Socrates 'The Allegory Of The Cave'

Life for the prisoners goes on this way without occurrence until one of them is freed, led up outside the cave, and shown the real world. The freed person will realize that the truth of the shadowed reality is actually a falsehood. After this realization the person who visited the upper world is returned to imprisonment in the cave. Her eyes have to adjust to the darkness of the cave once again. However, this adjustment naturally takes a long time. As a result, the once free person can no longer see the shadows as well as she did before her release into the upper world. To the people who have remained in the cave, it seems as though going into the upper world has destroyed her faculty for seeing "reality." Some of the captives then say that trying to reach the outer world is harmful, and that anyone caught trying to loose themselves or another person for the purpose of reaching the outside will be punished. Plato says that the cave symbolizes the world of sight and the outside represents the world of knowledge. Plato also instructs people to "interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world." Plato's belief is that in the "world of knowledge the idea of good appears," and that humans should strive to reach this goodness through philosophical thought.

When the prisoner turns his head towards the light of the fire his eyes hurt him and he is confused because he is unable to see the objects of the shadows he had been subjected to his entire life. It is because of this pain and confusion that the prisoner wishes to return to the life that he is accustomed to, and the reality he knows, the world of the shadows. We are asked to envision the stubbornness displayed by this prisoner to leave the world of the shadows, a stubbornness which causes him to be dragged into the sunlight. Upon seeing the light of the sun the prisoner is temporarily blinded, unable to see anything around him, blinding him more than when he was a prisoner of the cave. Eventually the prisoner’s vision adjusts and he is able to see more clearly. His mind will first be able to recognize the shadows, then moving on to reflections of objects in the water, and lastly the objects themselves. This new sight leads the prisoner to question the colours and objects around him. He questions what it is that causes him to being able to see all the things he can, compared to only seeing poor reflections of objects in the cave. The prisoner eventually concludes that it is the sun which illuminates all around him and is the source of his sight.

When the prisoner makes his way back into the cave, he will have to readjust to the darkness, since he has been out in the daylight- however, he knows this does not matter as he has seen what is beyond this cave. The prisoners would not want be freed: the cave is all they have come to know, it is their reality; the cave is where they are most comfortable. Leaving the cave would mean they would have to adjust to new factors and face the fact that their whole understanding was based upon an illusion. Even if the prisoner goes back to tell the other prisoners about all that he has seen in the world outside the cave, they won’t believe him; they will not understand what he is speaking of. Those who live in the cave are accustomed to that life only; if someone leaves and discovers that reality is drastically different, then that person is going to have a hard time convincing the others that there is anything other than what they know. The person who tells them otherwise will be criticized and labeled "crazy" by the inhabitants of the cave because they simply don't know any

The prisoners perceive the shadows as reality and remain ignorant of the world outside of the cave. Later in the story, a prisoner is freed and exposed to the sunlight. We can see that initially, the man is resisting what he

One of Plato’s more famous writings, The Allegory of the Cave, Plato outlines the story of a man who breaks free of his constraints and comes to learn of new ideas and levels of thought that exist outside of the human level of thinking. However, after having learned so many new concepts, he returns to his fellow beings and attempts to reveal his findings but is rejected and threatened with death. This dialogue is an apparent reference to his teacher’s theories in philosophy and his ultimate demise for his beliefs but is also a relation to the theory of the Divided Line. This essay will analyze major points in The Allegory of the Cave and see how it relates to the Theory of the Divided Line. Also, this

The people that were inside the cage had a controlled version of life. They believed the shadows were absolute reality. Eventually a cave dweller was able to see the truth. First, he was taken back by the light, and though it was uncomfortable he did received knowledge. Next, he went to share his new-found wisdom and happiness with others within the cave and he was rejected.

"Allegory of the Cave" Review Questions An allegory is a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. Plato is said to have placed his mentor, Socrates, in his place in the story. Therefore, Plato is having a discussion wit one of his fellows known as Glaucon.

The “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato represents the differences in the way we perceive reality and what we believe is real. In his story, Plato starts by saying that in a cave, there are prisoners chained down and are forced to look at a wall. The prisoners are unable to turn their heads to see what is going on behind them and are completely bound to the floor. Behind the prisoners, puppeteers hide and cast shadows on the wall in line with the prisoners’ sight, thus giving the prisoners their only sense of reality. What happens in the passage is not told from the prisoners’ point of view but is actually a conversation held between Socrates and Glaucon (Plato’s brother).

