柏拉图的洞⽳⽐喻论上帝和⽆神论
柏拉图的洞⽳⽐喻/论上帝和⽆神论
【注】以下第⼀部分是中⽂维基百科全书对柏拉图的洞⽳⽐喻的介绍。第⼆部分是英⽂⽂章，以柏拉图的洞⽳⽐喻来论上帝和⽆神论snowy
来源：维基百科全书
在柏拉图《理想国》对话集第六卷⾥，苏格拉底向他的谈话对象Glaukon和Adeimantos（柏拉图的两个哥哥），解释了哲学家必须满⾜的伦理和认知（区别于感受）⽅⾯的要求，从⽽能胜任研修⾼深的认识范畴，同时担当政治领袖的责任。在第七卷中，他从哲学的⾓度详细地阐明了，教育同⽆教育之间的区别所在。以及哲学教育的最终⽬的是什么。为了更好地阐明这些观点，他在⽂章的开篇，讲述了洞⽳⽐喻。Glaukon则形像化地设想出⽐喻的细节部分。
苏格拉底描述了⼀个地下洞⽳住所，洞⾥有⼀条宽阔的通道通向地⾯。这个⼭洞⾥居住着终⽣被关押在那⾥的囚犯。他们被捆绑着⼤腿和脖⼦坐在那⾥，以致他们只能朝前看到洞⽳的墙壁，⽽不能转⾝回头顾望。因此，他们永远看不到背后的出⼝，也根本不知道有这么⼀个出⼝。他们也不能看到⾃⼰和其他囚犯。他们唯⼀能看到的是他们⾯对的墙壁。他们的住所被⾝后远⽅⾼处燃烧的⽕炬照亮。囚犯只能看见这唯⼀的亮光，照亮着墙壁。但是看不见光源。在墙上他们只能看见光影。
监狱内部同⽕炬之间，有⼀堵不会遮挡光线的矮墙。沿着这堵墙壁，有⼈来回穿梭，搬运着不同的物品，包括⼀些⽤⽯头和⽊头做的⼈体和其他⽣物模型。这些物体⾼出那堵矮墙，但是他们的搬运者⽐墙低。其中的⼀些搬运者相互交谈着，另⼀些则保持沉默。
由于囚犯⾯对洞⽳墙壁，那些来回移动的物体，在墙上投射的阴影，被⽳居⼈看见当作会移动的影⼦。
但他们想到有⼈在搬运这些东西。当有⼈说话时，洞壁上的回声，就如同那些影⼦⾃⼰在讲话⼀样。因此，囚犯以为那些影⼦会说话。他们把这些影像当作⽣物，把所有发⽣的事情理解为这些⽣物的⾏为。墙上演绎的事情，对他们来说都是真相，当然是真实的。他们从这些影⼦中研发出⼀整套学问，试图从它们的出场和动作中，找出⼀系列规律，并且预告将要发⽣地事情。那些预测最准确的⼈，还会得到嘉奖。
聚苯乙烯接着，苏格拉底问Glaukon，如果给⼀名囚犯松绑，让他站起来，转⾝向出⼝望去，看见这些以往所见的影⼦的原型，能否想象这时会发⽣什么？这个⼈可能会在强光刺激下痛苦不堪，产⽣错乱。相⽐于过去熟悉的光影，他可能会认为届时所看到的东西不是现实的。因此，他可能希望重新返回⾃⼰习惯的位置。因为他相信只有在洞壁上能看见真相。⽽不去会相信⼀个善意解放者的相反说教。
接受的英文如果使⽤武⼒将松绑的囚徒从洞⽳中拖出来，穿过对他来说陡峭难⾏的通道，来到地⾯，他也许会觉得特别别扭，愈发神志错乱。因为璀璨的阳光会使他睁不开眼，开始时什么都看不见。慢慢地他也许会适应看见的新鲜事物。其过程也许是⾸先识别光影，然后是⽔中的倒影，最终才是⼈和事物本⾝。如果往上看，他也许会先习惯夜晚的星空，然后才是⽩天的⽇光，最后他也许才敢于直接⽬视太阳，从⽽感受太阳的独特之处。只有这时他才能理解，太阳造就了光影。有了这些经历和认识，他应该不再愿意回到洞⽳，去探究那⾥的光影学问，获取其它囚徒的赞誉。
如果他还是回到故地，那么他肯定需要重新慢慢地适应洞⽳⾥的⿊暗。由此他肯定会在⼀段时间内，落后其它囚徒对后续光影估算能⼒。⽽洞⾥其它的囚徒则会认为，他在上⾯把眼睛弄坏了。他们会嘲笑他，觉得离开洞⽳显然是宗蚀本⽣意，根本不值得⼀试。如果有⼈试图解放他们，把他们带到地上，他们会杀了他，如果可能的话。
随后，苏格拉底向Glaukon解释，如何理解这个⽐喻。洞⽳是⼈体感官所能及的世界的化⾝。它表⽰⼈类所处的普通环境，⼈们通常会把这个环境同存在的整体等量齐观。上升⾄⽇光，则代表灵魂从可逝的世界，提升到“精神境界”，即只有精神领会的认知世界。柏拉图以此表⽰不变的主意，即他的主意学范畴⾥的、各种物质现象的原始形象和榜样。在这些纯精神物中，善良的主意占据着最⾼的地位，相应于洞⽳⽐喻中的太阳。对话中的苏格拉底确信，为了能获得善良的主意，必须受到外在的⼤⼒作⽤，只有这样才能在私⼈或者公众⽣活⾥，理智地⾏事。
但是，与此同时苏格拉底强调，他此地所表⽰的，仅仅是⼀种猜测或者希望，⽽不是确切⽆疑的知识。尽管他按照Glaukon的愿望，表述了⾃⼰的观点。但是只有上帝晓得是否正确。
这样他也表明了，他⾃⼰并未上升⾄善良的主意。从⽽他不是在叙述⾃⼰的经验，⽽只是在谈论设想。
最后，苏格拉底指出，谁如果回到洞⽳中，就如同从上帝的关注⾓度，被遣返回⼈类的苦难⽣涯。对
