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Summary Seminars Philosophy Of The Humanities 1
- Instelling
- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
Seminar notes of Philosophy Of The Humanities 1
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SeminarsWeek 1
Introduction to Plato’s Cave
Cave scene: we imagine ourselves in the cinema seeing a projection on a screen in front of us
1. Contextualizing Plato’s ‘The myth of the Cave’
(Socrates is main protagonist; he explains the situation of the cave to his students)
• Part of the Republic
• Mural Scuola di Atene (1509-1510)
- Raphael (1483-1520)
- The Vatication
• Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC)
• Note Plato’s and Aristotle’s hand gestures
- In accordance with the differences: Plato’s idealism vs Aristotle’s realism
• Plato pointing upwards to the sky -> more
interested in what mankind in principle can
know
•Aristotle is gesturing towards the crowd in
front of them because he is interested in what
they know
2. Plato’s Protocinema
• Leezenberg/De Vries : Aristotles rejects the Pythagorean- Platonic conceptions that ideal
mathematical forms and relations are more real the observable world of phenomena (2.1.a
Lecture book) -> idea mathematical forms: Plato’s ideal in connection to cave scene; he says
that ideal mathematical forms are more real than the observable world of the phenomenon
• Note the embedded plot in Plato’s text
- The cave within ‘The Republic’-> The Republic stand for good governance but cave is not about
that
- Cavedwellers as actors in ‘the cave’-> they are asked to identify with their faith and pain
- Socrates and Glaucon discussing the Cavedwellers predicament -> talking about the
difficulties what Cavedwellers experience-> their predicament
• In the cave can ‘ideal’ math be considered ‘more real’ then the shadows?- what will the
Cavedwellers observe
• The senses do not register what is more real: ideas (ideas more real for Plato)-> ideas are
something that you can reason to, that you can understand and it is not necessarily sense
dependent
• Socrates on the Cavedwellers reluctance to accept the truth: ‘will he not fancy that the shadows
(…) are truer (…) will he not have a pain in his eyes ( 515, p.2) -> Socrates is acknowledging
the difficulties of the Cavedwellers, they are hesitant or even resisting the truth; ‘he’ not
fancy that the shadows are truer -> he: who has escaped for the moment and is looking into
, the fire, the fire that has actually caused the shadows and projections on the wall, with
looking in the fire he is experiencing because it is so bright
3. Plato’s Cave scene
• Up towards the sun is up towards the truth
- Plato’s idealism: the truth belongs to ideas, not to factual instances of those ideas
- The idea of a table in general is more truthful than the actual table in front of me
• This depiction of the cave covers the scene until halfway section 517 in our text
- Many anthologies ends here; cave is many many anthologies
- Halfway 517 the scene changes (changes with ‘But whether true or false…’)
Our text continues: the next slides depiction of Plato’s allegory also represents sections 520-521
- Jan Saenredam’s engraving 1604-> In the first part of the text the colorful picture of the cave
scene is actually followed quite truthfully but the scene changes-> our text will actually continue
with the picture and illustration of Jan Saenredam ( Part 4)
Picture: depiction of the cave scene:
• Down on the left : cave dwellers watching the shadows on
the wall-> watching what the shadows show them -> shadows
caused by the fire
• As soon as cave dwellers bread out they experience pain
because the fire is so bright
• Further more up the cave it gets even more painful by
looking straight in the sun
• But after you accommodated your eyes than you will be
experiencing the paradisiacal features of the landscape and
will be enjoying the freedom
• The scene entails that upwards the sun is actually upwards to
the truth -> this is comforting to the theory of Plato’s idealism-> Truth belongs to the ideas not to
factual instances of those ideas-> In other words: the idea of a table in general is more truthful to
Plato than the actual table in front of me
4. Plato’s cave according to Saenredam 1604
• Jan Saenredam (1565-1607) Haarlem, Amsterdam (area)
• What is actually added to the previous (contemporary) depiction of Plato’s cave?
- Saenredam has included sections 517 (2nd half) onward particularly 519 (2nd half) - 521
- The two men in the middle (front ) reaching back from the relative calm of already enlightened
conversationalists (in back who enjoy the light of the fire) -((not the prisoner who earlier returned
because he was blinded by the light of the fire without his eyes (517)-> but the two men
decided that this crowd (the conversationalists) should be abandoned and the people in the
dark (foreground) should be in the light
- The two people in front are not the prisoners who earlier in the text returned because he
was blinded by the dark and returned to the crowed without his eyes (Plato says that) and
he is actually threatened by the crowd because the crowd said you are a fool to hurt
yourself and than return to us to claim the the outside is better-> they do not want to do
anything with that-> this is a danger for everyone coming back to the crowd because they
will not be believed, but the two men in the picture are actually the ones who belonged to
519-521, the people who come down for another reason
, • Again shadows on the wall on the right
• The crowd in the dark looking at the scene
projected on the wall but they do not really
understand it yet
• Anyone who would escape and look into the
fire will understand that the shadows of the
figures are projected on the wall
• But as Plato has pointed out it is a painful
experience because the light is so bright
• Also one person is not afraid of the fire and is
looking straight into it
Why are the prisoners like us?
In the ‘Allegory of the Cave’, Socrates clearly refers to human beings and the context of life
that has placed individuals as prisoners in different ways, the most prominent one, and the
one Socrates had in mind being lack of knowledge. As such, Plato did not only draw this story
from his initial Theory of Forms, but also related it to the theory of stages of life. In his study
of forms, Plato suggested that the forms that appear to human beings as the world are only a
reflection of the more ideal and perfect forms (Dooley 39). Case in point, Plato’s main idea was
that human beings should not only rely on their physical senses in judging the true forms of
things in the world but should also include thought and reason to logically evaluate what they
perceive. It is only through proper understanding of the forms that individuals perceive that
true knowledge can be acquired. In the same sense, the prisoners in the cave represent humans
who are blinded by their physical senses in obtaining the true knowledge about forms (Dooley
39).
Like the prisoners who believed the puppets on the wall were actual and true, human beings believe
that the various forms of things that they interact within their social, political, economic, and
religious lives are true without giving attention to the basic driving forces behind such forms.
Plato’s Allegory of the cave can also be connected to his theory on stages of education where
individuals move from a state of not knowing to a state of knowledgeable by being exposed to
knowledge. Like the prisoners, human beings are constrained within a knitted fabric of
knowledge, into which they are enslaved, thus restricting them from freely roaming in search
of knowledge. This makes human beings prisoners, who do not have an insight in the
knowledge beyond their syllabus and thus perceive the world only in respect to their senses
and acquired knowledge (Dooley 40).
Dooley, Kevin. Why Politics Matters: An Introduction to Political Science. Stamford, CT: Cengage
Learning, 2015.
Seminar Week 1
Hermeneutics : Interpretation or originally Translation; art of interpreting texts
Plato- the allegory of the Cave
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