![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay argues that “the good” is a forgotten central aspect of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and that this forgetfulness about the good is partly the result of literacy and literate-mindedness. Eric A. Havelock’s work on literacy in the ancient world informs a media ecological and rhetorical approach to the allegory, “the forms,” and related writings in both The Republic and secondary literature. Analysis shows how many literate-minded readers have taken Plato’s allegory out of its textual and media ecological context, and underestimated the significance of “the good” as a form and ethical idea.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Grand Valley State University for granting a generous sabbatical leave, which helped make this writing project possible. I also acknowledge the membership of the Media Ecology Association for inspiring my interest in orality and literacy, and the role these practices play in human history. I also thank those who attended a Media Ecology Panel at the 2015 National Communication Association annual convention where ideas in this essay were first publicly presented and discussed. Finally, I would like to thank Corey Anton for his thoughtful input and assistance in preparing this manuscript.
Notes
1 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. William Clark Helmbold and Wilson Gerson Rabinowitz (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 73.
2 A number of different translations of Plato's Republic were used to help compensate for the difficulties of translating ancient Greek into English. The majority of direct quotations are drawn from: Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). Other sources include Plato, Plato: Republic, 2nd ed., trans. George Maximilian Antony Grube and rev. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992); Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1968); Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Anchor, 1973).
The Grube translation had helpful footnotes and was clearest about who was speaking which line in the dialogue. Both the Grube and Bloom translations included useful standard numeration for locating ideas as they appeared in the reading. The Cornford translation provided summary and explanatory notes before each chapter. The Jowett translation provided less details (fewer direct translations of words and phrases, and more paraphrasing), which offered a more coherent reading experience.
3 John Niemeyer Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge, 1974), 159.
4 Judy Whipps, “Entering into a Community of Engaged Learners: Liberal Education at Grand Valley State University,” in Reflection and Engagement: Liberal Education at GVSU, 3rd ed. (Acton, MA: Copley, 2006), xi–xvi.
5 Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “On the Dire Necessity of the Useless: Philosophical and Rhetorical Thoughts on Hermeneutics and Education in the Humanities,” in Education, Dialogue and Hermeneutics, ed. Paul Fairfield (New York: Continuum, 2011), 92.
6 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1990).
7 Ibid., 1.
8 Ibid.
9 Herbert Zettl, “Back to Plato's Cave: Virtual Reality,” in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, 2nd ed., ed. Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson, and Stephanie Gibson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003), 99–111.
10 Guy Cromwell Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 41.
11 The word being translated here as “art” was a broad term, and included what we now classify as science, technology, engineering, and math (including geometry).
12 Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 226.
13 Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
14 Ibid., 18–34.
15 Ibid., 34.
16 Ibid., xvii–xviii.
17 Ibid., 34.
18 Findlay, Plato, 159.
19 Paul Natorp, for example, takes a neoKantian approach to Plato's forms. His interpretation attempts to “dissociate the theory of ideas from its Aristotelian reception, still dominant today, which sees the ideas as transcendent substances” (Plato’s Theory of Ideas: An Introduction to Idealism, ed. Vasilis Politis, trans. Vasilis Politis and John Connolly [Sankt Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, 2004], back cover).
20 Wendell Johnson, Your Most Enchanted Listener (San Francisco: International Society for General Semantics, 1956), 90.
21 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 258.
22 Google searches vary by the searcher's search history. These examples are offered as representative anecdotes of the way people write about the allegory.
23 Steven Watt, “Introduction: The Theory of Forms (Books 5–7),” in Plato, Republic, trans. John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), xiv–xvi.
24 Dale Hall, “Interpreting Plato’s Cave as an Allegory of the Human Condition,” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 14, no. 2 (1980): 74–75.
25 S. Marc Cohen, “The Allegory of the Cave,” 2006 (last updated July 24, 2015), n.p., https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm.
26 Ibid.
27 For a better discussion of the three-part relation among object, image, and “eidos,” see Hans Jonas, “Image Making and the Freedom of Man,” in The Phenomenology of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 157–73.
28 George Boeree, “Plato, Book VII of The Republic, The Allegory of the Cave,” n.d., n.p., http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html.
29 Steven Kries, “Plato, The Allegory of the Cave,” The History Guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, 2000 (last revised April 13, 2012), n.p., http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html.
30 See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982); Havelock, Preface to Plato; The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
31 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 4.
32 Ibid.
33 Havelock, Preface to Plato, chapter 11.
34 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 15; see also Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979), 32–38.
35 Social and mental shifts are characteristic of widespread historical shifts in media dominance. Media ecologists identify three major cultural shifts that align with dominant media: oral to literate, literate to print, and print to electronic. Marshall McLuhan, a foundational thinker in the theory and practice of media ecology expressed appreciation for Havelock's work on Plato, seeing parallels to his own work on the effects of print. “Marshall McLuhan,” writes Havelock,
had drawn attention to the psychological and intellectual effects of the printing press [in Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962]: I was prepared to push the whole issue further back, to something that had begun to happen about seven hundred years before Christ. (The Muse Learns to Write, 10)
36 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 100–102, 112.
37 Ibid., 13.
38 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 270.
39 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 111.
40 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 293.
41 Ibid.
42 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 10.
43 Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (New York: Pantheon, 1951), 46.
44 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 23.
45 Donald J. Zeyl, ed., Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1997), 22.
46 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 96–97.
47 Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 43.
48 Ibid.
49 John David Gemmill Evans, A Plato Primer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 20.
50 Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 217.
51 See also Field, The Philosophy of Plato, 41:
There are clear indications in the Republic that, when that dialogue was written, Plato had some notion of a supreme first principle, a Form of Forms, as it were, in the knowledge of which ultimate explanation and understanding was to be found. And he calls this first principle by the name of the chief moral category, the Good or, as he sometimes refers to it, the Form of the Good. But his references to it are extremely obscure and it is very difficult for us to form any clear idea in our own minds of the way in which he thought about it.
52 Ibid., 42. A comparison here might be drawn between the way Plato approaches the subject of “the good” and the way, in Freedom from the Known Jiddu Krishnamurti approaches the subject of “love.” Both are unwilling to offer a definition, and both argue against multiplicity: “love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many” (Freedom from the Known [New York: Harper & Row, 1969], 86–87).
53 Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 220.
54 Ibid.
55 Terry Penner, “The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato,” in A Companion to Plato, ed. Hugh H. Benson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 178.
56 Jowett, The Republic, 209.
57 For an interesting explanation of how an “ultimate good” might be justified, see Evans, A Plato Primer, 20–21. He starts with the question “is it good to be a good ‘x,’” when “x” might be a bad thing (say a thief or a liar)? He answers by saying this situation complicates Aristotelian typologies, and reveals a higher-order level of goodness, one that relies on context and wisdom for an answer. In other words, for example, “being a good person” might in some cases require “being a good thief”—even if, generally speaking, thieving is a bad thing.
58 Raphael Demos, The Philosophy of Plato (New York: Octagon, 1966), 48.