ipl-logo

Allegory Of The Cave Essay

1201 Words5 Pages

In the “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato, He is determining what makes the best leaders in his ideal city-state. In order to explain this he uses an allegory. He depicts a cave in which there are prisoners chained down being fed information solely from unknown masters. These masters are giving the prisoners their information via a puppet show. Because the prisoners have been restrained in the cave their entire life they believe this is what reality is, because they have never seen another. To Plato, the cave dwellers represent the ignorant. The ones who take the world at face value. Eventually one escapes, and in doing so, he’s blinded by the sun's powerful rays. Plato uses the sun as a metaphor for “true knowledge” or “enlightened” describing …show more content…

In the end plato exclaims that the enlightened ones, the ones who escaped the cave, are the ones fit to rule over others. In the text he says “for only in the state which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom”(7). Plato’s cave allegory speaks honestly about what he wants from his ideal city-state, but his story also showcases a personal journey from a lack of knowledge to a better understanding of oneself and their place in the universe. This allegory can be applied to my life. Until about a year ago I lived mostly in my head and never took time to understand things past the face value. I kind of kept my head down and ensured I was below the broom bristles called insight. I didn’t ever ask questions about why things were happening the way they were. I remember when I got my heart broken by my first love in high school. It was one of the worst pains I had felt and in the pain I recall asking why? Physically anguished, grasping my chest as if the world was ending, “Why is this happening to me? Why me of all people?”. And I would throw a tantrum and isolate myself from others like I always have in my time of pain. But I never really cared why. What I mean by

Show More
Related
876 Words | 4 Pages

In the “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato breaks the story into four main scenes to demonstrate the path to enlightenment for the unenlightened reader. He uses a story of a man trapped in a cave,

Read More
1112 Words | 5 Pages

In the Allegory of the Cave by Plato the people who can only see shadows create their own version of the truth based on what they know, “To them [the people stuck in the cave unable to move],’

Read More
708 Words | 3 Pages

In reality, many people live without an absolute knowledge of the world and often times, they are comfortable with this ignorance. Likewise, Plato introduces the idea of this unawareness through The Allegory of the Cave, a short story in his published book, The Republic: Book VII. In his book, he narrates the story of a few prisoners who are held captive in a dark cave, where the only light that shines through is from a fire that burns behind them. He further explains that the prisoners are completely bound and unable to move their body or head. Moreover, he reveals that the captives grew up with no outside communication and consequently, the way of life in the cave was all they knew.

Read More
773 Words | 4 Pages

Plato tells us that the prisoners are confused on their emergence from the cave and that the prisoners’ will be blinded once they had been freed from the cave. After a period of time they will adjust their eyesight and begin to understand the true reality that the world poses. The stubbornness to develop a different perspective is seen in much of today’s society. The allegory of the cave is an understanding of what the true world is and how many people never see it because of their views of the society they are raised in.

Read More
1377 Words | 6 Pages

1) In the allegory of the cave, Plato’s main goal is to illustrate his view of knowledge. A group of prisoners have been chained in a cave their whole lives and all they have ever been exposed to were shadows on the wall and voices of people walking by. The prisoners in the cave represent humans who only pay attention to the physical aspects of the world (sight and sound). Once one of them escapes and sees the blinding light, all he wants is to retreat back to the cave and return to his prior way of living. This shows that Plato believes enlightenment and education are painful, but the pain is necessary for enlightenment and it is worth it.

Read More
1057 Words | 5 Pages

In other words they only know about that false reality that they are living in and to them there is nothing else. Plato then goes on to describe of how those people are enlightened when one is taken out of the cave and brought into the outside world they are shown the real reality and “enlightened”. If one of the people is enlightened he or she will be motivated to help those in the cave

Read More
1656 Words | 7 Pages

If they were able to move and look around, they would have seen the truth of the statues, and the fire behind them. The cave is a metaphor for human existence. The people in the cave accept the shadows on the cave wall as reality because this is all that they have experienced. The echoes they hear are assumed by them to be real for the same reason. Plato is trying to illustrate that people know little truth about the reality of the world.

