John D. Proios, University of Chicago
In the Republic’s Allegory of the Cave, Socrates describes people raised in an underground dwelling (514a-515c), shackled so that they cannot turn around or move, and forced to view the shadows of artifacts cast by a firelight behind them, with the result that “such people would think that nothing else is the truth than the shadows of the artifacts” (515c1-2). Yet, a single prisoner escapes and discovers the ordered world outside (514c-516d). Socrates uses this image as the inspiration for a corresponding educational program (521c-535a), including a famous account of how the soul “calls up” or “summons” its intelligence in the face of certain kinds of sensible paradoxes (523a-524b, which I call the “Summoners Passage”).
The primary aim of this paper is to give an account of how Socrates theorizes the first two movements of the prisoner’s liberation in the Summoners Passage. In the image of the Cave, the prisoner is first “compelled instantaneously” to turn around (515c4-8), say “what it is” for each of the artifacts, and then to become confused (515d4-7). Afterwards, he is dragged “from here by violence along the rough and steep ascent” to the world outside (515e5-516a5). The Summoners Passage appears to be in tension with this representation of the prisoner’s liberation. For Socrates interprets (517a-b) the Cave in terms of the Line (509c-511e), so that the underground corresponds to the sensible realm (divided into image and original), and the outside to the intelligible (divided into image and original), and the prisoner to the soul’s ascent from sensible image to intelligible forms. Yet in the Summoners Passage, Socrates seems to claim that the soul is liberated from sensible images to intelligible reality, skipping sensible originals. This collapses what are two distinct movement in the image of the Cave.
I first criticize two existing scholarly responses to this problem (e.g. Burnyeat 2000, 1987; Storey 2022). Then, I argue for a new view, on which the Summoners Passage consists in two stages: first, the soul, prompted by confusion at its perception of contraries in the same sensible body, goes from the perception to the sensible body. On both philological (cf. McCabe 2015: 112-113) and philosophical grounds, I argue that at this initial stage, the soul considers what the qualified thing is such that it is one thing and yet two contraries. In a distinctive, second stage, the soul finds it must use intelligence’s power to think of the contrary properties as separate non-bodily realities. Here, the soul is no longer beholden to sensible contradiction to resolve its own confusion, instead asking about the definitions of separate intelligible beings. The final paper of the paper steps back to suggest broader implications. I propose that the view I defend puts us in a better position to conceive of the soul’s liberation as an ontological reorientation, of the cave as the realm of perception, of liberation as internal or subjective, and of intelligibility as an intrinsic value for the soul. Moreover, this model may also apply to the intellectual transition outside of the cave, or from mathematics to dialectic (cf. Byrd 2007).