Symbolism In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

The saying goes that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that in his Allegory of the Cave, Plato uses the image of a cave to illustrate the effects of education on the human soul and how the symbolism represented in the allegory ties in to a broader discussion of one of Plato’s main philosophical ideas, the Theory of Forms. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato (who is speaking as Socrates to one of his students, Glaucon) asks us to imagine an underground cave in which a group of prisoners have lived since birth. The prisoners are chained to the ground and are positioned in such a way that they can only stare at the cave wall in front of them. Thus, the prisoners’ world has been reduced to a world of darkness, and the only thing that is real to them is the shadows and echoes of passersby as they walk past the mouth of the cave. But, Socrates goes on to say, the reality that the prisoners perceive is a false one; it is only by being dragged

Novelist and essayist Susan Sontag draws a particularly interesting parallel between the Allegory of the Cave and photography in her essay In Plato’s Cave. “This very insatiability of the photographing eye,” writes Sontag, “changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe,” (3). The camera, Sontag argues, makes what one is experiencing at any given point in time real, impervious to the decay of time yet nonetheless stands as a testament to its passage. Much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave divided existence into the visible world and the knowable world, the act of taking a picture draws a line between the subject and the photographer, the image-world and the real