Read More
1613 Words | 7 Pages

“Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exist in the soul already;” (Plato). Spoken by Socrates in reference to the philosophy of life, this quote depicts the meaning of broadening our horizons in order to gain knowledge and escape the shackles that confine us in the form of deceit. This quote is portrayed in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” as the prisoners detained in the cave are deluded by their perception of reality, and the prisoner that escapes loses that distorted world and becomes enlightened. The cave is a representation of the hidden lies in which the prisoners are provided as the premises of their knowledge and are restrained from the truth to remain ignorant. Ultimately, one of the prisoners discovers that the world in actuality is

Read More
1813 Words | 8 Pages

In Plato’s, “Allegory of the Cave”, a key theory I found was the importance of gaining knowledge. Plato uses an “allegory to illustrate the dilemma facing the psyche in the ascent to knowledge of the imperishable and unchanging forms” (Fiero, 104) Based on my research of the Republic, the allegory can reveal multiple hidden messages. Plato describes in the allegory, ordinary mortals are chained within an underground chamber, which according to Fiero, represents the psyche imprisoned within the human body. These mortals can’t look sideways, but rather only straight ahead.

Read More
1080 Words | 5 Pages

He symbolizes this “ignorance” with the cave itself. In the text we can clearly see the division between realities, between visible and intelligible orders. Plato creates the allegory of the cave only to refer to the world of appearances. This myth explains, men would be prisoners chained in a dark cave and that, because of being in such an uncomfortable situation, they can only see what they have in from of them that are, the shadows of other men, that’s because of a fire they have behind them, but they could not see . Having no other way of perceiving the world, those shadows would be for them their only reality.

Read More
264 Words | 2 Pages

In its simplest form, I believe that in the “Allegory of the Cave” Plato is trying to explain the difference between perception and true knowledge. It's not only an analogy about exposing what is behind the shadows when there is light. It's also about what happens when you finally do obtain this knowledge and then try to explain it those who have not been enlightened. The cave can represent a multitude of things: religion, government, life, a fixed perspective of the world, etc. Each of these provides context that shape humans views but also creates bias from which it’s hard to escape, especially as many “truths” are passed from generation to generation or taught in school.

Read More
1507 Words | 7 Pages

The Allegory of the Cave is a brilliant writing by Plato that really puts into perspective how we are living as a part of a materialistic and consumer society. The darn thing was written almost 2,500 years ago, and considering the fact that the allegory is still relevant today, Plato’s allegory is surprisingly very close to what contemporary society is like. His arguments are undoubtedly strong since he patches all his arguments well to lower any possibilities of counter arguments, but there is still room for doubt. Also, even with those weaknesses, the prisoners in the allegory are still indisputably similar to the people of today, and the cave doubtlessly like the modern society. In this essay, I will discuss some of Plato’s strength and weaknesses in his arguments as well as how the allegory still applies to the current people and society.

Read More
785 Words | 4 Pages

In “The Allegory of the Cave”, Plato’s idea of the human who escaped the cave, but came back to tell about his learnings but the other people in the cave did not want to listen to him since they believed that the cave was the real truth and did not want to be educated about the outside

Read More
2035 Words | 9 Pages

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is at its core a metaphor for what Plato believed to be wrong in Greek society at the time. The fact

Read More
1159 Words | 5 Pages

The emergence from the cave is an enlightenment of intellectualism, when all the difficulties and confusion of life is gone and only reality exists. Plato uses the shadow of fire as a metaphor for intelligence. The people who emerged out of the brightness represent truth; the freed prisoner. The chained prisoner would “look towards the firelight; all this would hurt him, and he would be too much dazzled to see distinctly those things whose shadows he had seen before”(Plato

Read More

More about Allegory Of The Cave Essay

Related Topics

Open Document