Socrates, Plato, and the Allegory of the Cave
Philosophical Ideas
The beliefs of Socrates, in comparison to those of Plato, are difficult to discern. There are few significant differences between their philosophical ideas. Therefore, differentiating the philosophical beliefs of Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon is a difficult task, and one should always remember that what is attributed to Socrates might reflect the thinking of other authors.
If something can be said about the ideas of Socrates, it is that he was morally, intellectually, and philosophically different from his contemporary Athenians. When on trial for heresy and corrupting the youth, Socrates used their method of elenchos to demonstrate the erroneous beliefs of his judges. Socrates believed in the immortality of the soul, and he claimed to have received, at a certain moment in his life, a special mission from Apollo. In the Apology, he defends the Apollonian logos “know thyself.”
Socrates also questioned the Sophists’ idea that arete (virtue) could be taught. He believed that moral excellence is a matter of inspiration rather than kinship, as morally perfect parents did not necessarily have children like them. Socrates frequently said that his ideas were not his own but those of his teachers, among them Prodicus and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae.
Knowledge
Socrates often said that his wisdom was limited to his own ignorance (I only know that I know nothing). He believed that wrong actions were the consequences of ignorance and never claimed to be wise. Socrates’ intent was to make people aware of their own ignorance by questioning concepts that people held as dogmas and truths. This questioning, especially of scholars, led to him making many enemies.
Virtue
Socrates believed that the best way for people to live was by concentrating on their own development instead of pursuing material wealth. He invited others to focus on friendship and a sense of community, believing that this was the best way for a population to grow. His actions are proof of this: at the end of his life, he accepted his death sentence when everyone believed he would flee Athens because he felt he could not escape his community. He believed that humans possessed certain virtues, both philosophical and intellectual, and he said that virtue was the most important of all things.
Politics
It is said that Socrates believed that ideas belong to a world that only the wise could understand, making the philosopher the ideal ruler of a state. He opposed the democracy practiced in aristocratic Athens during his time. This same idea appears in the Laws of Plato, his disciple. Socrates believed that relating to members of parliament would make a person a hypocrite.
Break and Legacy
Socrates provoked an unprecedented shift in the history of Greek philosophy. Philosophers began to be considered as either pre-Socratic or post-Socratic. The Sophists, a group of philosophers (a title denied to them by Plato) from several cities, traveled throughout the polis, where they gave public speeches and taught their arts, such as rhetoric, in return for payment. Socrates outwardly resembled them, except in thought. Plato says that Socrates did not receive payment for his teaching, and his poverty was proof that he was not a Sophist. For the Sophists, everything should be judged according to the interests of man and how he sees social reality (subjectivity), according to the maxim of Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” This means that, according to this line of thought, moral, political, and social relationships should be guided by individual convenience. To this end, any person could assert a compelling speech, even if it was false or meaningless. The Sophists used complicated puns in their speech to demonstrate the truth[3] of what they intended to achieve. This kind of argument has earned the name of sophistry. In summary, sophistry destroyed the foundations of all knowledge since everything is relative (relativism), and values would be subjective. It also prevented the establishment of a set of standards of behavior that would guarantee equal rights for all citizens of the polis. As far as the Sophists were concerned, Socrates gave himself to explaining and focused on the problem of man. However, unlike the Sophists, Socrates waged a deep controversy with them, looking for an ultimate foundation for human questions (What is good? What is virtue? What is justice?), while the Sophists located their reflections from empirical data, the immediate sensory, without worrying about the investigation of an essence of virtue, justice, and so on, from which empirical reality itself could be evaluated.
Myth of the Cave
Plato was not seeking the true essence in just physis, as Democritus and his followers sought. Under the influence of Socrates, he sought the essence of things beyond the tangible world. The character in the cave who became free, like Socrates, risked being killed for expressing his thoughts and wanting to show a totally different world. Applying this to our reality, it is as if you believe, since you were born, that the world is a certain way, and then someone comes and says that almost everything is fake or partial and tries to show you new, totally different concepts. It was precisely for reasons like this that Socrates was killed by the citizens of Athens, inspiring Plato’s writing of the Allegory of the Cave. This allegory invites us to imagine that things will pass in human existence comparably to the situation in the cave, deceptively, with men chained to false beliefs, prejudices, and misconceptions and, through it all, inert in their few chances.
The myth of the cave is a metaphor for the human condition before the world regarding the importance of philosophical knowledge and education as a way of overcoming ignorance. It represents the gradual movement from common sense as a worldview and explanation of reality to philosophical knowledge, which is rational, systematic, and organized, seeking answers not based on chance but on causality.
According to Plato’s metaphor, the process for obtaining consciousness, that is, knowledge, covers two domains: sensible things (eikasia and pistis) and the domain of ideas (dianoia and noesis). For the philosopher, reality is in the world of ideas—a real and true world—and most of humanity lives in conditions of ignorance in the world of sensible things—this world—the degree of apprehension of images (eikasia), which are changeable and are not perfect like things in the world of ideas and, therefore, are not good enough to generate perfect knowledge.