Plato's Cave

Most of my readers may be familiar with the Allegory of the Cave Plato presents in Book VII of the Republic, but in case the reader is not, here is a good website giving the text in the MIT translation along with a nice graphic to get the idea visually:

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html

There are at least three ways of looking at the Myth of the cave, and they all have slightly different messages, but all tend to try and justify rationalism over empiricism.  First there is a political view. Plato lived in politically contentious times not unlike our own.  His claim with the myth is that the pundits of his day the Sophists were giving the people shadows on the wall and not real truth politically speaking, and as a result they were led to believe what they had seen with their eyes, but that was not reality at all.  One prisoner escapes presumably the philosopher among the prisoners and he discovers that the Sophists were just giving us shadows and not what was really real so he proceeds to tell the other prisoners about what he had discovered about what was really real, and they are afraid and therefore kill him.  Presumably that Philosopher is Socrates Plato’s mentor and therefore the myth is actually metaphorically a condemnation of the Athenians for the death of Socrates.

Second there is the epistemological message in the myth which is that what we observe through our senses and therefore what we know empirically is nothing more than shadows, because we are often confronted with illusions and mirages that we cannot trust any knowledge that ultimately comes from sense perception, since we do not know whether it is a mirage, illusion or mere shadow and not reality at all.  This ultimately relates to Metaphysics and the thesis that what is ultimately real is ideas.  Plato was fond of Mathematics and the rationalist deductive methods of Mathematics, which he claimed were the only way to get around the illusion problem.

Thirdly the epistemological relates to Education and learning theory Here Plato is saying that learning is an activity; it is an escape from our imprisonment to shadows on the wall and what we have been told, and ultimately that we need to find things out for ourselves and that logic and the mathematical method will allow us to make "sense" of what we can encounter in the world.  Education, by this, is not a passive view of the shadows, but an active searching and finding, a kind of discovery method of learning and teaching.