“I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human condition somewhat as follows. Imagine an under-ground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave.” - Plato, ‘Book 7 - The Allegory of the Cave’, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Penguin : London, 2007), pp.241-245
This week in contextualising practice we begun to look at some of Plato’s core teachings and ideas. We began by looking at Plato’s most notable book ‘Republic’. Plato’s Republic is a Socratic dialogue which was written around 380 BCE. The historical context of the book is between 428 and 348 BCE. The book’s message is communicated through various characters who discuss the rules of representation about various things in society and ultimately, it is Plato’s attempt to link theory and practice together.
The most noticeable of his ideas proposed in the republic is ‘the allegory of the cave’ (514a–520a). The allegory of the cave is an especially interesting idea for those concerned with the ideas of representation in the media like myself. In short, 3 prisoners are situated in a cave underground. There is a light which portrays shadows of different things on the wall facing them. As far as the prisoners know, there is nothing more to the shadows. These things, according to Plato would be mere representations of a form, the lowest possible position on Plato’s hierarchy of importance. It is only when one of the prisoners escapes, that he can see reality for what it is. The sun is real and is higher on the hierarchy than the light source from within the cave. When the prisoner returns to inform the others, they are uninterested by his findings as they have conditioned themselves comfortably with mere representations. The story is concerned with the purpose and placement of representations of a form and how the cave dwellers slowly begin to prefer the representation of a form over the true and ultimate version of the form.
Plato refers to these representations as ‘mimesis’ which is a synonym for imitation.
Another interesting concept which supports this idea of different forms is ‘One and three chairs’; a piece of artwork produced by Joseph Kosuth in 1965. It features a real chair, a picture of a chair, and finally a dictionary definition of a chair. It is an excellent example of Plato’s hierarchy portrayed in artwork.
This idea can be very easily applied to modern media and the different forms of distortion which the media can create. In society now, it is difficult to understand what is true and what is an imitation. We can see this best demonstrated on mainstream television with the construction of shows which focus on delivering distant content to the audience, such as travel programs or the manifestation of war in the middle east shown in the news. As a mainstream audience, the majority of us will have little to no experience with society in the middle east. The only knowledge we have about the middle-east is fed to us through mediums (the media). Eventually over time, alike the prisoners in the cave, we become comfortable with the mimesis, and when presented with reality, we react differently and are placed in a situation of culture shock.
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