The name given to one of the better known passages in Plato's most famous works, The Republic. The myth is the philosopher's symbolic expression of the plight of humans and especially with regards to human knowledge as a whole.
In the myth, Plato imagines a big cave that is connected to the outside world by a passage, so long that light does not penetrate the cave. Here in the cave sits a row of prisoners, their back to the passage, their face towards the far wall of the cave, their hands and necks bound so that they could not move their bodies or heads, and so could not also see their neighbours or even thir own bodies. Behind and unknown to them is a bright fire. Between them and the fire is a wall just tall enough so that, when the people perpectually going to and fro behind the wall, the fire casts only the shadows of the objects they carry on their heads onto the further wall. They hear the echoes of the people but see only the moving shadows of the things on the people's heads. These, Plato says, are therefore the only things that the prisoners experience and know. They would assume that this is all that there is to reality, and all that they could converse about.
But suppose one of the prisoners manages to break his bondages and escapes. The mere act of turning around to see the wall and the fire would confuse and frighten him. The temptation would be to turn around to the shadows and the echoes familiar to him. And if he were to make his way out of the long passage into the world, he would be even more disorientated at first. It would take him a very long time before he could apprehend the new reality of things around him. If he were to venture back into the passage and the cave, everything he tells the other prisoners would be totally unintelligible to them, who know only the flitting shadows and echoes.
The myth is an important reminder to all of us that we are all, in a sense, prisoners in our understanding of things. The history of the Christian Church is replete with stories of the pride in particular interpretations, formulations, and doctrines that prevent us from appreciating dissenting voices, of others who may have seen and understood things we have not seen or appreciated. A particular tragic case in point in the last one and a half centuries is the Christian response to the question of evolution, where both sides continue, with great losses to everybody, to live within their own caves.
©ALBERITH
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