

The allegory of the cave illustrates how unenlightened truth is simply appearances—
that which we see in the light of day (without “the good” directing our inquiry). When
we take things solely by their surfaces or looks, we have only partial understanding of
those things. To get past the appearances of things, to get to the “good truth” and not
the “superficial truth,” the prisoners (we) need a deeper knowledge informed by (some-
times painful) experience.57 This knowledge is motivated by a desire for the good or it is
not true knowledge. Without an overarching desire for the good—and without this
desire for the good being a total-body-and-soul commitment—there is no education.

Conclusion
This reading of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave differs from those by scholars and others who
focus on matters of reality, language, and truth. Those approaches to the story are born out
of and enhanced by, but also limited by, literacy and literate-mindedness. The reading
offered here reveals a parable about motives and ethical behavior, one that considers
the education of the youth of the state, and asserts the importance of “the good” in edu-
cation and leadership. “The good” is in no way conclusively or comprehensively defined in
the allegory, but it is a central feature of the story, via the metaphor of the sun.
Today we find literacy entering a new era. Textual communication is being transformed
by electronic platforms into wikis, posts, and tweets. Digital images and talking robots sup-
plant the written word. New forms of communication re-establish the eye and the ear away
from text and toward different sensory and communicative economies. It will remain to be
seen if these avenues of communication will be any more successful at teaching about the
good than older, more “primitive” practices.
In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato appears to acknowledge what his teacher Socrates
taught him: that some things exist before, beyond, and outside of literacy. According to
Plato, “the good” is the most important of all topics to man. But, writing simply cannot
get us to it. I close, ironically, with a quotation from Raphael Demos:
We can safely believe the legend that Plato lectured on the Good to his pupils in the
Academy. However, his pupils had a friendly and a personal relation with the master, and
had gone through the intellectual discipline indispensable to philosophical understanding.
But the written word is addressed to an amorphous and unselected public which need
have neither intellectual preparation, nor even a love for the subject of philosophy. Thus,
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 285

reflections on important and fundamental matters may not properly be treated in books. For,
in addition, the written work is immobile and dead, in contrast with the spoken word which
is flexible and alive, adapting the idea to the particular question in hand. Yet, to the misfor-
tune of posterity, it remains a fact that living things die; only lifeless things like books
survive58

Notes
1. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. William Clark Helmbold and Wilson Gerson Rabinowitz (New York:
Macmillan, 1989), 73.
2. A number of different translations of Plato’s Republic were used to help compensate for the
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difficulties of translating ancient Greek into English. The majority of direct quotations are
drawn from: Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1963). Other sources include Plato, Plato: Republic, 2nd ed.,
trans. George Maximilian Antony Grube and rev. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1992); Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1968); Plato, The Republic,
trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Anchor, 1973).
The Grube translation had helpful footnotes and was clearest about who was speaking
which line in the dialogue. Both the Grube and Bloom translations included useful standard
numeration for locating ideas as they appeared in the reading. The Cornford translation pro-
vided summary and explanatory notes before each chapter. The Jowett translation provided
less details (fewer direct translations of words and phrases, and more paraphrasing), which
offered a more coherent reading experience.
3. John Niemeyer Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge,
1974), 159.
4. Judy Whipps, “Entering into a Community of Engaged Learners: Liberal Education at Grand
Valley State University,” in Reflection and Engagement: Liberal Education at GVSU, 3rd ed.
(Acton, MA: Copley, 2006), xi–xvi.
5. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “On the Dire Necessity of the Useless: Philosophical and Rhetorical
Thoughts on Hermeneutics and Education in the Humanities,” in Education, Dialogue
and Hermeneutics, ed. Paul Fairfield (New York: Continuum, 2011), 92.
6. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1990).
7. Ibid., 1.
8. Ibid.
9. Herbert Zettl, “Back to Plato’s Cave: Virtual Reality,” in Communication and Cyberspace:
Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, 2nd ed., ed. Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson,
and Stephanie Gibson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003), 99–111.
10. Guy Cromwell Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969), 41.
11. The word being translated here as “art” was a broad term, and included what we now classify
as science, technology, engineering, and math (including geometry).
12. Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 226.
13. Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1966).
14. Ibid., 18–34.
15. Ibid., 34.
16. Ibid., xvii–xviii.
17. Ibid., 34.
18. Findlay, Plato, 159.
19. Paul Natorp, for example, takes a neoKantian approach to Plato’s forms. His interpretation
attempts to “dissociate the theory of ideas from its Aristotelian reception, still dominant
today, which sees the ideas as transcendent substances” (Plato’s Theory of Ideas: An
 286 V. V. PETERSON