此他⼀开始可能还会不适应。所以他会在⾃⼰⽆法理解的环境⾥，显得笨拙和可笑。如果⽳居的囚犯更能体谅的话，他们也许会明⽩，有两种截然不同的视⼒障碍。⼀种出现在从光明⾛向⿊暗的时候；另⼀种出现在⼀个⼈，从⿊暗被抛⼊光明的时候。类似情况也适⽤于⼈的灵魂。当⼀个⼈经过⼀段过渡时期后，迷失在⼀种截然不同的经验范围内，⽆法认识某个事物的时候。当事⼈这时不应当受到嘲笑。因为这可能是由于他来⾃能识别真相的光明世界，⼀下⼦置⾝于不习惯的⿊暗氛围；或者从⽐较⽆知的环境，闯⼊⼀个相对明了的世界，从⽽使他感到眩晕。这两种相互对⽴的原因，可能导致同样的结果，从⽽对有关局势的判断起着决定性的作⽤。
接下来苏格拉底叙述的，是关于哲学教育。它被看作是⼀种“转换”（periagōgḗ）的艺术。它的⽬的是把灵魂从⿊暗引向光明，亦即从可逝的世界，转换⾄完整的存在，最终使其能看到善良的主意。这种精神的上升，只有⼀个长期孜孜不倦的哲学家能做到。苏格拉底强调说，就像⽳居者的眼睛只能跟着整个⾝体⼀起转动那样，他们⽤来理解事物的灵魂器官，也不能单独⽽只能同整个灵魂⼀起，实现⾯向存在世界的转换。即便是那些不合理的灵魂部分，也需要重新定位。为此所需的教育培养途径，在苏格拉底的谈话中得到了详细的描述。他⾸先归纳了不太重要的课程，如体育、⾳乐，然后依次列举了哲学⼊门所需的算术、平⾯⼏何、空间⼏何、天⽂和和声学等研修课。在学习过程中要注意的是，采⽤根据哲学观点的恰当的⽅法，⽽不是照葫芦画瓢按经验办事，⽽是以理论为基础寻求普遍规律。否则⽆济于事。在此之后才能开始辩证法的学习，⾛上⽅法论的哲学真理探索之路。
如果⼀个哲学家实现了⾃⼰的⽬标，他当然想长久地停留在这个⾼端领域。但是他却不得不重新回到那个“洞⽳”，因为他对同胞的命运有责任，他们还停留在地洞⾥，需要他的帮助。因为他尚有公平正义的美德（柏拉图称之为公平同理⼼），所以他认为这么做是对的。
⽐喻中的囚徒，象征着不会哲学思考的民众，从⽽置⾝于⼀个次级复制品的⼈造世界或者臆想世界。他们的看法是完全错误的。
Plato’s Cave Image / God and the Atheist
By Eve Keneinan
[Note: It has been drawn to my attention than not everyone reads classical Greek. I apologize, but I honestly forget this fact. It is so transparently clear to me that such an enormous part of what we Westerners believe is derived either from Greek philosophy or Christianity, that it just ems evident that a knowledge of Greek is needed to understand where we are and how we got here. And it ems equally evident from that that every educated Westerner should have at least a passing
preci—I’m aware that “being preci”, which we
familiarity with Greek. I u Greek words becau I want to be preci
philosophers regard as a critical virtue of rational discour, is often viewed by the wider public as a vice, that of“nit-picking”or “hair-splitting.” (I’ve never really understood the“nit-picking” charge though—I mean, if you don’t engage in that very fine grained activity of picking off nits, you get lice. How is nit-picking bad? It is a task that requires a good deal of precision in order to avoid the bad outcome of lice infestation.) Anyway, I’ve added Latinate transliterations of the Greek words, so people can at least read them.]
