Plato’s allegory of the cave - Bilingual Philosophy 4th ESO

The body is a prison for the soul

The bilingual group of Philosophy 4th ESO made this work for the School Library Project 2016-17: The human body. We represented here the Allegory of the cave, from the Greek philosopher Plato’s book Republic (5th - 4th century BC).
We wanted to make a visual presentation of the text, using only the words that were important to describe the levels of knowledge: conjecture, belief, thought and understanding.

1. Reading (and explaining) the story
First we read an abridged version of the allegory. But it was still very difficult. We didn’t have to understand everything, we only had to be able to report about it: gather enough information to answer in Galician the questions that the teacher asked us in Galician too.
So, going back to some hard paragraphs, we learnt some vocabulary and made an image in our minds of the whole story: the wall, the prisoners, the fire, the shadows, the puppets, the freed prisoner, the world outside the cave, the return.

2. Symbolism
We had already studied Rationalism and Empiricism. Now we researched this story on the internet to find out why it is a rationalist explanation of the world. We discussed what source we should use and decided that the we could trust the Wikipedia on this subject. It is well organized so we used it to learn some vocabulary. For instance, we learned from the side information that Plato’s main theory is called Theory of Forms, so we clicked on the link and visited this article, which gave us new information, like the four levels of knowledge.

We organised the symbols and the relations between them in this table of contents.

3. Sketching
First we tried our hand on our notebooks. Some of the ideas were really good to start up!

Then, Iris went up to the blackboard and made some drawings following our suggestions.

4. Drawing
Here we are, standing around the blank piece of paper, not knowing where to start.

This was our first decision: we would draw the divided line to define the proportions of the drawing. We established a proportion, 2:5 – 3:5, and this way all the elements of the picture could be easily located.

We also represented the way back to the cave as sort of a wormhole across the sun – Fantastic, really! Edward sat as a model for Samuel’s prisoners, Iris and Andrea made Socrates and Glaucon’s portraits and Jasmine drew the Sun and the wormhole. Des, Irene, Reuben and Sergi used the markers on the pencil sketches.

5. Painting
This was mostly Xavier, David, Annabel and Cesar’s work, though we all contributed.

6. The mural
Finally, the mural takes shape (Form, would Plato and Aristotle say). We can see the cave, with the fire, the shadows and, of course, the prisoners (corresponding to the level of knowledge named CONJECTURE); the puppets (BELIEF); the freed prisoner climbing (THOUGHT); and the real world outside the cave (UNDERSTANDING).
The cave is the Sensible world and the exterior is the Ideal world, the prisoner is the soul and the chains are the body.

But there isn't a happy ending: when we are enjoying the outside world we think of our friends back in the cave, we go through the wormhole down to the cave again to try and free them, but the prisoners don’t want to be released of their chains.