The song Carry On My Wayward Son by Kansas contains insights into what Plato believes to be a philosopher as is found in his allegory of the cave in the Republic. Found in the second verse of the song, it describes how “Once [he] rose above the noise and confusion/just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion” which is a direct correlation to the journey which one takes to become a philosopher as described by Plato in The Republic through his Allegory of the Cave. This is similar in the sense that the philosopher separates himself from the distractions of normal life to search for what is the reality behind these distractions that cause illusions. The song also says “Though [his] eyes could see [he] still was a blind man/Though [his] mind could …show more content…
Is reality the shapes and flickering lights right before us or is it something that exists in another realm of existence? Plato describes reality is as something called the forms which exist in and of themselves within the world of Being, while we exist in the world of Becoming. Since we are in the world of Becoming we are always constantly changing so we cannot possibly be a part of the world of Being which always stays the same. The only way that we know these forms is because we have had their ‘shadows’ imprinted within our minds, or in our souls. Plato argues that people’s devotion to their passions can lead to their lack of understanding what reality is. Kierkegaard would argue against that in the sense that passions are what determine our reality of who we are as a human. When in my opinion, there is something beyond just what we see on a daily basis, there is something that exists in a realm which we are not a part of, this something may very well be what Plato describes as the forms. When someone focuses too much on their own passions they are led astray from their search for …show more content…
Found in the first verse of the song, it describes how “Once [he] rose above the noise and confusion/just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion” which is a direct correlation to the journey which one takes to become a philosopher as described by Plato in The Republic through his Allegory of the Cave. This is similar in the sense that the philosopher separates himself from the distractions of normal life to search for what is the reality behind these distractions that cause illusions. The song also says “Though [his] eyes could see [he] still was a blind man/Though [his] mind could think [he] still was a madman” which describes what is happening with the philosopher as he reflects on what he once was. This brings into question, what is reality? Is reality the shapes and flickering lights right before us or is it something that exists in another realm of existence? Plato describes reality is as something called the forms which exist in and of themselves within the world of Being, while we exist in the world of Becoming. Since we are in the world of Becoming we are always constantly changing so we cannot possibly be a part of the world of Being which always stays the same. The only way that we know these forms is because we have had their ‘shadows’ imprinted within our minds, or in our souls. Plato argues that
In his Allegory Plato shows us how a man ascends from the darkness of a cave to the light of the outside world. In this ascent Plato’s man passes through four distinct stages of cognition: from imagination, to belief, understanding, and finally knowledge.
The shadows seen on the cave wall are a truth to those people and Plato says that if you believe everything you see then you are just seeing a shadow of the real truth. The game the prisoners played while in the cave was interesting to me because it showed how anyone can believe one person is a master of nature when they have ‘knowledge’ of the world observed by senses. I also liked Plato’s feelings about the game they played, he felt that it showed how the master does not actually know the truth, and suggests that it is ridiculous to admire someone like this. The prisoner that had escaped can be seen as the philosopher because he or she seeks knowledge outside the cave (or outside the senses). The only thing that I found to represent itself in the story was the journey the prisoner went on to find beauty and wisdom. One very interesting element Plato added to this story was the return of the prisoner. At first I asked myself “why would the prisoner go back to the cave” but then I realized that it also represented something and that was that most people are scared to know what is real and would rather stick to what they know rather than going out of their comfort zone to possibly see something differently or to see the actual
Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is a story being told by Socrates to Plato’s brother, Glaucon. Socrates tells of prisoners in an underground cave who are made to look upon the front wall of the cave. To the rear of the prisoners, below the protection of the parapet, lie the puppeteers whom are casting the shadows on the wall in that the prisoners are perceiving reality. Once a prisoner is free, he's forced to look upon the fire and objects that once determined his perception of reality, and he so realizes these new pictures before of him are now the accepted forms of reality. Plato describes the vision of the real truth to be "aching" to the eyes of the prisoners, and the way they might naturally be inclined to going back and viewing what they need perpetually seen as a pleasing and painless acceptance of truth. This stage of thinking is noted as "belief."
Imagine a group of people, prisoners, who had been chained to stare at a wall in a cave for all of their lives. Facing that wall, these prisoners can pass the time by merely watching the shadows casted from a fire they could not see behind them dance on the walls. These shadows became the closest to what view of reality the prisoners have. But what happens after one of these prisoners is unbound from his chains to inspect beyond the wall of shadows, to the fire and outside the cave? How would seeing the world outside of the walls of the cave affect his views of the shadows and reality? It is this theme with its questions that make up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It is in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that there are several key ideas presented in the allegory. The ideas presented in the allegory can be related back to themes of education and the gaining of knowledge and in ways that can relate back to “us”, the people.
The Allegory of the Cave has many applications to both Plato’s writing and life in general. It describes the education of a philosopher, as well as how others look on the philosopher after he has gained the knowledge of the Forms. It also describes what it is like to see the forms. After understanding the forms, what once were objects, real things, become merely shadows. One sees everything as it truly exists, as it’s form.
