Teaching Plato’s Cave Hermeneutically

Rescuing people imprisoned in Plato’s cave has formed philosophy’s vocation for millennia. I challenge this with a snapshot of a class period where students work through a close reading of the cave passage. I develop a four-fold scaffold of hermeneutic questions to help students identify what is on the lines of the text, what is between the lines, what is behind the lines, and what is beyond the lines. Students use the scaffold to excavate Plato’s cave, nurturing semantic ambiguity for critiquing what we can call “bootstrap and rescue” spins on the text. For example, is the term “allegory” on the lines? To get at what is between the lines, how does the cave episode relate to other elements of the Republic? What was Plato’s historical context behind composing the lines? What might students take with them from interpretations going beyond the lines, beside the sedimented “bootstrap and rescue” readings?