Allegory of the Cave [excerpted from LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY by Simone Weil based on notes taken by Anne Reynaud-Guérithault when Weil's pupil in a French girls' school 1933-34. In the second line Weil talks about the fetters or chains of the imagination. Our society worships imagination. We are not used to thinking of it as our prison. To help you understand what Weil means when she gives a word a different meaning than we are used to, the word is set in red and defined to the left by a key passage from Weil's writings.] >>>>>>>>>>>> The cave is the world The fetters are the imagination The shadows of ourselves are the passive states which we know by introspection. The learned in the cave are those who possess empirical forms of knowledge (who know how to make predictions, the doctors who know how to cure people by using empirical methods, those who know what is going on, etc.). Their knowledge is nothing but a shadow. Education, he says, is, according to the generally accepted view of it, nothing but the forcing of thoughts into the minds of children. For, says Plato, each person has within himself the ability to think. If one does not understand, this is because one is held by the fetters. Whenever the soul is bound by the fetters of suffering, pleasure, etc. it is unable to contemplate through its own intelligence the unchanging patterns of things. No doubt, there are mathematicians in the cave, but their attention is given to honors, rivalries, competition, etc. If anyone is not able to understand the unchanging patterns of things, that is not due to a lack of intelligence; it is due to a lack of moral stamina.
