Nobody Wants to Go Back Down

Let me show you in a figure how far our nature is enlightened, or unenlightened.¹

Picture human beings living in an underground den. The den has a mouth open towards the light, and the opening runs the whole length of it. The people have been here since they were children. Their legs and their necks are chained, so that they cannot move, and they can only look straight ahead — the chains prevent them from turning their heads.

Behold, Human Beings in an Underground Den

Above and behind them, at a distance, a fire is burning.

Between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised walkway, and along it a low wall has been built — like the screen that puppeteers put in front of themselves, over the top of which they show the puppets.

And now imagine men walking along behind that wall, carrying all kinds of things that stick up above it: vessels, and statues, and figures of animals made of wood and stone. Some of the men are talking. Some are silent.

Glaucon said it was a strange picture, and they were strange prisoners.

They are like ourselves, I said.

The Shadows Are the Whole of the Truth

Consider what they can see. They see their own shadows, and each other's, thrown by the fire onto the wall of the cave in front of them.

How could they see anything else? They have never been able to turn their heads.

And of the objects being carried past behind them, they see only the shadows of those too.

Now suppose they can talk to one another. When they name the things they see, would they not suppose they were naming what is actually in front of them? And suppose the prison had an echo off the far wall. When one of the men carrying things spoke, would they not be certain the voice belonged to the passing shadow?

So to them, the truth would be nothing whatever but the shadows of the images.

Important

I want that understood exactly. Not that they are mistaken about some part of reality. The shadows are not a portion of their world. They are the entirety of it, and they are the only thing the word truth has ever pointed at.

What Happens When You Unchain One

Now watch what naturally follows if one of them is released and cured of his error.

Suppose he is freed and made to stand up suddenly, and turn his head, and walk, and look towards the light. Every one of those movements hurts. The glare distresses him. And he cannot make out the objects whose shadows he used to see perfectly well.

Now imagine somebody standing beside him and explaining that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, being nearer to what really exists and with his eyes turned toward more real things, he is seeing more clearly.

What do you suppose he says?

And imagine that instructor pointing at the objects as they go past and requiring him to name them. Will he not be at a loss? Will he not conclude that the shadows he used to see are truer than the things being shown to him now?

Far truer, Glaucon said.

And if you force him to look straight at the fire itself, his eyes will hurt. He will turn away and take refuge in the things he can look at — and he will be convinced that those are genuinely clearer than the things you are trying to make him see.

Notice that he is not being stupid. Every step of this is correct reasoning from where he is standing. He is trusting his eyes, and his eyes are telling him he has been made worse off.

The Climb

Now suppose he is dragged up the steep and rugged ascent, against his will, and held there until he has been forced out into the presence of the sun.

He will be in pain, and he will be furious. And when he gets into the light his eyes will be so dazzled that he will not be able to see a single one of the things we now call real.

Not all at once, Glaucon said. And he was right.

The man needs to grow accustomed, and there is an order to it.

• First he will make out shadows best.
• Then reflections of people and of things in water.
• Then the things themselves.
• Then he will look up at night and see the moon and the stars and the whole spangled heaven — and he will find that he can see the sky at night more easily than he can see the sun by day.
• Last of all, he will be able to look at the sun. Not at reflections of it in water, or images of it somewhere else, but at the sun in its own place, and contemplate it as it is.

And then he will begin to reason.

He will work out that this is the thing which gives the seasons and the years, which governs everything in the visible world, and which is in a certain way the cause of everything he and his companions used to look at down below.

He Would Not Envy Them Their Prizes

Now, when he remembered his old home, and the wisdom of the den, and his fellow prisoners, do you not suppose he would congratulate himself, and pity them?

Certainly he would.

And consider what they were doing down there. They had honors, you know. They gave prizes to whoever was quickest at making out the passing shadows, and best at remembering which of them went in front and which came after and which traveled together — because that man could predict what was coming next.

Do you think he would want that prize now? Do you think he would envy the men who hold it?

I think he would say with Homer that it is better to be the poor servant of a poor man, and to put up with anything at all, rather than think the way they think and live the way they live.

And Then He Goes Back In

Now imagine him coming suddenly out of the sunlight and being put back in his old place.

His eyes would be full of darkness.

And suppose there were a contest — suppose he had to compete at measuring the shadows against the prisoners who had never left, while his sight was still weak and before his eyes had settled. And the time needed to acquire that habit of sight again might be considerable.

Would he not be ridiculous?

They would say of him that he went up and came back down without his eyes. They would say that it is not worth even thinking about making the ascent.

And if anyone tried to release another prisoner and lead him up towards the light — if they could once lay hands on that man, they would put him to death.

What the Figure Means

You may now attach this whole allegory, dear Glaucon, to what we said before.

The prison house is the world we see. The light of the fire is the sun. And if you take the journey upward to be the ascent of the soul into the world of the intelligible, you will not be misunderstanding me — though whether my belief is right or wrong, god knows.

