Class Reflections: Plato's Republic books 6 and 7

leading students through discussions of the divided line and the allegory of the cave

I’ve been a bit under the weather this week, to the point I considered actually cancelling my Thursday class sessions and having my students watch some of the lecture videos I’ve produced on Plato’s Republic books 6 and 7. But I hate to do that so early in the semester - we’re just finishing up week 3 - and I know that once I get into teaching with my students, despite being ill and tired, I’ll find myself with enough energy to have a good discussion with them. (I actually started a thread about that just earlier today, which you can jump in and comment on if you like.)

So I made the trek over to Marquette University for my 8 AM and 12:30 PM Foundations In Philosophy classes. This is the last class session we will be spending on Plato, and in this one we’re getting into his metaphysics as well as expanding our study of his epistemology (aspects of which we have explored a bit already with class sessions on the Apology and Meno). There are a lot of different ways to describe what metaphysics extends to and focuses on, and we’ll get to other aspects later on in the semester. Today I started out by telling them that it has to do with determining what is more real and what is less real.

Before we jumped into discussion of the two key analogies Plato elaborates within books 6 and 7 - the divided line and the allegory of the cave - I did three things.

First I asked them if they had ever heard or read the expression “Platonic form of. . .”. Quite likely more than just the one who raised her hand has actually encountered that phrase before, but you work with what you’ve got. I asked her what she thought that phrase meant, and she said “archetype”, which is a perfectly good answer, but one which leads to the followup question: “so what’s an archetype”? And we got going for a few minutes exploring that, discussing the ideal versus the “real”, the notion of a pattern or essence, and then moved on.

I then held up my laptop, displaying a picture of me with one of the Almost Home cats perched on my shoulder, and asked them what they saw there. They all said “a cat”, and then “that’s you”. I mentioned that the cat was named Gravy, and that he was a particularly cuddly and friendly 2-year old boy, who likes being in my arms, on my lap, or on my shoulder. Then we spent a little time discussing the differences between the image of something and the original that image is a copy derived from. I pointed out that if they wanted to ask questions about that cat, they could do that with me, but the guy in the picture wouldn’t say, or for that matter even hear, anything.

After those two warm-ups, I outlined some key features of Plato’s theory of forms on the board, mentioning but not trying to explain that the relationship between “real things” of our everyday experience and Platonic forms of those was something that he calls “participation”. There’s one ideal form which the many material individuals participate in, and that’s how we are able to call them by the same name, understand what they are, determine how close or far they are from the idea, and so on. And then I added the feature that makes it particularly metaphysical, in the grand, elevated sense of that term. The forms, for Plato, are more real than the many “real” things they are the forms of.

That then leads into the two key analogies from the texts for today: the divided line, which gets introduced and discussed in book 6, and the allegory of the cave, the one that at least a few of the students have previously encountered. We work through what’s being set out by Plato in the text, involving in both cases a progression away from the tangible, visible world of “real things” (as our ordinary way of looking at them might call them) and the derivative images or reflections of them, to the invisible world or domain of the forms.

This is a bit of a hard sell, this early form of idealism, but I stress to my students - as I do with every thinker we look at - that I’m not overly concerned that they agree with or buy into Plato’s ideas. The goal is instead for them to come away with a solid understanding of what he thought, the bases for thinking that might be plausible or reasonable, and the applications we might make of those concepts.

Since Plato himself says that the allegory of the cave is about the process of “education” (paideia), the second to last thing we discuss in class is whether my students have had any sort of transformative educational experience that radically changed their perspective, any being led out of the cave, in the course of their lives. They’re still rather reluctant, most of them, to speak up all that much in class, but a few of them did and we explored those briefly.

The last matter we discuss, however, leads us back into the domain of ethics. What do you do when you’ve escaped the cave? You now understand things better, and you have a more meaningful existence. Do you remain above in the sunlit real world outside of the cave? It might make sense for you to do so? Or do you venture back into the realm of darkness and shadows, to explain as best you can what you have experienced to those who lack any substantive frame of reference for it, out of a desire to help them? There’s a case to be made for either choice, and I have them think through that option.