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PARTISAN REVIEW
himself from the fetters which chain the cave dwellers' "legs and
necks" so that "they can only see before them," their eyes glued to
the screen on which shadows and images of things appear; he now
turns around to the rear of the cave where an artificial fire illuminates
the things in the cave as they really are. There is, second, the turning
from the cave to the clear sky where the ideas appear as the true and
eternal essences of the things in the cave, illuminated by the sun, the
idea of ideas, enabling man to see and the ideas to shine forth. Finally
- there is the necessity of returning to the cave, of leaving the realm
of eternal essences and moving again in the realm of perishable
things and mortal men. Each of these turnings is accompanied by a
loss of sense and orientation: the eyes accustomed to the shadowy ap–
pearances on the screen are blinded by the fire in the cave; the eyes
then adjusted to the dim light of the artificial fire are blinded by
the light that illuminates the ideas; finally, the eyes adjusted to the
light of the sun must readjust to the dimness of the cave.
Behind these turnings-about, which Plato demands only of the
philosopher, the lover of truth and light, lies another inversion indi–
cated generally in Plato's violent polemics against Homer and the
Homeric religion, and in particular in the construction of his story
as a kind of reply to and reversal of Homer's description of Hades
in the eleventh book of the
Odyssey.
The parallel between the images
of the cave and Hades (the shadowy, unsubstantial, senseless move–
ments of the soul in Homer's Hades correspond to the ignorance and
senselessness of the bodies in the cave) is unmistakable because it is
stressed by Plato's use of the words
eidolon,
image, and
skia,
shadow,
which are Homer's own key words for the description of life after
death in the underworld. The reversal of the Homeric "position" is
obvious; it is as though Plato were saying to him: not the life of
bodyless souls, but the life of the bodies takes place in an underworld;
compared to the sky and the sun, the earth is like Hades; images
and shadows are the objects of bodily senses, not the surroundings of
bodyless souls; the true and real is not the world in which we move
and live and which we have to part from in death, but the ideas
seen and grasped by the eyes of the mind. In a sense, Plato's
peri–
agoge
was a turning-about by which everything that was commonly
believed in Greece
in
accordance with the Homeric religion came to
stand on its head. It is as though the underworld of Hades had risen
