Anyone who has studied philosophy to any reasonable degree will be familiar with the “Father” of philosophy, Plato (c.428–348 BC). Along with this teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato underpins the canon of ancient Greek philosophy and, descending from that, the entire history of Western and Middle Eastern philosophy to this day. Alfred North Whitehead summed up Plato’s enduring influence by characterising the whole of subsequent philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato”.
Plato innovated the so-called dialectic method of reasoning by way of dialogues between two or more characters (one of them often being his old teacher Socrates himself) in order to tease out the truth about something. Plato’s Socrates turns many an interlocutor on his head with his acute reasoning, and he’s also a dab hand with allegories: his most famous being found in Plato’s Republic and known as the Allegory of the Cave.
In this allegory Socrates describes a group of prisoners who live their lives chained to the wall of a cave, and facing a blank wall. The prisoners see only shadows projected on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world; they are merely fragments of reality. Socrates explains that a philosopher is one who seeks to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality and is like the prisoner who is freed from the cave and who comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not the direct source of the images seen.
There is a thread running between this ancient allegory right up to modern times as science grapples with the fundamental makeup of reality and the possibility of higher dimensions but we needn’t tax ourselves with such deep matters right now. Instead, enjoy this excellent clay animation short which summarises the allegory nicely and is the work of writer and director Michael Ramsay, claymation artist John Grigsby and voice actor Kristopher Hutson.
