Plato\'s Republic and the Little Prince

Plato and the Little Prince

Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Little Prince of Antoine de Saint Exuprey

Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Book Seven of The Republic portrays a world in darkness, the darkness of a cavern. Individuals in the darkness of the cavern of the lived texture of reality, of a daily existence of neckties and golf as Antoine de Saint Exuprey might say, sit around a burning fire. This image represents human beings the world. The fire the human beings gaze at is the fire of the enlightenment the philosophers of humanity, are seeking, often in vain. Occasionally, the humans at the fire catch glimpses of a higher form of reality upon the walls of the cave in the form of shadows. The shadows, which represent how most human beings see reality, are really only dimly filtered versions of the true nature of the forms, or the most pure aspect of every lived substance -- for every object in the world, there is a more perfect version of it in the world of the forms.

The Little Prince, in the children's book of the same name, may be said to reflect such an allegory, even in its dedication when the author asks "the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up," for the man the book is dedicated to is not only full of understanding, like the Platonic philosopher in a world of false shadows, but hungry and cold in a physical sense and also a spiritual sense for enlightenment. Thus the author De Saint Exuprey dedicates the book to "the child from whom this grown-up grew," the Platonic form of the adult whom is now seen by all in the world as a shadow upon the cave, for "all grown-ups were once children -- although few of them remember it," the author notes, the "forgetting" of an adulthood of childhood being a reference to the Platonic false consciousness of what we perceive as reality, but is merely the shadowy world of the forms. Childhood is purity and truth, adulthood is falseness.

This notion of a Platonic misinterpretation of physical truths in the world is even more literally rendered when the child of Chapter 1 draws a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant that, in the false perception of adults, merely appears to be a hat rather than the frightening, true form that it is in the lived world of reality and the child's mind, as opposed to the cave-like understanding of grown adults. The child narrating the work sagely observes that grownups never understand. Although Plato does not idealize the childlike state in The Republic itself, the idealization of childhood in The Little Prince has a Platonic parallel in the sense that the novel chronicles a fall from grace on the part of its adults and a wisdom on the part of the individual who is farthest away from the older reality of lived existence.

Both Plato and Exuprey suggest, in the texture of their works, that the longer one dwells in the constructed and false nature of earthly existence, the farther one leaves the world of the forms. Exuprey suggests that children are closer to the forms, or the world of truth, because they have dwelled for a shorter period of time upon the earth. Plato states in other places in his writings that children must be educated appropriately. However, Exuprey is merely taking the Platonic allegory and rendering it in a way that it will be not only comprehensible and palatable to a younger audience, but also popular.