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enlightenment and its influences
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Many philosophers have explored the idea of enlightening one's mind through the acceptance of the inalienable truths of justice, beauty, and essential goodness. Arguably the greatest thinker to delve into this complex subject matter Plato, who through the use of his parable, "The Allegory of the Cave", presents us with a unique perspective on learning and making the journey from ignorance to enlightenment. In this interesting piece of literature Plato compares enlightening one's mind to a prisoner who has been living his life in the darkness of a cave who liberates himself from the shadows to see a brave new world, one full of light and new experiences. On a metaphorical level, this journey into the world outside represents one's voyage from ignorance into knowledge and goodness, or as Plato called it, `enlightenment'. Similarly, Daru in Albert Camus's short story The Guest also lives in the dark confines of ignorance, only to have his eyes opened to the light of truth and justice by the arrival of a mysterious prisoner. Claiming to be a teacher himself, Daru (like the prisoner's of the cave) is in fact a victim of his own ignorance. As the story progresses we begin to see a marked change in him, until finally in the story's conclusion his full voyage from the darkness to the light is complete.
Plato in his Allegory of the Cave describes the existence of a group prisoners shackled far beneath the earth's surface in a cave of darkness. On a metaphorical level, Plato contends that the men are chained by the weight of their own ignorance, and it is such that keeps them from seeing the light of the outside world, or as Plato calls it, `enlightenment'. Similarly, the chief character in Albert Camus's The Guest is also a victim of su...
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...n his throat, a physical manifestation of the guilt he feels knowing that he has acted contrary to goodness. Daru turns around and makes his way to the spot that he and the Arab had parted ways and finds the man gone. So the schoolmaster presses on, until finally he sees the Arab trotting along eastward towards the prison. Daru is finally satisfied that justice has been served, and he makes his way back to the school. Plato related in his allegory that the prisoner who had been freed from the cave would be ridiculed and killed by those who were still living as prisoners in the shadows. This holds true in The Guest as well, for when Daru returns to the schoolhouse he finds a threat scrawled on the blackboard. The author(s) of the threat is not dissimilar to the prisoners in the cave, and is blind to reality and the universality of goodness of Daru's righteous act.
In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato describes the cave as very dark with chained people inside and a wall where they can only see shadow illusions, which they believe is reality. Outside the cave, there is “light” and “truth.” One chained person is released into the “light,” which is uncomfortable at first, because of how bright the “light” or “truth” is however, once he adjusts, he realizes the outer world is the “truth” or reality and the cave is a shadow of reality. He pities the ones in the cave, still lost in the darkness yet, when he tries to make them see reality, their ignorance overpowers them and they kill the enlightened one out of fear and confusion. This is the kind of society, full of puppet-handlers, the narrator Sylvia in “The Lesson” dwells in and the author, Toni Cade Bambara, depicts Sylvia as being freed from the chains of ignorant society. Bambara’s released prisoner, Miss Moore, is the one to free Sylvia and the other chained prisoners and exposes them to the “light,” which is the unequal distribution of wealth and the “truth,” which is educating youth on economic inequality so the freed prisoners can learn to change their society’s shadow of reality.
What is reality? An enduring question, philosophers have struggled to identify its definition and basic concept since the beginning of time. Plato, in his provocative essay, The Cave, used symbols and images to ridicule and explain how humanity easily justifies their current reality while showing us that true wisdom and enlightenment lies outside this fabricated version of reality. If he were alive in modern times, he would find society unchanged; still uneducated and silently trapped in our own hallucination of reality with only the glimmer of educational paths available. While this may be a bleak comparison, it is an accurate one as the media influences of today present a contrasting picture of education and ignorance that keeps us trapped
In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato described a group of people that have lived their lives confined to a cave, tied to a pole making them face a wall. On this wall you could only see shadows of what was going on behind you, and from that they misperceived shadows from reality. One day, one of the inhabitants broke free and was able to leave the cave, only to be shocked by what “true reality” was outside of the cave and what was different from the shadows he saw on the cave wall. He was so excited that he wanted to go back into the cave and basically enlightened the other prisoners about what he saw,
The world outside the cave represents paradise some might call it even, some might call it enlightenment, etc. I believe it is a representation of Valhalla in its own essence because the good must suffer to reach it or wherever they wish to go .This is why I think the prisoner shirks away from Plato's version of a philosophical heaven ,because when the prisoner arrives he feels pain at the blinding light the pain he is feeling is his illusions falling away, which can be very painful if you are emotionally attached to your beliefs or have philosophical phobias .Very much similar to the pain ,fear and hatred caused by Socrates attempts to enlighten the Athenians resulting in his death. Much like the prisioner in the cave
Inside the cave, the prisoners believe that the shadows they see on the wall are actual reality. Their “bodily eye” tells them that this world is real because their senses perceive so. Plato suggests that the senses do not perceive actual truth.
