Ibn Ṭufayl

Andalusian physician and philosopher at the Almohad court, and author of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān — the story of a child raised alone by a gazelle on an empty island, who works out for himself, step by step and with no teacher, the structure of the world and the existence of God, and then meets society and finds it cannot hear him.

The cave turned inside out, written five hundred years before Defoe and read by Locke's century. Plato's prisoner is freed by someone else and dragged up. Ḥayy is never chained — he ascends alone, unaided — and gets exactly the same reception when he comes back down.