Pa rt 1: Pla to’s Im a ge o f the Ca ve
Plato’s Socrates, in the very center of the Republic, gives an account of what is probably the most famous image in Western philosophical thought: the Image of the Cave.
It is an image, says Socrates, of us, of human beings “in our education and ignorance.” It is an image of the fundamental human condition. It is also a retelling, in miniature, of the entire Republic.
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Since the Cave Image is an image, let’s start with pictures:
alienate
Socrates asks us to imagine a dark cave which opens onto the sunlit world above, but deep within which there are prisoners chained to a wall, in such a way that they cannot turn their heads and e behind them, but can only e the back wall of the cave in front of them. This wall is like a giant movie screen. Far up behind the prisoners, there is a fire, which casts light down into the cave. The prisoners cannot e the fire. Between the fire and the prisoners, there is a wall, and behind this wall some men walk, carrying “artificial things”, that is, things they have made, which they hold up over the wall, in such a way that the light from the fire caus the artificial things hold up to cast shadows upon the back wall of the cave. The men behind the wall also make nois, which echo off the back wall, and em to come from the shadows. You can think of this whole t up as Plato describing a movie projector and a movie screen (many centuries in advance), but also not letting us overlook the
fact that people make movies. The images we e that prent reality to us, on television or the internet, are images made by people, or at the very least, placed inside a narrative by people. They are storytellers.
The shadows and echoes are all that the chained prisoners e and hear, so they are all that they know. They therefore take the things to be WHAT IS, or reality. Their reality, what they think is rea
l and true, consists of the shadows of artificial things. Their “knowledge” of reality consists entirely of images they are shown by others and stories they are
told by others. Ask yourlf, how much of what you ‘know’ is really something you have been told by someone, a person, a book, a television show, a website?中英翻译网
Now Socrates puts his image in motion. What would happen, he asks, if one of the prisoners were freed from his chains “by nature”? This freed prisoner would be able to move around freely for the first time in his life. He would be able, for the first
μετάνοια [metanoia] and it is very important. It means a TURN AROUND. The Greek word here is μετ
time in his life to TURN AROUND
νοῦς[nous]. Just to give you a hint, it comes into Latin as convertio or “conversion.”turning around of the intellect or νο
Just as a man cannot turn his eyes alone around to look behind him, without turning his whole body around, a man cannot
νοῦς, around without turning his whole soul, his ψυχ
丹顶鹤英文ψυχή[psychē], around as well. This is the turn the “eye of his soul,” hisνο
TURNING ONE’S INTELLECT THE RIGHT WAY REQUIRES THE COMPREHENSIVE fundamental Platonic teaching that TURNING ONE’S INTELLECT THE RIGHT WAY REQUIRES THE COMPREHENSIVE RIGHT ORDERING OF ONE’S WHOLE SOUL BY VIRTUE. This is something we moderns often overlook, becau we RIGHT ORDERING OF ONE’S WHOLE SOUL BY VIRTUE
tend to conceptualize knowledge as a kind of technical mastery—the kind of thing Descartes taught us to do—the kind of
virtue. But virtue or goodness is not
thing natural scientists do—which as mere technique is largely indifferent to virtue
irrelevant to our capacity to attain wisdom, σοφ
σοφία [sophia]; there are certain things that tho with disordered souls simply cannot comprehend. Everything depends on one being “turned” the right way. Some kinds of knowledge, that is to say, ar
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e not existentially neutral; they depend upon the right disposition of our souls. Ethical knowledge, or knowledge of what is good, is particularly like this: bad people are particularly blind to goodness (and to their own badness) which is both a conquence of their badness, as well as a further cau, such that evil (like depression) is a lf-feeding cycle.
