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Plato's Allegory Of The Cave Essay

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What does Plato’s allegory of the cave illustrate about the nature of reality for Plato?

For the Greek thinkers, living means go and search on what you believe in and confront fundamental questions, stay always hungry. For Plato, life its not real if you are in "autopilot", a life without own opinion, repeating the ideas and opinions held by parents, teachers and friends. It certainly can be a form of existence, but not real life. Plato addresses this issue in his long dialogue The Republic, in which, in addition to many of the essential platonic ideas, explores what should be an ideal society. A likeness of Socrates, Plato believed that most people live in ignorance most of the time; the worst part of this situation is that they didn’t even …show more content…

In the sensible world you can only get a contact with the opinions, while in the transcendental world, the soul being alone, you can know the truth only if the soul is freed completely from the body.
The soul exists before we are born and after we die, that’s why in the sensible world we have a foreknowledge of things through remembering, or precisely by Reminiscence, which is the ability of the man to remember everything lived in the transcendental world.
In the allegory of the cave Plato talks about how the soul liberates from all the ignorance surrounding us everyday. 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. It is for this reason that postulates the existence of the visible world “objects that surround us” and the intelligible world of “

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