Plato's Allegory Of The Cave '

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Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the cave compares the effect of education and the lack of it on human nature. It describes a group of people who have been imprisoned in a cave for all their life. They are chained facing a wall and behind them is a fire. The only things they can see are images projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire. The shadow cast on the wall becomes the prisoner’s reality.

When one prisoner is set free, the light from the fire would hurt his eyes and he would turn back to the familiar wall. If the prisoner is forced out of the cave, the sunlight would hurt, but his eyes would gradually adjust to the light. The prisoner would then realize that the images he saw in the cave were not a reality. This realization would encourage the prisoner to free the other prisoners. When the prisoner returns to the cave, he would be blind because his eyes have become accustomed to the light. The other prisoners would conclude that the experience of the outer world was the

His theory is that in order to acquire knowledge we must not use our senses but must use intellect. This is because sense only provides opinions while intellect produces knowledge. An opinion is composed of a belief and an illusion, which is the lowest form of knowledge and portrayed as the shadows on the wall. Belief is the physical world and is changeable because it is what appears to us. Knowledge, on the other hand, is composed of reasoning and intellect. Reasoning relies on imaginations and assumptions while intellect provides an insight. His position is that knowledge cannot be transferred from a teacher to a student, but that the teacher should direct the students' mind towards what is