Abstract
José Saramago’s novel The Cave recruits the well-known Platonic image in order to describe the totalitarian power of our capitalistic society and the human efforts to fight back. This chapter compares Saramago’s novel with some of the most significant twentieth-century interpretations of the Platonic allegory of the cave, namely, those by Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Jan Patočka, Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. The broader phenomenological framework within which Saramago’s novel can be examined includes many issues, from the space for tactile and bodily knowledge, man’s freedom and responsibility and the relationship between reality and the virtuality of experience. In The Cave, Saramago somehow reverses Plato’s original myth, develops some of its implicit strands and creates a new model for collective imagination.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The Platonic image has been traditionally translated and understood as myth, fable, simile, allegory, picture, and so forth. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, refers to a Gleichnis as Sinnbild: the English translator renders Heidegger’s Sinnbild as “sensory image, of sort that provides a hint or clue” (Heidegger 2002, p. 12). It is worth pointing out that in his Republic, Plato refers to the status of the cave as “this image … we must apply” (Plato 1970, 517b). It deals with a προσαπτέα εἰκών that Plato does not seem to consider a ὑπόνοια, the Platonic term for allegory.
- 2.
- 3.
“[A] carousel of horses, a carousel of space rockets, a centre for toddlers, a centre for the Third Age, a tunnel of love, a suspension bridge, a ghost train, an astrologer’s tent, a betting shop, a rifle range, a golf course, a luxury hospital … rain, wind and snow on demand, a wall of china, a Taj Mahal, an Egyptian pyramid, a temple of Karnak, a real aqueduct that works twenty-four hours a day … a lake … a Trojan horse, an electric chair, a firing squad … a list of prodigies so long that not even eighty years of leisure time would be enough to take them all in, even if you had been born in the Centre and had never left it for the outside world” (CV 259).
- 4.
Arendt (1978, pp. 79–85) maintains instead that the philosopher is dead in the eyes of the people because he has left the real world after contemplating ideas. He is a living dead waiting to leave that human world.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. 1961. Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking.
———. 1978. The Life of the Mind. Ed. Mary McCarthy, 2 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Baptista-Bastos, Armando. 1996. José Saramago. Aproximação a um retrato. Lisboa: Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1989. Höhlenausgänge. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Borrelli, Francesca. 2014. Tutti i personaggi agli ordini della mia volontà. Dialogo con José Saramago. http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=15247i. Accessed 2 Aug 2017.
Cavarero, Adriana. 1999. Note arendtiane sulla Caverna di Platone. In Hannah Arendt, ed. Simona Forti, 60–83. Bruno Mondadori: Milano.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Findlay, John N. 1966. The Discipline of the Cave. London/New York: Allen & Unwin/Humanities Press.
———. 1967. The Transcendence of the Cave. London/New York: Allen & Unwin/Humanities Press.
Fink, Eugen. 1966. Studien zur Phänomenologie, 1930–1939. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus. Trans. Ted Sadler. London/New York: Continuum.
Laird, Andrew. 2003. Death, Politics, Vision, and Fiction in Plato’s Cave (After Saramago). Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 10 (3): 1–30.
Ortega Villaro, Begoña. 2002. La Caverna de Saramago. In La recepción del mito clásico en la literatura y el pensamiento, ed. Aurelia Ruiz Sola and Begoña Ortega Villaro, 325–340. Burgos: UNiversidad.
Patočka Jan. 1996. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Trans Erazim Kohák, ed James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court.
———. 2002. Plato and Europe. Trans Petr Lom. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Plato. 1970. Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. Loeb Classical Library. London/Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann/Harvard University Press.
Saramago, José. 2001. Saramago: la letteratura ci salva dalla società delle illusioni. Interview with Paolo Di Stefano. Corriere della Sera, January 22. p. 25.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Menditto, G. (2018). Some Remarks on a Phenomenological Interpretation of Saramago’s Cave. In: Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K. (eds) Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91922-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91923-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)