ABSTRACT
The progressive philosopher of education Maxine Greene writes that she still remembers that time when as a graduate student she first came across the cave analogy, “that moment in Plato’s Republic when a prisoner released from the cave moves haltingly up the incline into the light of the sun.”1 From then on, she writes, she thought of herself as Plato’s prisoner, freed at last of the commonsense beliefs she had grown up with, “standing in the blinding light of disembodied reason.” As a Jewish American young woman, Greene saw in the cave analogy “an incarnation of values that promised to transcend gender and class and race.” She came to believe that through an autonomous reason and a dogged commitment to the truth, people could overcome their differences, rise above prejudices, and become enlightened. The Enlightenment promise of the age of reason was also the democratic promise, the promise of a society in which reason ruled rather than privilege, tradition, and superstition. Thus she looked to the university and her graduate seminars as spaces where people’s backgrounds and genders mattered less than their commitment to the truth, places where people were able to rise above the commonsense beliefs that still kept others in chains. Greene writes that “knowing better,” she continued to believe in Plato’s cave analogy long after she should have. “Knowing better, I even liked the idea of the objectively universal, the overwhelmingly True.”2