A leader’s actions do not always follow popular opinion or the opinion of one’s superiors. In “The Allegory of the Cave”, Socrates says “Human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been since childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.” Only one of the prisoners, the leader, breaks the pattern of what the prisoners have done their entire lives when he goes on “the journey upwards to be the advent of the soul into the intellectual world” after being “liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light.” This does not follow the beliefs or opinions of the other prisoners who believe “it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.” The actions of the prisoner that leaves the

When the prisoner sees the fire, existence outside the cave is obscure, but it holds certainty; whereas existence in the cave only holds illusions of what could

In the cave are prisoners held in captivity all their life one day one of them gets freed and he explores the world outside and is overwhelmed with everything happening. He goes back and tells the other prisoners and they assume that he was brainwashed and don’t believe him. He tries to free them but they decline. The prisoner who was freed became enlightened and understood the surrounding environment he was placed in. The others stayed ignorant because they've seen the same events happening around them since they could remember. This would be hard to understand from someone who has never seen the actual world out of the

At the last stage of learning, In the story, “Allegory of the Cave”, Socrates mentions, “But I think that finally, he would be in the condition to look at the sun itself, not just at its reflection whether in water or wherever else it might appear, but at the sun itself, as it is in and of itself and the place proper to it and to contemplate of what sort it is” (19). Eventually, the prisoner could see things easily through the shadows under the sunlight. He would try to understand the structure of the objects and at the end, he would start to begin to look for the real objects when his eyes no longer in pain under the sunlight. Socrates also says, “And then what? If he again recalled his first dwelling, and the “knowing” that passes as the

Have you ever felt so trapped in a small space you began to lose your mind? In Plato’s short story, “Allegory of the Cave,” the author uses allegory as a means to justify that the world is a reflection of more perfect and ideal forms. As the story begins, Plato’s teacher, Socrates, presents a world of alternate reality to Plato’s brother Glaucon by telling him to imagine a cave full of prisoner’s who have been chained their entire lives. The shadows, voices, and figures given to them by the puppeteers on the wall have constructed the only reality the prisoners have ever known. Those few interpretations lead the prisoners to believe the shadows are real. To the prisoners, they must be real because that is all they have ever seen, heard, or known. The cave is used as a means to open peoples eyes to the world we live in and to not blindly walk through life living by the rules of our puppeteers. As children we are the prisoners hidden in the cave or chained to the society defined by the media, government, educational systems, and many other constructs we do not even question. Our knowledge of reality, truth, and education will always be limited by our fears of puppeteers, new ideas, and radical perspectives unless we break free from what is holding us back. Just like the prisoners locked in their caves, we must seek enlightenment beyond the illusions instilled upon us.

One day one of the prisoners was freed to see the fire and the statues behind them .Firstly , it was painful looking at the light of the fire and it hurt his eyes, but he came to the point that those statues are more real than the shadows he used to see and he understands the way the fire and statue caused the shadows to appear on the wall he was facing. After that he was dragged out of the cave to look at the outside world. At first he was fascinated by the light, reflections, trees, nature and houses. But he started to realize that everything he sees now is way more real than the statues he had seen in the cave and they are just copies of real things.

The “Cave” was told as an allegory, a story that is compared to something similar, but unstated. The “Cave” represents people who think knowledge comes from experience in the world. This is known as empirical evidence. In the cave believers of this type of evidence believe that they are trapped in some type of cave. This cave that they are trapped in this cave of misunderstanding. The shadows are seen as those who believe in this type of evidence and that it guarantees knowledge. If what you see is what you believe, then that is the truth, it is just a shadow of what the truth is. The game shows that some people believe that a person is a master when they have knowledge of this world. Plato showed though that this master knows nothing really and thinks it is absurd to look up to someone so highly in such ways. The escape prisoner is like a philosopher. This philosopher is one who looks for knowledge outside of this cave. The sun then shows us philosophical knowledge and truth. The sun is wisdom. Then there was the return. The other prisoners were scared of knowing all of the knowledge of this world, so when the escapee returned they were shocked. The overall lesson of the “Cave” was that sometimes knowledge is a good thing, but sometimes if someone is