Returning to Plato’s Cave: Dislodging the Individualist Distortion

Wisecrack’s 8-Bit Philosophy video on Plato’s cave raises the question of what is real by providing a summary of the episode from Plato’s Republic—using Zelda to represent the person who leaves and returns to the cave.

In both face-to-face and online contexts, I assign students reading from Plato’s Republic: the analogy of the sun, the development of the divided line, and the image of the cave (502c–524b). In introductory-level courses, this assignment is in the midst of students reading the entirety of Plato’s Politeia, a title meaning “on the just,” more commonly known to us as the Republic. This institutionalized renaming matters because what Socrates proposes as an analogy (where the elements of the soul are represented by elements of a kind of “city”) is taken by many as Plato’s substantive theory of statehood. In more advanced courses, these passages are abstracted from the text. In this post, I focus on my class discussion for face-to-face meetings. My more thorough treatment can be found in “Teaching Plato’s Cave Hermeneutically: Nurturing Ambiguity for Student Appropriation.”

I first ask a volunteer to summarize the story Socrates tells to Glaucon. Without fail, students summarize it this way (even after reading it for themselves): the person “pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps” to escape the cave by themselves, where they set themselves free from their bonds, and then they return to free others. In some rare cases, a student might mention that the person is freed by someone else but then says that the freed person still returns to the cave to save others. The students typically agree that the rest of the cave competitors would try to kill this returner. This basic frame is shared by slogans and T-shirts promoting, for example, “Plato’s Search and Rescue Team.” And this is precisely how the 8-Bit clip (as well as the School of Life version, the TED-Ed version, and most others) summarizes the episode from Plato. Moreover, this is how scholars and philosophers often approach the episode in research, such as in Luce Irigaray’s feminist inversion of it, Martin Heidegger’s emphasis on the “penetrating” violence of the liberator, and so on. I mention these to students to assure them that they are in good company and that our critique of this entrenched misreading is structural, not personal to them.

In class, I bring up the clip on the screen, alongside Plato’s text, and we move through the video step-by-step, pausing (often!) at each element to focus on Plato’s lines, to determine to what degree the 8-Bit clip is loyal to the text. For example:

1. The clip calls it an “allegory.” Is that what Plato has Socrates call it? No (see 514a). Why might this matter, that it is an “icon” rather than an “allegory”? It helps students to look at Eastern Orthodox religious iconography for illustration.
2. What are the cave dwellers doing? They are not just sitting there emaciated and trapped; they are competing in a society with symbolic capital over who proves to have the highest “IQ” for predicting shadows and sounds (516c). Why might this matter, that there is a whole privileged society in the cave? It helps students to think about social stratification and classism, where the cave competitors represent not all humanity but merely privileged elite like the men with political ambitions participating in the dialogue (such as Thrasymachus, Adeimantus, Glaucon, and the others).
3. How does the person leave the cave? Not on their own; they are forced, as they experience agonizing pain (516c–d). Do they even want to leave? Do they want to return? It helps students to think about the negativity of experience wherein we undergo “reality checks” or learn difficult life lessons through loss.
4. Who do the cave competitors try to murder? Not the returner (517a)! The returner is simply placed in their “same seat” (516e). The cave dwellers perceive the returner as disabled by their experience outside the cave, laughing at them. It helps students to reflect on social stigmas surrounding disabilities, and I refer them to crip theorists like Alison Kafer and to Socrates’s explanation that mental and physical disabilities are the only way someone can become a philosopher in corrupt societies (496c). Compre Athens and the United States. The real threat to a cave dweller’s way of life, in which they have accrued social capital, is the liberator. This is who they try to kill—which is Plato’s allusion to Socrates’s execution.

And so forth.

What I find particularly interesting about this approach to Plato’s cave is exploring the explanations in a nearly 500-year history of reception, in which the cave has been read as an individualistic, “bootstrap and rescue” hero’s journey. Students and I speculate about and research possibilities to explain why this distortion of the cave episode is so prevalent. One source I find especially critical for liberative leverage is Angela Davis’s (2016) critique of Eurocentric “individualism,” which she takes to be complicit with neoliberal capitalist exploitation. What we realize is that tellings of Plato’s cave like that found in the 8-Bit clip anachronistically project individualism into the story and occlude Plato’s message. The point is not to escape the cave but to return to it to live there better, in such a way that we know what is actually happening rather than remain caught up in illusions. The cave is Plato’s attempt to describe a “lightbulb moment” before the invention of lightbulbs.

Suggested Reading

• Plato, Republic. Either Allan Bloom’s or G. M. A. Grube’s translation works fine.

Sources and Other Resources

• Cavarero, Adriana, and Paul Kottman. 1996. “Regarding the Cave.” Qui Parle 10 (1): 1–20.
• Davis, Angela. 2016. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books.
• Debono, Mark. 2023. “Lessons on Knowledge Transmission from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: The Influence of Reason and Companionship on Transmissive and Participatory Pedagogies.” Ethics and Education 18 (2): 181–94.
• Dickman, Nathan Eric. 2024. “A Hermeneutic Approach to Plato’s Cave.” Presentation for The Hendrix Steel Center Afternoon Discussion Series, February. YouTube, 1:03:28. https://youtu.be/phjtl9lrTrg.
• Dickman, Nathan Eric. 2025. “Teaching Plato’s Cave Hermeneutically: Nurturing Ambiguity for Student Appropriation.” Teaching Philosophy 48 (2): 183–214.
• Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1986. The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated by P. Christopher Smith. Yale University Press.
• Gocer, Asli. 1999. “The Puppet Theater in Plato’s Parable of the Cave.” The Classical Journal 95 (2): 119–29.
• Robinson, James. 1992. “Teaching the Allegory of the Cave.” Teaching Philosophy. 15 (4): 329–35.
• Wilberding, James. 2004. “Prisoners and Puppeteers in the Cave.” In Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, edited by David Sedley. Oxford University Press.

Nathan Eric Dickman

Nathan Eric Dickman (PhD, The University of Iowa) researches in hermeneutic phenomenology, philosophy of language, and comparative questions in philosophies of religions. He has taught a breadth of courses, from critical thinking to Zen, and existentialism to Greek and Arabic philosophy. In Using Questions to Think (Bloomsbury 2021), he examines the roles questions play in critical thinking and logical reasoning. In Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Priority of Questions in Religions (Bloomsbury 2022), he examines roles of questions in the speech of religious figures. In Interpretation: A Critical Primer (Equinox 2023), he examines scaffolds of questions in the interpretation of texts.