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carry past all sorts of implements such as are used in everyday life. These objects throw their own shadows and are visible as moving objects on the opposite wall. The prisoners discuss among themselves what they see on the wall. What they see there is for them the world, actual beings. Suppose one of the prisoners is released, so that he can tum around and look into the light, and even move out of the cave and walk toward the light itself; he will first be dazzled and will only slowly become accustomed to the light and see the things that stand outside the cave in the light. Let us now assume that, with the sun in his eyes, he returns to the cave and converses once again with those who are sitting in the cave. The cave dwellers will take him to be mad; they would like to kill him because he wants to persuade them that the objects they see and have deemed to be real throughout their lives are only shadows. Plato wants to show by this that the condition for the possibility of recognizing something as a shadow in distinction from the real does not consist in my seeing an enormous quantity of given things. If the cave dwellers were to see more clearly for all eternity only what they now see on the wall, they would never gain the insight that it is only shadows. The basic condition for the possibility of understanding the actual as actual is to look into the sun, so that the eye of knowledge should become sunlike. Ordinary common sense, in the cave of its know-it-all, wiseacre pretensions, is narrow-minded; it has to be extricated from this cave. For it, what it is released to is, as Hegel says, die verkehrte Welt-the inverted, topsy-turvy world. We, too, with this apparently quite abstract question about the conditions of the possibility of the understanding of being, want to do nothing but bring ourselves out of the cave into the light, but in all sobriety and in the complete disenchantment of purely objective inquiry.
What we are in search of is the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. For Plato this ἐπέκεινα is the condition of possibility for all knowledge. Plato says, first, that the ἀγαθόν or the idea ἀγαθοῦ is ἐν τῷ γνωστῷ τελευταία ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα καὶ μόγις ὁρᾶσθαι;5 in knowledge or in the knowable and intelligible, and in general in the whole sphere of that which is in any way accessible to us, the idea of the good is that which lies at the end, toward which all cognition runs back or, conversely, from which it begins. The ἀγαθόν is μόγις ὁρᾶσθαι, hardly to be seen. Secondly, Plato says of the ἀγαθόν: ἔν τε νοητῷ αὐτὴ κυρία ἀλήθειαν καὶ νοῦν παρασχομένη.6 It is that which has dominion in the knowable and renders knowledge and truth possible. It thus becomes clear how the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας is that which has to be inquired after, if indeed being is to be the object for knowledge. How the ἐπέκεινα must be defined, what the 'beyond" means, what the idea of the
5. Ibid., 7.517b8 f.
6. Ibid., 517c3 f.