The Myth of the Cave from The Republic by Plato, when taken literally, allows inferences of many kinds, like Planet being of a rather different nature from the one we’re used to living and thinking about. Look at this extract:
“(A1)Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all--they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.
(A2)What do you mean?
(A1)I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not.”
What “State” is the interlocutor referring to is my question. I pose it’s a hidden place, undiscovered and beyond discovery. The main interlocutor calls himself one of its founders and is pondering about the importance of “descending” again. They are above us. Descending would mean literally going down to Earth, where we live. He explains, in his narrative, how the prisoners are treated with false symbols produced by them, as put in the first passage of the text: "like the screen which marionette-players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets". Screen here would be suited for official information and “they” indicates the ones who act as the illusionists. They have the true knowledge about our nature. All founders know about our existence because they came from the same place we’re now, but the people who came after the founders do not know about us. This class who knows and holds knowledge is called “Philosophers”. The allegory of the cave was produced by one of them.
Contrasting light with shadows tells about their location. They are in a very illuminated place, where light is much more strong. The physical discomforts the interlocutor mentions, such as eye pain, are due to the different nature of light there, which makes the ones who ascend blind momentarily.
Going even further, I infer they are at a point in Antarctica. They’ve climbed it and found the true nature of the sun – a place where light shines differently revealing the true nature of the world. But contemplating this took them time, since their eyes pertained to our ‘Earth’ reality. As the interlocutor highlights, the mind and the body must change together in order to be able to understand it. There there is an organization similar to the one of our modern State, which is not good at the eyes of the narrator. The purpose of the text was not to inform us. It is the dialogue between a philosopher and a student, a dialogue about the importance of not believing the apparent world, a lesson they've learned from their previous experience. “[they] must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.”
What your thoughts on this? thx