REPUBLIC(BOOKVII) 119
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“Next,” I said, “make an image of our nature as it involves education and the lack
of it, by likening it to a condition such as the following: picture human beings in a cave-
like dwelling underground, having a long pathway open to the light all across the cave.
They’re in it from childhood on with their legs and necks in restraints, so that they’re
held in place and look only to the front, restricted by the neck-restraint from twisting
their heads around. For them, the light is from a fire burning up above and a long way
behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners there’s an upper road. Picture a lit-
tle wall built along this road, like the low partitions puppeteers use to screen the humans
who display the puppets above them.”
“I see it,” he said.
“Then see the humans going along this little wall carrying all sorts of articles that
jut out over the wall, figurines of men and other animals fashioned out of stone and
wood and materials of all kinds, with some of the people carrying them past making
appropriate sounds and others silent.”
“You’re describing a bizarre image and bizarre prisoners,” he said.
“Like us,” I said. “First of all, do you imagine such people would have seen any-
thing of themselves or one another other than the shadows cast by the fire onto the part
of the cave right across from them?”
“How could they,” he said, “if they were forced to keep their heads immobile
throughout life?”
“And what would they have seen of the things carried past? Wouldn’t that be the
same thing?”
“What else?”
“So if they were able to converse with one another, don’t you think they’d speak
of these very things they see as the beings?”
“Necessarily.”
“And what if their prison also had an echo from the side across from them? Any
time any of the people carrying things past uttered a sound, do you imagine they’d
believe anything other than the passing shadow had made the sound?”
“By Zeus, I don’t,” he said.
“So in every way,” I said, “such people wouldn’t consider anything to be the truth
other than the shadows of artificial things.”
“That’s a great necessity,” he said.
“Then consider,” I said, “what their release would be like, and their recovery
from their restraints and their delusion, if things like that were to happen to them by
nature. Whenever one of them would be released, and suddenly required to stand up,
and turn his neck around, and walk, and look up toward the light, he’d suffer pain
from doing all these things, and because of the blazes of light, he wouldn’t have the
power to get a clear sight of the things whose shadows he’d seen before. What do
you imagine he’d say if someone were to tell him that he’d been seeing rubbish then,
but now, somewhat nearer to what is and turned toward the things that have more
being, he was seeing more accurately? And especially if, pointing to each of the
things passing by, one forced him to answer as he asked what they are, don’t you
imagine he’d be at a loss and believe the things he’d seen before were truer than the
ones pointed out to him now?”
“Very much so,” he said.