William NÉRIA

T he myth of the cave, an obscure and popular story, has it revealed everything to us? Or does it retain, again, the secret of existence allowing it to achieve its only goal, that of contemplating the divine?
Socrates tells Glaucon a succinct, enigmatic and thousand-year-old story, which opens the seventh book of The Republic of Plato and which challenges the depths of our souls wavering his deepest conceptions, even going so far as to bend the destiny of philosophy according to Martin Heidegger, capsizing her towards a metaphysical edge! This assignment weighs, like an accusation, on the myth of the cave, condemning it to inaugurate the history of the forgetting of being. However, is this position defensible?
The inner epic that this story tells can neither be exhausted nor reduced to this ill-justified condemnation. This history, universal and tragic, of the human condition, does it conceal a forgotten dimension, because hidden? The impenetrable cloud floating over this allegory worries and reassures ... but what could it teach us that is so fundamental that we do not already know? or rather, that we do not know?
This work rereads the myth of the cave from its legitimate source, Plato and his commentary. Diving to the root of its original meaning, we will go to the discovery of the key to the interpretation of the myth. Freed from its original opacity, it will reveal, perhaps, the mysterious meaning, and not metaphysics, of the image of the prisoner whose journey, in and out of the cave, will lead him to free himself from his chains to be finally glorified by the Sun !