Introduction to Idealism, ed. Vasilis Politis, trans. Vasilis Politis and John Connolly [Sankt
Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, 2004], back cover).
20. Wendell Johnson, Your Most Enchanted Listener (San Francisco: International Society for
General Semantics, 1956), 90.
21. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 258.
22. Google searches vary by the searcher’s search history. These examples are offered as repre-
sentative anecdotes of the way people write about the allegory.
23. Steven Watt, “Introduction: The Theory of Forms (Books 5–7),” in Plato, Republic, trans.
John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997),
xiv–xvi.
24. Dale Hall, “Interpreting Plato’s Cave as an Allegory of the Human Condition,” Apeiron: A
Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 14, no. 2 (1980): 74–75.
25. S. Marc Cohen, “The Allegory of the Cave,” 2006 (last updated July 24, 2015), n.p., https://
faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm.
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26. Ibid.
27. For a better discussion of the three-part relation among object, image, and “eidos,” see Hans
Jonas, “Image Making and the Freedom of Man,” in The Phenomenology of Life: Toward a
Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 157–73.
28. George Boeree, “Plato, Book VII of The Republic, The Allegory of the Cave,” n.d., n.p., http://
webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html.
29. Steven Kries, “Plato, The Allegory of the Cave,” The History Guide: Lectures on Modern Euro-
pean Intellectual History, 2000 (last revised April 13, 2012), n.p., http://www.historyguide.
org/intellect/allegory.html.
30. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982); Havelock, Preface to
Plato; The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the
Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
31. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 4.
32. Ibid.
33. Havelock, Preface to Plato, chapter 11.
34. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 15; see also Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving
Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979), 32–38.
35. Social and mental shifts are characteristic of widespread historical shifts in media dominance.
Media ecologists identify three major cultural shifts that align with dominant media: oral to
literate, literate to print, and print to electronic. Marshall McLuhan, a foundational thinker in
the theory and practice of media ecology expressed appreciation for Havelock’s work on
Plato, seeing parallels to his own work on the effects of print. “Marshall McLuhan,” writes
Havelock,

had drawn attention to the psychological and intellectual effects of the printing press
[in Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962]: I was prepared to push the whole issue further back, to
something that had begun to happen about seven hundred years before Christ. (The
Muse Learns to Write, 10)
36. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 100–102, 112.
37. Ibid., 13.
38. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 270.
39. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 111.
40. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 293.
41. Ibid.
42. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 10.
43. Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (New York:
Pantheon, 1951), 46.
44. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 23.
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 287

45. Donald J. Zeyl, ed., Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press,
1997), 22.
46. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 96–97.
47. Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 43.
48. Ibid.
49. John David Gemmill Evans, A Plato Primer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 20.
50. Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 217.
51. See also Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 41:

There are clear indications in the Republic that, when that dialogue was written, Plato
had some notion of a supreme first principle, a Form of Forms, as it were, in the
knowledge of which ultimate explanation and understanding was to be found. And
he calls this first principle by the name of the chief moral category, the Good or, as
he sometimes refers to it, the Form of the Good. But his references to it are extremely
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obscure and it is very difficult for us to form any clear idea in our own minds of the
way in which he thought about it.
52. Ibid., 42. A comparison here might be drawn between the way Plato approaches the subject of
“the good” and the way, in Freedom from the Known Jiddu Krishnamurti approaches the
subject of “love.” Both are unwilling to offer a definition, and both argue against multiplicity:
“love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many” (Freedom from the
Known [New York: Harper & Row, 1969], 86–87).
53. Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 220.
54. Ibid.
55. Terry Penner, “The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato,” in A Companion to Plato,
ed. Hugh H. Benson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 178.
56. Jowett, The Republic, 209.
57. For an interesting explanation of how an “ultimate good” might be justified, see Evans, A
Plato Primer, 20–21. He starts with the question “is it good to be a good ‘x,’” when “x”
might be a bad thing (say a thief or a liar)? He answers by saying this situation complicates
Aristotelian typologies, and reveals a higher-order level of goodness, one that relies on
context and wisdom for an answer. In other words, for example, “being a good person”
might in some cases require “being a good thief ”—even if, generally speaking, thieving is
a bad thing.
58. Raphael Demos, The Philosophy of Plato (New York: Octagon, 1966), 48.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank Grand Valley State University for granting a generous sabbatical leave, which
helped make this writing project possible. I also acknowledge the membership of the Media
Ecology Association for inspiring my interest in orality and literacy, and the role these practices
play in human history. I also thank those who attended a Media Ecology Panel at the 2015 National
Communication Association annual convention where ideas in this essay were first publicly pre-
sented and discussed. Finally, I would like to thank Corey Anton for his thoughtful input and assist-
ance in preparing this manuscript.

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