A dark cave and two birds can explain the world? Yes, through allegories.
Plato, Hegel, and Marx think and explain much of our old world without gates.
What are allegories? The word comes from Greek and means precisely "to speak of something else" or "to say the other." It functions as a series of metaphors that can be interpreted at two levels: the literal meaning (what is shown) and the symbolic meaning (the real significance behind it all).
The text: A cidade de São Paulo registrou um aumento significativo no número de casos de COVID-19 nas últimas semanas, levando as autoridades de saúde a implementar medidas restritivas para controlar a propagação do vírus. De acordo com o último relatório da Secretaria de Saúde do Estado de São Paulo, foram confirmados 15.418 novos casos e 274 óbitos nas últimas 24 horas. O governador João Doria anunciou o fechamento de bares e restaurantes a partir das 20h e a limitação de aglomerações em locais públicos a um máximo de 50% da capacidade. Escolas e universidades também serão fechadas temporariamente, com aulas sendo realizadas remotamente. Especialistas em saúde pública alertam que o aumento dos casos pode ser atribuído ao relaxamento das medidas de distanciamento social e ao aumento das atividades econômicas. Eles recomendam o uso contínuo de máscaras, higiene frequente das mãos e o respeito ao distanciamento físico para prevenir a transmissão do vírus.Allegory of the CaveThe Allegory of the Cave, embedded in Book 7 of Plato's "The Republic," is more than a mere philosophical myth. It is a nearly complete map of the human condition, a psychological and political script that spans millennia with a remarkable contemporary relevance.
To comment and discuss it, we need to break the shell of literal interpretation and dive into its epistemological, ontological, pedagogical, and above all, political layers. After all, everything is Politics.
Let's imagine prisoners shackled since birth at the bottom of a cave.
Real estate, they can only look at the back wall, where they see shadows cast by objects passing behind them, illuminated by a bonfire. For these men, those shadows are the entirety of reality. The echoes of voices are attributed to the dancing images.
When a prisoner is released and forced to leave, the journey is painful. The sun's light blinds him, the three-dimensional reality disorients him. Slowly, he understands that the shadows were mere copies, that the fire was an artificial light, and that the Sun (the Idea of Good) is the ultimate source of all things. When he returns to the cave to free the others in a solidarity, he encounters fierce resistance and is threatened with death. Note the relevance of all this.
Plato outlines a hierarchy of knowledge. The initial stage of shadows is theeikasia(imagination/conjecture), where we take illusions for truths.
The stage of loaded objects and fire is thepistis(belief), proper to the sensible world, where we have opinions about physical things, but still mutable.
The exit from the cave is thediánoia(discursive reasoning), where we use mathematics and logic. The apex, contemplating the Sun, is thenóesis(pure intelligence or intellectual intuition), knowledge of eternal and immutable Forms. That is, knowledge is not an accumulation of data, but a conversion (a shift) of the soul's gaze on the journey from darkness to light.
The myth sanctifies Plato's Dualism. The inside of the cave is the Sensitive World (becoming, illusion, corruption). The outside is the Intelligent World (being, essence, perfection).
Shadows are copies of physical objects, which in turn are imperfect copies of universal Ideas (Forms). The Sun, metaphorically, is the Idea of Good, which is not just a moral virtue, but the condition of possibility for all being and all cognition, just as the sun illuminates and generates life in the physical world, Good illuminates and generates truth in the intellectual world.
Here is the great twist. Plato categorically asserts that education (Paideia: EducationIt is not to put knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, like filling an empty vessel.
Education is the art of torsion.Text: "Periagoge"This is the most poignant and current point of the myth. The freed prisoner cannot stay outside enjoying the beauty of Being. He has a moral obligation to descend back into the cave and rule (the concept of the Philosopher-King).
Descending, he sees with difficulty because his eyes have become accustomed to the darkness, and the prisoners, who have never seen light, think he is blind and mad. They prefer to kill him rather than set themselves free. Plato prophesies here the fate of Socrates (his master, condemned to death for "corrupting the youth").
As he descends, he witnesses with difficulty because his eyes have become accustomed to the darkness, and the prisoners, who have never known light, believe him to be blind and mad. They would rather kill him than set themselves free. Plato here prophesies Socrates' (his master) fate (condemned to death for "corrupting the youth").
Politics, as we can see, is the battlefield between comfortable ignorance and uncomfortable truth.
If Plato were alive today, he would say that we have traded physical chains for algorithms. The modern cave is the system of social media,news feedspersonalized news and informational bubbles.
The shadows projected on the wall are no longer statues of stone, but fabricated narratives, fake news, confirmation biases, and engaging hate speeches.
The fire that projects these shadows is the economic and ideological interests ofbig techs, manipulating our perception of the world without us even moving.
Liberation today demands a Herculean effort of critical thinking. Leaving our fortress of certainties or comfort zone - as you prefer - of "liking" and "sharing" to read primary sources, cross-check heterogeneous information, and bear the pain of doubt.
However, the greatest challenge remains the return. The modern enlightened one - the scientist who warns about climate change, the investigative journalist, the philosopher who denounces power structures - is often ridiculed, cancelled, or symbolically (and in many places physically) assassinated by the chained crowd, who prefers the security of familiar shadows to the anguish of unknown light.
Discussing Plato's "Cave" is ultimately an exercise in introspection and courage. It is to recognize that we are all prisoners to some degree, as no one escapes entirely the shackles of language (everyday vulgar chatter), culture, and limited perceptions. However, the myth offers us an existential choice: to remain passive in the shadows or to embark on the painful and solitary climb towards the light.