The Allegory of the Cave is a hypothetical scenario, described by Plato, in the form of a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon. Socrates describes the picture of prisoners living in a cave where they have no source of light except for the one provided by the fire. There since birth, the prisoners live in a fixed position, staring at the shadows that are projected onto the walls. The puppeteers walk along a path behind the chained prisoners, each holding different objects. They live in a state of constant prediction, waiting for future shadows to be cast. As the objects reflect into shadows, the prisoners guess what the projections are and what they represent. The conversation reveals Socrates thoughts of human ignorance and the imprisonment of humans, trapped in society. It covers the search for truth and the desire to share it with others and free them from the bondage of ignorance. Socrates metaphor can represent education, religion, and our interaction with society. The prisoners in the cave lack education and you can
The Allegory of the Cave is Plato's explanation of the education of the soul toward enlightenment. He sees it as what happens when someone is educated to the level of philosopher. He contends that they must "go back into the cave" or return to the everyday world of politics, greed and power struggles. The Allegory also attacks people who rely upon or are slaves to their senses. The chains that bind the prisoners are the senses. The fun of the allegory is to try to put all the details of the cave into your interpretation. In other words, what are the models the guards carry? the fire? the struggle out of the cave? the sunlight? the shadows on the cave wall? Socrates, in Book VII of The Republic, just after the allegory told us that the cave was our world and the fire was our sun. He said the path of the prisoner was our soul's ascent to knowledge or enlightenment. He equated our world of sight with the intellect's world of opinion. Both were at the bottom of the ladder of knowledge. Our world of sight allows us to "see" things that are not real, such as parallel lines and perfect circles. He calls this higher understanding the world "abstract Reality" or the Intelligeble world. He equates this abstract reality with the knowledge that comes from reasoning and finally understanding. On the physical side, our world of sight, the stages of growth are first recognition of images (the shadows on the cave wall) then the recognition of objects (the models the guards carry) To understand abstract reality requires the understanding of mathematics and finally the forms or the Ideals of all things (the world outside the cave). But our understanding of the physical world is mirrored in our minds by our ways of thinking. First comes imagination (Socrates thought little of creativity), then our unfounded but real beliefs. Opinion gives way to knowledge through reasoning (learned though mathematics). Finally, the realization of the forms is mirrored by the level of Understanding in the Ways of Thinking. The key to the struggle for knowledge is the reasoning skills acquired through mathematics as they are applied to understanding ourselves. The shadows on the cave wall change continually and are of little worth, but the reality out side the cave never changes and that makes it important.
