an elaborate abstract exercise.

It was, they felt, a deeply useful skill

that should be learned and practiced by all,

in order to help us to live and die well.

No one believed this more than Plato.

Who was passionate in his defense of philosophy

as a kind of therapy for the soul.

One of the most forceful stories he told on behalf of the utility of philosophy

Was what has become known as "The Allegory of the Cave".

It is perhaps the most famous allegory in philosophy.

This was a story that was intended, as he wrote,

to compare "[t]he effect of education and the lack of it on our nature."

At the start of Book 7 of his masterpiece, "The Republic",

Plato tells us about some people living imprisoned in a cave

They've always lived there and don't know anything of the outside world.

There is no natural light in this cave, the walls are damp and dark

All the inhabitants can see comes from the shadows of things thrown up on the wall by a light of a fire

The cave dwellers get fascinated by these reflections of animals, plants and people

Moreover, they assume that these shadows are real and that if you pay a lot of attention to them

you'll understand and succeed in life

And they don't, of course, realize that they are looking at mere phantoms

They chat about shadowy things enthusiastically

and take great pride in their sophistication and wisdom

Then one day, quite by chance, someone discovers a way out of the cave

out into the open air

At first, it's simply overwhelming. He is dazzled by the brilliant sunshine

In which everything is, for the first time, properly illuminated

Gradually his eyes adjust and he encounters the true forms

of all those things which he had formerly know only as shadows

He sees actual flowers, the colors of birds, the nuances in the bark of trees

He observes stars and grasps the vastness and sublime nature of the universe

As Plato puts it in solemn terms:

Out of compassion, this newly enlightened man

decides to leave the sunlit upper world and makes his way back into the cave

to try to help out his companions who are still mired in confusion and error

Because he's become used to the bright upper world, he can hardly see anything underground

He stumbles along the damp wet corridors and gets confused

He seems to the others totally unimpressive

When he in turn is unimpressed by them and insists on explaining what the sun is

or what a real tree is like

The cave dwellers get sarcastic, then very angry and eventually plot to kill him

The story of the cave is an allegory of the life of all enlightened people

The cave dwellers are humans before philosophy

The sun is the light of reason

The alienation of the returned philosopher is what all truth tellers can expect

when they take their knowledge back to people who have not devoted themselves to thinking

For Plato, we are all for much of our lives in shadow

Many of the things we get excited about, like fame, the perfect partner, a high status job

are infinetly less real than we suppose

they are for the most part phantoms projected by our culture onto the walls of our fragile and flawed minds

but because everyone around us is insisting that they are genuine

we are taken in from a young age

It's not our fault individually

No one chooses to be in the cave

That's just where we happen to begin

We're all starting from a very difficult place

If, like the man in Plato's story, you bluntly tell people they're wrong

You get nowhere, you cause deep offense and may endanger your own life

Athens had, after all, recently put Socrates, Plato's friend, to death

Plato knew from close experience just what the cave dwellers might do to those who claim to know the sun

The solution, Plato says, is a process of widespread carefully administered philosophical education

By which he understood the method of inquiry pioneered by Socrates and known to us as the "Socratic Method"

It's a very gentle process. You don't lecture or harang or force someone to read a particular book

You just start with a general declaration of intellectual modesty no one knows very much

It's always good to insist: "wisdom starts with owning up to ignorance"

Confess that you don't know exactly what the government should do, what wars meant to achieve or how good relationships work

You then get the other person to say what they think and gradually together you investigate the answers

Most likely the other person will be confident or rather painfully overconfident

They may tell you it's all quite simple really and everyone knows the answer already

You must be supremely patient with this kind of bravado

If they go off topic, you must cheerfully double back

You must take a lot of time and be ready to have chats over many days

This method of talking is founded on a lovely confidence that with the right encouragement

people can eventually work out things for themselves and detect errors in their own reasoning

If you carefully and quietly draw their attention to tricky points

and don't cast blame or ever get annoyed

You'll never teach anyone anything by making them feel stupid

Even if they are,

at first

We have all started in that cave

but it is Plato's deepest insight that we don't have to stay there

And the road out is called, quite simply, philosophy

This is the sun whose light we can follow and by whose rays

the proper nature of things can become clear

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