There are two issues to be considered. The most obvious is that Socrates was sentenced to death for being an atheist and so if Plato was an atheist it was necessary for him to hide it . (Descartes faced the same problem based on the Church’s response to Galileo). The second is that he recognized that atheism was not a good public teaching. He does not deny gods but does not affirm them either. There is no mention of gods in the image of the Forms. Theistic Platonists might conceive of the Good as God, but the text itself does not support such a reading. It is something they bring to it.The wholeness and order of the Cosmos (Plato) now looks to me like panentheism not theism.
I left it intentionally ambiguous because this ambiguity is part of the problem - is the logos human or is there a logos of the cosmos that man can come to know? As a skeptic he cannot say one way or the other whether there is a cosmic logos and so he addresses only the human logoi. But this is not limited to reasoned speech. Poetry and the imagination play an important role. Aspiration (your post #131), the image of the ascent from the case, is often ignored by philosophers whose whole concern is reason. Platonists, on the other hand, fail to see Plato’s poetry and imagery as poetry and mistake it for truth.When you say "there is no logos of the whole" do you mean that nobody can explain Cosmos absolutely but must in all reason do so only doubtingly and partially.
Something like that. I actually wrote the above before reading this far. I am hesitant to call it the philosopher’s faith. While that description might fit the aspiring philosopher, I cannot say that Plato had faith in the existence of the Good as it is presented in the Republic. Based on a consideration of other dialogues, and most clearly in the Symposium, it is eros that both inspires and that to which the philosopher aspires - the erotic desire for wisdom. In theological terms, it would be the god Eros who takes center stage, but of course Plato is being playfully ironic.The Sun which the philosopher king could see outside of the Cave , i.e. the Form of the Good , was what the philosopher king aspired to , or in other words the philosopher king's faith .
As to the cave, we should not, so to speak, be too quick to make the ascent, for by doing so it does not come to our attention what Plato is saying and doing. We need to pay attention to the “puppet masters”, that is, those who make the images whose shadows are seen on the cave wall. They are the opinion makers, the makers of the images we take to be the truth. Prior to the image of the man who ascends from the cave there is the image of the man freed from the cave wall who is able to turn around and discover the opinion makers. In other words, the freedom from the cave is not ascent out of the cave but takes place when one becomes cognizant of the opinion makers, those who influence the way we think and see things, who shape our beliefs and opinions. It is freedom from our founding mythologies.
But it is here that the enthusiastic reader of Plato’s image of the cave may be fooled. Plato reveals the opinion makers but what is not seen is that he too is an opinion maker. He simply replaces old images with new ones, ones that still hold sway today. The Good and the other Forms are just images, Plato’s philosophical poetry. Those who mistake the images for the truth are what he calls “philosophical dogs”, faithful guardians of the founding myth.
There is a sense in which the whole thing is a joke, and Socrates discusses this extensively. Philosophers cannot be kings or rulers in any ordinary sense of the term. Even today philosophy is often seen as a worthless endeavor and philosophers as hopelessly out of touch. But if you look at the ideas that have shaped western culture they can be traced back to the philosophers, and this includes our religious beliefs. So, yes, the philosopher king remains the elite, but this is not a permanent position. There is always a tension between the philosopher and the political and religious elite.1. The philosopher king remains the permanent elite among permanent prisoners in the Cave.
The question is: what does it mean to be rescued from ignorance? As I suggested above, Plato replaces the old images with new ones and so some believe that they have been rescued from their ignorance, but they remain ignorant because they simply replace old images with Platonic images. They do exactly what Socrates says the prisoners have always done - believe images not to be images but the things of which they are images.2. The prisoners in the Cave are rescued from their ignorance by the philosopher King.
And the truth itself? We remain ignorant of it when it comes to what Socrates called in the Apology the “most important questions”.
What they view are images, the product of philosophical poetry, what we imagine the Good itself and Beauty itself and Justice itself are. If one knows an image as an image will he or she be willing to place faith in it? It is only when one believes that the images are not images but the truth itself that one puts faith into it. The “philosopher-king” knows the image is an image. A useful instrument for the aspiring philosopher and a public teaching but he does not worship his own image.3. Not the philosopher king ,nor the prisoners, nor any former prisoners are able to view the Sun except through the eyes of faith.
Plato and Aristotle both made similar arguments. The Good is that to which we aspire. Everyone wants what is good. The difficulty arises when we try to determine what the good is. Plato does not reject Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure. He is aware, however, of just how dangerous this can be. It can lead to a radical relativism. Fixing the good in an eternal unchanging reality served as the antidote. It should be kept in mind that this discussion of the Good and the cave occurs in a dialogue devoted to the question of justice.4. The Form of the Good can be argued by moderns, especially perhaps by Buddhists, to correlate with inherent predisposition towards fairness as in distributive justice.