Diego Vazquez Gomez Bertelli

Dr. Anson Koch-Rein

HUM 2101-07

Reading Response 2

September 22nd, 2019

Adjusting the Eyes

In the seventh book of Plato’s Republic, Plato records his well-known allegory of the

cave, a detailed analogy of practical education and humanity’s natural lack of respect for it. In

this metaphor, Plato describes to his student a cave in which prisoners are made to face a wall on

which the shadows of passersby are projected by a large fire placed behind them. Plato makes it

exceedingly clear to his pupil that these shadows are everything these prisoners know and that

therefore it is their reality. Plato goes on to detail the difficult journey that one of these

hypothetical prisoners must go through to leave the cave and confront the painful realization that

the shadows are not independent figures, but inextricably tied to objects the prisoner had no

previous exposure to. Plato’s allegory of the cave dives into the nature of spiritual growth

through the acquisition of knowledge and claims that the role of an educator is one of sacrifice,

empathy, and integration as they grapple with pupils and lead them out of their caves and into the

beautiful light of truth.

To illustrate the process of effective education, Plato uses the images of light and darkness and

plays with the human eye’s capacity to adjust between them. Plato says that there are “two

distinct disturbances of the eyes arising from two causes… from light to darkness or from

darkness to light.” (518-a) This represents the barrier between the educated and the uneducated

and Plato condemns any persons on either end who have an awareness of their potential to adapt
but choose to not to engage with the other. The role of the teacher however is to sacrifice his/her

enjoyment of the beautiful light of reality and travel into the darkness that his/her students

occupy to encourage and lead them out of the cave. Those who choose a life as teachers must

realize that there is validity in the shadows which his/her students cling to. Despite a shadow’s

very nature as a consequence to the interaction of object and light, one cannot negate its

existence or impact, just as a teacher cannot discount the experiences that have cultivated a

student’s world view. A teacher must implement empathy to adjust their vision in order to see

what the student sees because until the teacher knows where the journey begins, the teacher

cannot offer adequate guidance or direction to the student. An educator who refutes the darkness

of his or her students is “inserting vision into blind eyes,” (518-c) encouraging students to derive

pleasure from ideals they have no essential understanding of. Plato phrases it best, explaining to

his student that “there might be an art…of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversion

of the soul, not an art of producing vision in it, but on the assumption that it possesses vision but

does not rightly direct it and does not look where it should, an art of bringing this about.” (517-d)

And as in all art, one must implement sacrifice (in the form of generosity), empathy, and

integration in order to affect and inspire the humanity beholding it.