Plato's great lesson is not escape from the world, but commitment to the world and to the oppressed. True wisdom is not to isolate oneself in an ivory tower, but to develop the courage to descend back into chaos, armed with lucidity, to try, even at the risk of being stoned, to loosen the chains of even one prisoner.
The cave persists, but the flame of reason - though fragile - is the only tool we have to humanize the darkness and bring the Sun.
The allegory of the birds: the owl and the rooster.
Hegel, in his mature work (specifically in the "Preface to Philosophy of Right"), consecrated the allegorical image of Minerva's owl (the Roman goddess of wisdom), which takes flight only at dusk.
The dawn rooster is not a Hegelian allegory.
The rooster belongs to the revolutionary imagination, consecrated by Karl Marx (who speaks of the "rooster's song of revolution" in his letters and in his critique of Hegel's philosophy) and later by poets and philosophers of praxis. One of them, the beloved professorCarlos Roberto Velho Cirne-Lima, persecuted by the dictatorship, arbitrarily expelled from UFRGS, later a professor at PUC/RS and the Jesuit-run Unisinos.
By juxtaposing these two symbolic birds - the crepuscular owl and the morning cock - we touch upon the nerve center of the greatest modern philosophical split: the tension between Theory (comprehension) and Práxis (transformation), between recognizing the real and intervening in the becoming.
Let's deconstruct this dialectic, so as to subsequently unite them again.
For Hegel, philosophy is essentially retrospective. The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings when the shadows of night fall upon the world.
Philosophy doesn't aim to teach the world "how it should be", Hegel asserts; this is a futile pedagogical endeavor. It arrives when a particular way of life, a culture or a state has completed its cycle of development and maturation. Just as the owl hunts in the dark, the philosopher only grasps the rational structure of history after the facts have unfolded.
Hegel asserts that philosophy is the age apprehended in thought. It is an attempt at reconciliation.ReconciliationIt is not about lamenting the past or projecting utopias, but understanding what is real and rational at the same time. Everything that is real must be rationalized.
Twilight symbolizes the passage of a world. Wisdom arises precisely to give name and meaning to this passage, preventing history from falling into mere chaos or useless nostalgia.
Here, Hegel turns his back on the Enlightenment's impulse to build the future through reason. The owl teaches us historical resignation. We only understand a revolution (like the French one) after Napoleon is already mounted in power, and not before. Philosophy is the tragic-logical epitaph of reality.
In direct opposition (at once critical and militant), Karl Marx takes the image of the rooster - which announces the rising sun, the rupture of the day - to symbolize the active and transformative function of thought.
Marx inverts Hegel in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" and in "Thesis 11 on Feuerbach": "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but what matters is to change it."
The rooster does not wait for the end of night, it announces and accelerates the luminous dawn with its song. It is the consciousness infiltrated into historical matter, fomenting the awareness of the proletariat and of the "bleed and rebleed" - as historian Capistrano de Abreu put it.
While the owl bends before necessity (the accomplished reality), the rooster challenges necessity, betting on contingency and collective action.
If night is the oppressive past, dawn is the classless society, which is not given but needs to be built through the violence of historical childbirth. The rooster sings to wake the sleeping - the prisoners of the old Hegel cave, we could say.
For historical materialism, the Hegel owl is a conservative alibi - a way to justify present misery as rational and delay liberation to metaphysics or, worse, to the liberal/neoliberal deception that - today - flows into the neofascism we know.
The great genius of putting these two images in contrast is that they do not cancel each other out, they form a great temporal dialectic.
Without the owl, the rooster is a blind man.freakwhich can destroy structures without understanding their functions, generating great blunders (like 20th-century Stalinism, which tried to do the new without comprehending the internal logic of capitalism).
Without the rooster, the owl is a passive cynicism that accepts exploitation and barbarity as the rational destiny of history.
Hegel works with the perfect past tense (the Being is already). Marx works with the future tense of the past (what can be, if we act). If we act, I repeat.
Contemporary philosophy - especially the Frankfurt School and thinkers like Slavoj Žižek - suggests that we need both: the owl gives us the structural analysis (to know where the chains that imprison us are), and the rooster gives us the ethical decision (to break them).
We live in an era where the rooster seems to have gone mad and the owl is left blind.
The Hegelian twilight - which would be the end of liberal history - seems to have extended indefinitely, while the revolutionary dawns of the 20th century fizzled out.
What the myth teaches us today is that reason is neither a clock nor an alarm clock. It is a compass. The owl forces us to look back with honesty. How many revolutions, in trying to bring the cock's crow, simply reproduced the shadows of the caves they swore to destroy?
On the other hand, the cock forces us to look forward with urgency: in the face of climate change and algorithmic inequalities, we cannot afford to merely understand the present. We need to interrupt it.
There is no peaceful synthesis between the owl and the cock. There is a productive, rational tension.
The true philosopher - better put, the true citizen - is he who learns to fly with the owl at dusk, deciphering the deep structures of power and history, to, the following morning, encourage the cock to sing loudly the possibility of revolution.
If Plato taught us to leave the cave (individual conversion), Hegel teaches us that when we leave, we only see the landscape after the sun has set.
And Marx reminds us that if we merely watch the sunset, the eternal night of servitude and infamy will swallow us up.
Wisdom lies in honoring the owl's flight without ever silencing the cock's song, for freedom demands both the clear lucidity of memory and the fresh audacity of the dawns of a new time.
Christopher Feil is a sociologist.