Abstract

Plato's texts have been subject to re‐reading in recent years, reflecting new ways in which philosophy has sought to understand the relationship between the author, the reader, and the text. This chapter begins by restating the allegory of the Stanley Cavell in The Republic, before turning to Cavell's reading of this in relation to the opening of the text. It further illustrates the idea of education as a finding of voice, which Cavell articulates through Emersonian moral perfectionism with reference to his work on philosophy as autobiography. The educative relationship to the self and to the other, and the responsibility one takes for one's voice, is then illustrated further by way of Michel Foucault's account of Socratic parrhesia, a practice evident in The Republic and in other texts of Plato to which Foucault refers. Cavell ventures the term sublimation in relation to his questioning of the allegory of the Cave.