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I notice further points of continuity and difference between the Anthem story and the allegory of the cave in Republic. Firstly, I underscore one of Fred’s change from the Binswanger/student summary of the cave allegory. The individual in Plato’s story—who is unfettered, turned around, and dragged to see more of reality in the cave, see light coming into the cave entrance, then see the world above ground and eventually the sun illuminating the world—is not killed. Rather, closer to Fred’s sketch, Plato's Socrates proposes only that those fettered fellows would kill the enlightened one, were they able and were he to try to free them and drag them upward. Rand’s protagonist Equality 7-2521 likewise is not killed, and when he first confronts the powers in his native, collectivist and technologically stagnant society, they want to kill him and would do so but for his escape.
The sun that Plato/Socrates would have one freed from the cave bondage come to see is analogue of the Good. Rand was not aiming in Anthem for Equality to come to see the Good, and as Binswanger indicated, unlike Plato, she was not out to turn sight away from the visible realm. She crafted her story of Equality for him to come to see the ego, the I, his independent individual mind, and its importance for knowing reality. What Equality has learned in the tunnel fits the stage of what Socrates’ unfettered prisoner has learned after being turned around in the cave, before ascending to the world and sun above. Equality tries to inform and free his fellow citizens at this premature stage.
It is later, during the time Equality is living in the modern house from the ancient times, where he is learning their knowledge from their books, that he realizes the word I and its meaning. Again he wants to enlighten and free men still in the dark in his native society, and this is parallel, though with largely opposite specific intent, the Plato/Socrates story in which persons—brought through much education to the sweet life of the intellect and realization of the Good—will, or anyway should, return to stirring things up (and issuing edicts) among those chained to the visible.
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On Republic in The Fountainhead, here.
(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 1/01, 8:56am)
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