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Imagine an underground chamber like a cave with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children … they [are chained so they] can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road. In front of which (is) a curtain-wall … like the screen at puppet shows, between the operator and their audience, above which they show their puppets.
There are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain-wall projecting above it and including figures of men and animals … and some of these men are talking and some are not …
The prisoners [can only see] anything of themselves or their fellows [by] the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them…. and … [They assume] the shadows they see (are) the real things. They believe the shadows of the objects … (are) the whole truth.
… Then if [one of them] was released from his bonds and cured of his delusion and forced to stand up … and look and walk towards the fire all these actions would be painful and he would be too dazzled to see properly the objects of which he used to see the shadows…. He would be at a loss and think that what he used to see was far truer than the objects now being pointed out to him.
… And if he were made to look directly at the light of the fire it would hurt his eyes and he would turn back and retreat to the things [the shadows] which he could see properly, which he would think really clearer than the things [now] being pointed out to him.
(Adapted from Plato's ‘The Simile of the Cave’, The Republic, Book VII, Sec. 7)
I begin with this extract from ‘The Simile of the Cave’ (Plato 1984) for it was my entry route into Meltzer's The Apprehension of Beauty. Approximately 2400 years ago Plato saw that man could only face the sun, the ‘eternal truth’, the ‘O’ of Bion's grid, for a