In "The Allegory of the Cave," prisoners in a cave are forced to watch shadows as people behind them are forced to accept these shadows as reality -- "To them... the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. One prisoner, however, is released, and stumbles into the real world, containing more depth and complexity than they had ever known. At first, the prisoner will be pained at the bright, piercing light, but will eventually recover. According to Plato, the freed prisoner is then obligated to return to the shadows of the cave, to inform the shackled prisoners left behind of the real world. The prisoners, however, will not believe the freed prisoner, and may even go as afra s to kill him for such "lies" contrary to their "reality." The pursuit of the truth is, therefor, a painstaking but rewarding process. According to Plato, the physical world is a world of sight, one that lacks meaning if left alone. Only those who manage to break into the sunlight from the cave will ascend to the intellectual world. The prisoners in the shadows only know of the dull physical world, while those who ascend into the sunlight learn of the spiritual world, and are exposed to the first hints of truth. The soul ascends upward into the realm of goodness and of the truth, where "... souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell.." The pursuit of goodness and of the truth, then, improves the soul, as the soul desires to be elevated to a higher state of knowledge and morality. Caring for the self and the soul involves freeing the shackles of the physical world and ascending to the "... world of knowledge... the universal author of all things beautiful and right... and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual..." The soul yearns to dwell in a world of morality and knowledge, and only the pursuit of
Both authors make a point of showing the narrow-mindedness of humans by nature. In “Allegory of the Cave”, the prisoners believed that the shadows they were seeing were reality, with nothing more to it. The comfort of the said perceived, and therefore the fear of the unrecognized outside world would end in the prisoner being forced to climb the steep ascent of the cave and step outside int...
They are in the dark about the truth and reality because they are unwilling to see the truth about the light, or the real world. They live with illusions of the real world but never get to see what really happens because of this unwillingness to believe others to see. They are stuck in their predisposed ways because they were never exposed to reality. If you can only see what is in front of you can ever know true reality. This story is representative of they way people live their everyday live and how what they live constantly might not be the highest knowledge. Ultimately when he can finally see the sun it represents what s the truth and goodness. The cave represents how people live their lives, in the dark, and “world of illusion” (Plato). The shadows in the cave represent the false reality everyday people see. This allegory make one question their own believes and reality. It teaches one to think about all their experiences in their life and think if the reality they know is true. He uses this story to explain how being a philosopher is like being the prisoner that can see, and the others stuck in the cave are the general masses that will not go though the pain of losing their reality to see the
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.
Plato’s allegory of the cave is an example of what Plato deems “the accent of the mind to true knowledge.” In the parable, the prisoners at the bottom of the cave represent the obliviousness of humans to what Plato believes constitutes true knowledge. What they judge to be reality is only a shadow depicted on the wall of the cave. These obscurities are all the prisoners have known of their lives and realities, and so they do not question them, leaving them in blissful ignorance of the world above them or what Plato likens to “true knowledge.” If one of the prisoners were suddenly released from the chains that hold him in his current state of ignorance, the movement would be uncomfortable, even agonizing, and he would...
The circumstances that are described by Plato have a metaphorical meaning to them. The allegory attacks individuals who rely solely upon; or in other words are slaves to their senses. The shackles and chains that bind the prisoners are in fact their senses .In Plato’s theory, the cave itself represents the individuals whom believe that knowledge derives from what we can hear and see in the world around us; in other words, empirical knowledge. The cave attempts to show that believers of empirical knowledge are essentially ...
There is a ton of ignorance in the world, many people believe something is wrong because they’re not a custom that certain way and automatically become stubborn and ignorant. For example, In the United States, many women don’t get the high ranked pay or job positions they deserve because of their gender. Even with the same qualities and qualifications, a man has, more than likely women will get the high ranked pay or position against a man due to the past of America where women had very little rights. Due to the past of women having very little rights many Americans to this day feel women are not as good as men. In the story “Allegory Of The Cave” the freed prisoner who at one point only saw shadows got to explore something new the outside world with color and tried to tell the other prisoners but was labeled demented because the other trapped prisoners did not know and have not explored the outside world. There’s a connection with the story “Allegory Of The Cave” and the real world by the prisoners who remained in the cave showing their ignorance calling the freed prisoner who saw outside world demented and Americans who still show ignorance towards women not being suitable for a high paying/ranked job position all because it was a certain way back then and got comfortable in their
Plato, a student of Socrates, in his book “The Republic” wrote an allegory known as “Plato's Cave”. In Plato's allegory humans are trapped within a dark cave where they can only catch glimpses of the world above through shadows on the wall.2 Plato is describing how the typical human is. They have little knowledge and what they think they know has very little basis in fact. He describes these people as prisoners, in his allegory, and they are only free when they gain knowledge of the world above the cave.