二年级下册口算题Back to Socrates’ story. The prisoner has gotten free, and he is now able to turn around; at some point, he certainly will, but since his eyes are accustomed to only the shadows on the wall of the cave, looking up directly at the light of the fire at first caus him “great pain and distress” and also, at first, blinds him becau his eyes are unud to the bright light. His first reaction, then, to what he has never en before, will be to recoil from it, as alien and painful and blinding. He will be lost and bewildered, no longer compelled to look only at the shadows, but pained whenever he looks in the other, upward direction.
This is where another mysterious character enters the story. Socrates refers to this figure only as “somebody.” Personally, I think of him as “Mr. S”, becau Socrates is very clearly describing himlf here. What if, Socrates asks, somebody (or Mr. S) were to take the freed prisoner in hand and tell him that what he saw before are “ridiculous nonbeings” and
firmly compel the prisoner to face the light? With time, and the (somewhat ungentle) guidance of Mr. S, the prisoner starts to have his eyes get ud to the sight of what is up above, and he es the artifacts that cast the shadows.
A little aside here: What are the artifacts? And who are the “puppeteers” who make the artifacts and hold them up above the wall to cast the shadows? I won’t argue the point at length, but simply give you my interpretation: they are
ποίησις in Greek means “making” so poets are “makers” in the primary n. They make the poets or storytellers.πο
the framework whereby human beings, being fundamentally creatures of reason and speech—in a word,
λόγος—understand the world. Yes, we have ns, but it is through words and speeches that
ofλ
we understand and interpret the world we live in. Whoever controls the narratives of a culture controls their thoughts and beliefs. Who tells our “stories” today? Who are our authorities for what is
and what is not? Politicians, the media, scientists, and others.
The prisoners are the persons who never get free of conventional opinion and belief. They take to be truth and reality what they are shown (told) to be so. The puppeteers are the ones who have realized, as the sophists did, that reality is not “obvious,” but is a matter of interpretation and narrative. Plato himlf is telling a story, the Republic, in which Socrates is using words to paint an image—with the aim of ultimately relegating images and stories to a lesr place than TRUTH
TRUTH. It is
no accident that the anti-Platonist par excellence, the arch-enemy of Plato, Nietzsche, says things like:
theme
and
Later in the Republic, in Book X, Socrates will speak of “the old quarrel between the poets and the philosophers.” Nietzsche is the philosopher who sides with the poets against the philosophers (that isn’t quite right: Nietzsche is using the poets
as his tools, just as much as Plato, but not in the rvice of truth, but of the will to power and his—Nietzsche’s—own master bermensch.
narrative of the Übermensch
I suppo it is possible that the freed prisoner, without Mr. S’s intervention, could end up becoming a storyteller, a poet, a manipulator and shaper of reality with his words. But this isn’t what happens in Socrates’ story. Instead, Mr. S drags him, kicking and screaming “up the long, steep, upward way”, up past the fire, up and out of the cave entirely. (In a masterpiece of ironic understatement, Socrates asks “wouldn’t he be vexed and annoyed at being so dragged?”)
Now the poor freed prisoner is really blinded. Now it isn’t just a big fire he has to contend with, but THE SUN. It takes him a good deal of time, in which he has to look first at shadows of real things (better than shadows of artificial things), and then their reflections in water, before moving on to looking at the real things themlves, and eventually, he will rai his eyes up high and e “THE SUN itlf in its own place”—even though THE SUN is “scarcely to be en”—not becau it is invisible, but becau it is too visible. One who looks directly at THE SUN risks blinding himlf permanently. THAT at least, is not something which one can become, in time, accustomed to. And yet, in a way, the freed prisoner does e THE SUN, and he knows that it is that upon which all el depends.
Thanks to the previous Sun Analogy and the Divided Line, readers of the Republic understand that, in the Cave Image, the fire in the cave is the actual, physical sun, the “ruler of the visible world”, that
gives not only the light of day by which we e all things, but also the warmth which gives us life. THE SUN on the other hand, is still higher: it is something so bright that it
the Idea of the makes the actual sun appear to be a tiny fire … compared to a sun! This is ἡἰδέα του ἀγαθού or the Idea of the Good—the ruler of the higher invisible realm, of which the physical world is only a kind of copy, and which far, far exceeds the Good
visible sun is splendor and magnificence. If the sun gives light and life, what does THE GOOD give? THE GOOD radiates its equivalent to the light of day by which we e, which is TRUTH, which makes it possible for us to KNOW all that we can KNOW, and MORE:
“Therefore, say not only that being known is prent in things known as a conquence of THE GOOD, but also existence
