Allegory of the cave

Summary

Dominique Pagani reads the allegory of the cave as a text that already contains the whole programme of philosophy1. The ascent stands for the philosophy of knowledge. It leads from doxa to the dianoia of the geometers, who do not go back to the unhypothetical principle, then to dialectic and to silent theoria. The descent back to the city opens onto the philosophy of action. He stresses this return: there is no individual salvation, man is a zoon politikon, and the dazzled philosopher who comes back is threatened with death, like Socrates. He traces the origin of Plato's philosophy to a political trauma, recounted in the Seventh Letter. For the moderns, he changes only one element of the scheme: freedom takes the place of the sun, the image of the idea of the good2. This "black sun" leads through the negative, the mal du siècle, Nietzsche and the will not to know that Freud discovered3. He also links the cave to Baudelaire's Platonism and to what sets the prisoner in motion: a crisis or a thunderstruck experience of beauty.

1. 1#3.5 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017
2. 2#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017
3. 3#1.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?28 Jan 2016

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.