Plato's 'Allegory Of The Cave'

1841 Words4 Pages

Name: Soheil Mohammadi Allegory of the cave

Everyone who lives in the world ask some same version of questions like: what is reality? what is the point of life? what is the truth? what is real? Plato, a famous philosopher, Socrates’s student attempted to answer these questions. Plato told the “Allegory of the cave” as a conversation between Socrates and Glaucoma. He compared the effect of education and the lack of education on our nature. In “Allegory of the cave” Plato believed that people are in dark cave and believed false truths and only an educator can release himself/herself from the chain and see the real world where he/she can find the truth. He was right. Many …show more content…

If someone finds the truth then, he/she doesn’t believe it first because it is hard for anyone to change his/her belief. This essay discussed what the story of
“Allegory of the cave” is and what the characters in the story are representing and how people can release themselves from the cave.

In “Allegory of the cave” there is a dark cave in which prisoners are kept there since birth.
These prisoners were forced to look at the wall in front of them. They were chained so that they could not move their leg, foot, and neck to look behind. There is a fire behind the prisoners and people who are talking and moving between fire and prisoners. These people moved the things like wood and animal between prisoner and fire so that, the prisoner could see the shadows and flickering images of them on the wall in front of them. Since they couldn’t move their head to see behind, they always see those flickering images on the wall and those images become real for them because they never saw the real object before. They saw those images a lot so that, they could determine the images on the wall quickly and if …show more content…

When he leaves the cave, he is shocked at the world he discovers outside the cave. He enters to the real world which represent the higher level of understanding and truth. This is the place that shows everything real. A philosopher realizes that his/her form of reality was wrong and then tries to understand the new world. When he sees the sun his eyes hurt first because he couldn’t imagine that the truth is sun not the shadows not even the fire. It was hard not only for him but also for everyone to change his/her belief. Over the time, his eyes adjusted to the light of sun. First, he saw shadows then, he could see the sun and that time he could figure out what the beauty is. Sun represents the truth and form of beauty.

Plato believed that form is true reality. It is supreme which means it doesn’t exist in space but it exists in different ways, that is why it is unchanging. No one can change the form. It is real and intelligible. The form is pure. Form is image or copy of a deeper, changeless, and intelligible world that can only be apprehended by the mind. Plato believed that the eternal world of

Open Document