Some remarks on a phenomenological interpretation of Saramago's cave

Giuseppe Menditto

pp. 81-99

in: Carlo Salzani, Kristóf Vanhoutte (eds), Saramago's philosophical heritage, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

José Saramago's novel The Cave recruits the well-known Platonic image in order to describe the totalitarian power of our capitalistic society and the human efforts to fight back. This chapter compares Saramago's novel with some of the most significant twentieth-century interpretations of the Platonic allegory of the cave, namely, those by Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Jan Patočka, Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. The broader phenomenological framework within which Saramago's novel can be examined includes many issues, from the space for tactile and bodily knowledge, man's freedom and responsibility and the relationship between reality and the virtuality of experience. In The Cave, Saramago somehow reverses Plato's original myth, develops some of its implicit strands and creates a new model for collective imagination.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Fink Eugen

Patočka Jan

Plato

Arendt Hannah

Cavarero Adriana