the cave

645 Words2 Pages

The allegory of the cave represents how humans can often skew reality due to beliefs that we create in our own imagination to explain the world around us. We must free ourselves from being led to believe in things without properly seeking evidence to support or counteract our beliefs by getting out of the cave to witness the actual world with our own eyes. Plato attempts to display man’s lifestyle, as well as their entire belief system, as one of bondage to perceptions. It can be very difficult to rid our minds of all we believed originally and establish a new way of thinking. However, like the prisoner who suffers from the bright light when he first gets out the cave, we will get used to the light and be thankful to whoever brought him out of the “dark” cave and enter the world with “light”. This light is used to illustrate enlightenment, or a transition from a state of ignorance to a state of understanding. Plato highlights that education is a process of learning spiritual knowledge, but that everyone has the inherited power to learn within their soul. On the other hand, the process of enlightenment can vary drastically from person to person. However, Plato expresses the notion that in an ideal world there will be equality among the people on many levels. For example, it is believed that all of the knowledge should be known by every citizen, so that everyone has the same opportunities to seek a fulfilling life with the knowledge of their surroundings. Once the prisoners have seen the light outside of the cave, they then have the responsibility to go back into the depths of the dark cave and attempt to enlighten the ignorant prisoners who still chose to live under the shadows, because they refuse to listen to information that dif...

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...s, by causing us not to seek out further information, but to simply take things at face value. The light and even the shadows are used to show us that the things we see aren’t always as they seem to us, especially when we are unable to see their sources. For example, we can analyze the things in our own reality, but it is still impossible to prove what truly makes our reality possible. To further demonstrate this point, Plato manipulates the idea of reflections. Our reality could easily be impacted the same way as the simple minded prisoners of the cave viewed a reflection of the sun on the cave wall. They would believe that the sun looked the exact way they saw it reflecting off the wall instead of the actual shape and size of the sun, but plato's cave causes us to explore the possibility that maybe our reality is merely a reflection or a shadow of something higher.

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