While such divisions are always prey to arbitrariness and subjective preference, I hope that the division I offer sheds light on what Plato is up to here.Ĥ In the first stage, the cave’s residents are prisoners, chained to their seats and unable to move not only their bodies but-crucially-their heads. Stages in the Cave Allegoryģ I count six distinct stages in the Cave Allegory.

Nonetheless, everyone has the capacity to be educated, to turn their soul from what is less real toward what is more real. But not everyone is capable of making it out of the Cave into the intelligible world of the Forms, just as not everyone is capable of winning a Nobel Prize in Physics or an Olympic medal in Figure Skating. Everyone, Plato insists, is capable of education in this sense (7.518c). Education as turning around is a powerful metaphor, capturing the way in which learning involves gaining new perspectives, seeing everyday things and events from new points of view. Though education sometimes requires that kind of transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, this is not its essence, which instead is ‘turning the whole soul’ (7.518d)-turning it around, ultimately toward the Form of the good. Given how visual the allegory is, many readers will find it helpful to draw themselves a diagram of it.Ģ Education, the Allegory’s topic, is not what most people think it is, says Plato: it is not ‘putting knowledge into souls that lack it’ (7.518b). Although an allegory is sometimes defined as a symbolic narrative that can be interpreted as having a hidden meaning, Plato is not cagey about the Cave Allegory’s meaning: it is about ‘the effect of education (παιδεία ) and the lack of it on our nature’ (7.514a). Although it is clearly related to the Sun and Divided Line analogies (indeed, Socrates explicitly connects the Cave and the Sun at 7.517bc), Plato marks its special status by opening Book VII with it, emphasizing its importance typographically, so to speak (he will do much the same thing in Book IX with the discussion of the tyrannical soul). Photograph by Crystallizedcarbon (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, wiki/File:Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif#/media/File:Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gifġ The Allegory of the Cave is arguably the most famous part of the Republic.

Markus Maurer, drawing of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ with Wikipedia’s logo as the sun (2015).

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