Philosophy Weekend: Orson Welles Does The Cave

The famous allegory of the cave is hardly the highlight of Plato’s great Republic, though commentators sometimes treat the extended metaphor — a person in a cave is temporarily blinded when he sees sunlight for the first time, and is then ridiculed when he returns to the cave and can no longer distinguish the shadows on the walls — as if it were a capsule summary of Plato’s entire philosophy. Perhaps the brilliance of the philosopher’s writing has itself blinded these commentators, because the allegory of the cave is mainly an illustration of the difficulty of understanding a provocative philosophy, and hardly represents the essence of Plato’s philosophy itself.


If I had to name one single idea as the core idea of The Republic, I’d name the notion that the human soul is like a government, and that different types of dysfunctional souls can be compared to different kinds of dysfunctional governments (I’ve written about this message here before). The “Republic” of the work’s title is, in fact, meant to designate the republic of conflicting voices and urges found inside each individual person’s mind, and the text was actually written as a work of psychology, not (as is commonly thought) a work of political theory.

With that said, I stumbled across a pleasant cartoon of the cave allegory this week, and thought it would make a fine entry in the Philosophy Weekend series. This 8-minute cartoon was made in 1973, and features the voice of the esteemed actor and director Orson Welles and animation by Dick Oden, who spent much of his career drawing fanciful classical record album covers. Enjoy it, if you’ve got eight minutes to spare, and I hope you won’t be blinded by the light.

One Response

  1. …….interesting…..i’ve
    …….interesting…..i’ve been on an orson welles kick all the past week Levi….watched F is for Fake and all the xtras on the criterion dvd and now it’s onto citizen cane which i 1st saw in 1968 in california……3rd man a favorite even though he just plays harry lime….his voice was amazing……the wine before it’s time shit a shame……hope to see his unreleased films “the other side of the wind” and “don quixote” someday….

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Litkicks will turn 30 years old in the summer of 2024! We can’t believe it ourselves. We don’t run as many blog posts about books and writers as we used to, but founder Marc Eliot Stein aka Levi Asher is busy running two podcasts. Please check out our latest work!