General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Karl Marx: 10 great quotes on his birthday [View all]mathematic
(1,451 posts)Socrates was a character in Plato's works. Socrates never wrote anything down. What we know about Socrates comes from people that wrote about him, like Plato. Scholars surmise by the evolution of thought in Plato's works that the early stuff was "Socrates" and the later stuff was "Plato". The allegory of the cave is in The Republic, one of Plato's later works.
What the cave has to do with the communist manifesto beats the hell out of me. The allegory of the cave is about Plato's wacky (though highly influential in the development of Christianity) metaphysics and epistemology and is not about any kind of popular struggle for equality by the masses or even the relationships of different groups of people with each other.
Plato used the allegory of the cave to describe why ideas were not subject to the material world and why his Theory of Forms explained how people interact with the non-material. I'm actually kind of surprised to see anybody suggest there's a connection between the non-materialist thoughts of Plato and the notorious materialist Marx.
Edit history
![](du4img/smicon-reply-new.gif)