In The Republic, Plato presents the relationship of the Divided Line and the Allegory of the Cave in connection to his epistemology and metaphysics. Throughout the Republic he discusses his beliefs on many topics using examples that express his ideas more thoroughly. He is able to convey very complex beliefs through his examples of the Divided Line and Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s epistemology depicts his idea of the Divided Line which is a hierarchy where we discover how one obtains knowledge and the Allegory of the Cave relates to Plato’s metaphysics by representing how one is ignorant/blinded at the lowest level but as they move up in the Divided Line, they are able to reach enlightenment through the knowledge of the truth.
Plato claims that self-existent and unchanging forms and not the reality obtained through sensory experience are perfect concepts for objects that can be seen in our physical reality. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato explains how a slave could be set free from chains to the shadows of this world by becoming aware of the higher reality of forms (the objects’ true forms once they leave the cave). His allegory claims that all humans are held prisoner in darkness as we believe actual reality to be the things that we can see around us. However, there is a true reality that exists beyond the physical world. For Plato, he believed we experience this absolute reality when our soul detaches from the body. He believed that the body and soul are two
Throughout Plato 's story "The Allegory of the cave" men are stuck in this cave with their backs turned away from the light, until one day a man turns towards the light and learns for himself what the light is about. The man than explores and begins to educate himself on everything and anything, he then tries to take everything he has learned back down to the cave to get his fellow cave members to step out and learn what the light is all about. The metaphor that Plato 's places in this story is how the cave is represents the human mind and the light represents the understanding of life
As people, we tend to believe everything we see. Do we ever take the time to stop and think about what is around us? Is it reality, or are we being deceived? Reality is not necessarily what is in front of us, or what is presented to us. The environment that we are placed or brought up has a great impact on what we perceive to be the truth or perceive to be reality. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is one of the most significant attempts to explain the nature of reality. The cave represents the prisoners, also known as the people. They are trapped inside of a cave. They are presented with shadows of figures, and they perceive that to be reality. The cave can be used as a
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
Plato's allegory of the cave is a metaphysical illustration of the philosopher’s view of the humanity. We are represented by the prisoners, who are mired and held captive by an extremely limited view of the world, and prevented by their chains from viewing the actual Truth of existence. We are each locked up in our own worldview, living our lives unknowingly in the shadow of actual truth. Having nothing else to rely upon but our meager eyesight and hearing, capable of only believing in shadows and whispering disembodied voices, once exposed to truth, it is blinding to us. We are dazzled and disoriented, afraid of the glaring sight that has been so rudely forced upon us.
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.
...onclusion, the considerations of knowledge and reality are ones that philosophers will continue to contemplate throughout the centuries. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is a wonderful attempt at trying to ascertain the answers to these inquiries with its revealing comparisons that contrast the darkness of ignorance and the light of the sun to knowledge to demonstrate an individual’s journey up and out of the cave to the immaterial world of heaven and a state of true enlightenment. The allegory also illustrates Plato’s ideal of dualism by liberating knowledge from any dependency on anything material or physical. This excursion into Plato’s teachings illuminated the “Allegory of the Cave” in detail, and affirmed the question that dualism does, undeniably, exist and that Plato is correct in his ideal that reality does, without a doubt, go beyond the material world.
According to Plato, his Theory of Forms states perfection only lives in the realm of thought. There only exists one of every ideal and the rest is just a copy. This one creation is called a form, the most flawless representation of an idea. In the physical world everything is a copy of these forms and all copies are imperfect. Plato believed in two worlds; the intelligible world and the illusionistic world. The intelligible world is where everything is unchanging and eternal. We can only grasp the intelligible world with our mind. It is the world of ideas and not senses. A place where there are perfect forms of the things we know on Earth. According to Plato everything in the world we live in is an illusion. All objects are only shadows of their true forms. His theory further states every group of objects that have the same defying properties must have an ideal form. For example, in the class of wine glasses there must be one in particular that is the ideal wine glass. All others would fall under this ideal form.
He wrote many dialogues, and one of them includes his famous dialogue called “Allegory of the Cave.” This dialogue explained how we were born into being very naïve people about our surroundings and taking things for granted, but eventually with the right education we grow to be philosophers that know the Form of Good. Society closes our eyes and whispers things to us in our ears and we believe it, in order to break free we need to educate ourselves into being more knowledgeable about our surroundings. We need to analyze even the smallest things, nothing is to be taken for granted because everything is more complex than what it seems (Plato, p. 26). Plato also states in his idea of self, the soul, that the soul is composed of three parts, our desires, the conscious awareness of reason and the spirited part which gets angry at injustice (Plato, p.40). His allegory and this idea about the parts of the soul connect with each other and might as well lead us to understanding what his idea truly means. Like the first argument, we could say that because our souls is what makes us alive, we are aware of the life we live, therefore we become philosophers only when we do not forget where we came from. This though, sounds contradicting to itself if we take the second argument in hand. If our soul is our life and our body is what carries it, than our ability to become philosophers depends solely on our ability to remove our soul from the body in