This is my opinion. In the world of knowledge, the idea of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is seen only with an effort. And once it has been seen, it must be concluded to be the universal author of everything beautiful and right — parent of light and of the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and of truth in the intelligible one.

That is the power on which a man who intends to act rationally, in public or in private, has to keep his eye fixed.

And you must not be surprised that those who have got as far as that vision are unwilling to come down again into human affairs. Their souls are always straining back towards the upper world, where they would prefer to live.

If the allegory is worth anything, that is entirely natural.

Nor should you be surprised if a man who has come from divine contemplation into the wretched state of human business behaves ridiculously — if, while his eyes are still blinking and before he has adjusted to the surrounding darkness, he is made to fight in courts of law about the shadows of images of justice, in front of people who have never once seen justice itself.

Two Ways of Being Dazzled

Anyone with common sense will remember that there are two kinds of confusion in the eyes, from two opposite causes: coming out of the light, and going into it. And this is exactly as true of the mind's eye as of the body's.

Note

So a man who remembers that, when he meets somebody whose vision is weak and perplexed, will not be in a hurry to laugh.

He will ask first which direction that soul has come from. Has it come out of a brighter life and been unable to see because it is not used to the dark? Or has it turned from the darkness towards the day and been blinded by too much light?

He will count the first man happy in his condition, and pity the second.

And if he does feel like laughing at somebody, there is more sense in laughing at the soul that has come up out of the dark than at the one that has come back down from the light.

Education Is Not Putting Sight Into Blind Eyes

If what I have said is right, then certain professors of education must be wrong.

They claim they can put knowledge into a soul that did not have it — like putting sight into blind eyes.

But our argument shows that the power of learning is in every soul already. The trouble is that it is aimed in the wrong direction.

Just as the eye cannot be turned from darkness to light on its own, but only by turning the whole body — so the instrument of knowledge can only be turned from the world of becoming to the world of being by the movement of the whole soul. And then, by degrees, it learns to endure the sight of what is, and finally of the best of what is.

So the art we want is not an art of implanting vision. The vision is there. It is an art of turning somebody round, in the easiest and quickest way.

And I will show you why this matters practically. Have you never noticed the narrow intelligence flashing out of the keen eye of a clever criminal — how eager he is, how sharply his mean little soul sees the way to what it wants? He is the opposite of blind. His eyesight is excellent. It has simply been conscripted into the service of something bad, and he is dangerous in exact proportion to how clever he is.

Now suppose that nature had been dealt with early. Suppose those leaden weights had been cut away — the appetites that get attached to us at birth and drag the soul's vision downwards. Turn the very same faculty in the opposite direction, and it would see the truth as keenly as it now sees the way to its own advantage.

The Reluctant Ruler

Which brings me to the conclusion, and to the part that Glaucon objected to.

It follows from all of this that two kinds of men are unfit to run a state.

• Not the uneducated, who have never seen the truth — because they have no single aim of duty to govern their conduct.
• And not those who spend their whole lives being educated and never come to an end of it — because they will never act at all unless they are compelled, imagining that they are already living in the islands of the blessed.

So the business of us who are founding this state will be to compel the best minds to make the ascent, and to keep climbing until they arrive at the good.

But when they have arrived, and seen enough, we must not allow them to do what they do now.

They must be made to go back down among the prisoners, and share in their labors and their honors, whether those honors are worth anything or not.

And Glaucon asked whether that was not unjust — whether we ought to give them a worse life when they could have a better.

You have forgotten again, my friend, what the legislator was aiming at. He was not trying to make any one class in the state happier than the rest. The happiness was meant to be in the whole. He binds the citizens together by persuasion and by necessity and makes them the benefactors of one another, and he brought them into being not to please themselves but to be his instruments in binding the state together.

So there is no injustice in compelling our philosophers to take care of other people. And here is what we shall say to them.

In other states, men of your kind are not required to share in the labor of politics — and that is reasonable, since they grew up at their own sweet will and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they can hardly be expected to feel gratitude for an education nobody gave them.

But we brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive. We educated you far better than they were educated, and you are the better able to do both duties. So each of you in turn must go down into the general underground dwelling and get accustomed to seeing in the dark.

And once you have the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the people down there. You will know what each of the images is and what it stands for, because you have seen the beautiful and the just and the good as they really are.

And then this state — which is also yours — will be a reality and not a dream. It will be run in a manner unlike other states, where men fight one another over shadows and tear themselves apart in a struggle for power, as though power were a great good.

So now consider how such men are to be produced, and how they are to be brought up out of the darkness into the light — as some are said to have ascended from the world below to the gods.

The process is not the flipping of an oyster shell. It is the turning round of a whole soul, out of a day that is hardly better than night, and into the true day of being — which is the ascent we have been calling philosophy.

And now we ought to ask what sort of knowledge has the power to bring about a change like that.