Dialogue on The Republic, Session 1: Allegory of the Cave, Simile of the Sun, Nature of Good, and the Divided Line

Members of the Toronto Philosophy and Calgary Philosophy Meetup groups convened on September 26, 2021 to launch season two of Plato’s Pod with a discussion on Plato’s Republic. Our focus was on the famous allegory of the cave, and the related simile of the sun, nature of the good, and divided line of reasoning (in passages 502(d)-521(b).

Is the prisoner in the cave, unable to see the source of the images projected on the wall in front of him that he mistakes for reality, like us, as Socrates states? During our dialogue, participants weighed in with some fascinating thoughts. The restricted perspective of the cave was compared to being in a small town and not knowing its surroundings, while another raised the idea of the human capacity of differentiation in distinguishing that which is from that which is not.

Our discussion included questions on our perception of ordering in sequences of cause and effect, and our ability to distinguish original cause and final effect. The nature of the good was compared to that which is without cause, and we explored the properties of the divided line that Socrates set out by which we weigh and measure degrees of reality. Is man, however, the measure of all things? That was the question raised in Plato’s Theaetetus, with which we ended season one, and in The Republic Socrates provides a method which as – as one member observed – allows for inductive logic to be reconciled with deductive logic at a single point of knowledge. One participant went so far as to claim knowledge that all we think exists is an illusion, and perhaps the question of how such knowledge could be obtained, in such a state, is a matter that we may continue to explore in future episodes when we return to discuss more of The Republic.