Abstract

It is a well-known fact that the famous analogy of the cave - used by Plato in "The Republic" to illustrate «our nature in its education and want of education» - lends itself to various applications and transformations. The recent development of virtual environment technologies suggests a new empirically based variation on Plato's analogy of the cave. Taking into account explicit references and suggestive allusions through the Twentieth century, the purpose of this article is to explore how different dimensions of human life have been reinterpreted in terms of the notion of «cave». A common feature that Twentieth century representations share is the impossibility of getting out of the cave, because of the uncircumventability of the embodied and embedded perspectives of our mental lives.