Plato: “Allegory of the Cave”

Audience

The primary audience of the “Allegory of the Cave” was probably the members of Plato's Academy and, more broadly, the educated elite of Athens and the wider Greek world. Plato's ideas on politics and education as espoused in the allegory and throughout The Republic represent a thorough revision, arguably even an intended replacement, of the traditional form of Greek politics and education. While it would be a mistake to abstract the author's political philosophy directly from the pages of The Republic—it is a literary-philosophic work and one in which Plato himself never speaks—it is clear that at least something of Plato's own philosophy can be derived from the words he puts into the mouth of Socrates. Moreover, Plato's work with Dionysius II seems to be evidence that he was interested in putting into practice some of the political ideals of The Republic.

As with all of Plato's work, the intended audience included his ideological opponents. The “Allegory of the Cave” and The Republic as a whole serve as a defense of the philosophical way of life, even an argument for its superiority over competing schools of thought. Indeed, the allegory goes so far as to suggest that society will never achieve justice until philosophers are kings and vice versa.

Given the low literacy rates in Plato's Greece and the limited nature of libraries and the book trade in general in that era, very few of Plato's contemporaries would have had direct access to the text of the “Allegory of the Cave.” Nonetheless, Plato's work would have almost certainly been disseminated orally, if not to the broader public—there is little evidence that Plato engaged in this sort of activity, though it was common among his contemporaries—then at least in the Academy itself. There, perhaps, given Plato's valuation of the practice of philosophy through dialogue, the allegory may have been read aloud as a means to spur further philosophical debate.