Abstract

By highlighting an often-neglected detail of Plato’s allegory of the cave, this essay puts to the test the conceptual resources of Husserl’s understanding of self-variation and weighs its relevance with respect to the concept of self-awareness. After a methodological introduction, a reminder of the relevant passages of Plato’s Republic, and a survey of the manner in which Husserl articulates self-variation and self-awareness, it shows which of these layers are revealed by the Platonic fiction of the cave and how fictions in general reveal selfhood in its different layers of contingency: a fiction according to which, in Plato, the prisoners are aware of themselves as shadows among shadows. The essay ends with a series of remarks about the meaning and scope of fictional self-awareness as a whole.