Allegory of the Cave Plato\'s

Allegory of the Cave

Plato's "Allegory of the Cave": A reflection on accounting principles and financial statements

The "Allegory of the Cave" is a fable told by the Greek philosopher Socrates in the classic philosophical work by Plato known as the Republic. It is a story that is designed to illustrate the imperfect state of human knowledge. In the allegory, Socrates describes a situation where human beings are in a dark cave where they are unable to see anything without the light of fire. A kind of campfire burns behind them, created by false hands of deceivers, not by the hands of truth. The humans are chained to the rocks, unable to explore and to move beyond the walls of the cave and see something different than what they are forced to see, because of their physically bound state. These human beings represent all humanity. What is so tragic about our state is that we do not know that we are bound, and that our knowledge is limited, by and large -- unless we are philosophers like Socrates.

Between the fire and the prisoners there is a balcony, on which the prisoner's jail keepers, a group of deceiving puppeteers, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the walls. Because the prisoners cannot turn their heads, they cannot see that people are manipulating the puppets, so they believe the shadows are real and the echoes of the puppeteer's voices in the cave are real voices of truth. This shows the difficulty of finding out 'the truth' when one is deliberately deceived. Without openness and transparency, one can easily come to erroneous conclusions, unless one begins to question the surface of things.

Plato created this allegory to illustrate the difference between the world most of us non-philosophically oriented beings inhabit and the world of the forms. The world of the forms is the ideal world that exists in a way that is analogous, but better, to what we take to be reality. For example, if prisoner says he sees a book, he is not talking about the Platonic ideal of a book. "He thinks he is talking about a book, but he is really talking about a shadow" (Cohen 1999).

Plato thus acknowledges the ability to learn about the ideal world by observations of our shadow-world. After all, if it were impossible to learn about the ideal reality through observations of the real, than Plato could never have arrived at his theory, nor would his analogy be instructive. Plato acknowledges that all of us must learn the truth through constructed examples to some degree, in fact Socrates' logical system is based upon logical deductions through inferences, not making observations alone. Making observations, even through the scientific method, is troublesome for Socrates, because he believes that human perception and our senses are inherently faulty. Otherwise we would never be deceived by the puppeteers that our world is the real thing. This is why math is seen as superior to scientific observation alone in Plato, and whenever someone uses mathematical principles of any kind to establish a truth, rather than starting anew through observation, he or she is using a technique that would be approved upon by Socrates.

The discrepancy between the ideal and the real and the difficulty of arriving at the truth through deduction and induction is something that everyone must grapple with who deals with the ethics of a profession, like accounting. "Prisoners may learn what a book is by their experience with shadows of books. But they would be mistaken if they thought that the word 'book' refers to something that any of them has ever seen" (Cohen 2006). The ideal of how a corporation should behave and keep its books will invariably fall short of the reality, as the sloppiness of every day life, the new challenges posed by a dynamic business environment, and deliberate and accidental misinterpretations of the rules cause a deviation from the ideal, abstract forms that the reality is supposed to correspond to, Platonically.

There is a critical distinction between an accountant and a philosopher like Socrates, though. On some level Plato believed that it was possible to be unchained from the rock, the material existence, and to spiritually transcend the limits of one's existence and enter the world of the forms. Unfortunately, no one who still believes in the value of the real world has such a luxury. He or she must deal with the limits and demands of reality, and the frustrations of the fact that reality will never perfectly correspond to the ideal.