Plato's Cave

1131 Words3 Pages

The basic premise of Plato's allegory of the cave is to depict the nature of the human being, where true reality is hidden, false images and information are perceived as reality. In the allegory Plato tells a story about a man put on a Gnostics path. Prisoners seating in a cave with their legs and necks chained down since childhood, in such way that they cannot move or see each other, only look into the shadows on the wall in front of them; not realizing they have three-dimensional bodies. These images are of men and animals, carried by an unseen men on the background. Now imagine one of the prisoners is liberated into the light, the Gnostic path will become painful and difficult, but slowly his eyes will begin to accommodate what he sees and his fundamentalist view about the world will begin to change; he sees everything through an anarchic thinking and reasons. When he returns into the cave, his fellow prisoners will not recognize him or understand anything he says because he has develop a new senses and capability of perception. This is the representation of the human nature, we live in a cave with false perception of reality that we've been told since childhood, but we must realize that these present perception are incomplete. To awaken the unconsciousness one must experience reality and develop new senses. The cave overall incorporates the idea of a movie theatre, where individuals watch life unfold on a screen, with no knowledge or desire to want to know who is playing the movie; only to sit in the darkness and watch the screen. Many of us take what they see in the movie as reality, not distinguishing between, story and fantasy; soon they begin to behave like the characters in the movie. For instance the twil... ... middle of paper ... ... don't have individual autonomy despite, the system stating that we possess such fundamental freedom. Since childhood the government and school system feeds us with guidelines to follow and never to question these guidelines. To break loose of this guidelines one must realize that everything is three-dimensional, and begin their own Gnostic path. To sum up, Plato’s allegory of cave depicts the human condition, each of us is a prisoner chained down with distorted illusion of reality. To gain individual autonomy one must awaken the unconsciousness, we must kill our imperfection and liberate one’s senses. We cannot accomplish individual autonomy by watching what’s on the screen, but rather using our own consciousness, begin a Gnostic path, and enlightened each other, hence we can build our own philosophical ideologies and get out of the ignorance, that is the cave.

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