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Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

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An allegorical essay is generally used by writers as a metaphor to create a hidden meaning in their story. This can be seen in the essay, “The Allegory of the Cave” by Plato, a part of his larger work The Republic. In this essay, Plato tries to subtlety send a hidden message that humans rarely understand the true reality of our world. On the other hand, we think that we know everything about our universe, but we only see the “shadows”, as he says, of the real universe. It also shows how humans are not open to change and will ignore anyone who tries to teach them the reality of our world because humans think that they know it all already, but they are stuck in their own bubble. To send this thesis, the author uses symbols, descriptions and an …show more content…

In fact, Plato describes with details the cave, the outer world and our perception of our world. The cave is described as dark with little light coming from the fire and there are chained people who are not open to learn the reality. It its described in this way to represent our mind and our perception of the world. The outer world is well light and everything is clearly visible, yet none of the prisoners wants to believe that this the reality. It is described in this way to represent the real world that the prisoners, simply refuse to belief as the reality. Plato also describes our perception of the world in two ways, a sensory perception and a spiritual perception. The sensory perception being the world of appearance, it is the world of illusion or “shadows” as he says. This sensory is presented in the essay as the perception of the prisoners in the cave who believe the shadow of the fire is the reality. The spiritual perception represents the real world. This kind of perception is only possible if we reject our sensory perception and break out of anything restraining us from the freedom to learn. Therefor, in this case, the prisoner need to forget their sensory perception that the “shadows” are the reality and break out of their “chains” that restrains their freedom to learn and the freedom to get out of the cave. Even if one of the prisoners manages to get a spiritual perception and learn the reality, they can not convince the others that their perception of the world is false. These descriptions combined helps the author explain furthermore his thesis and show that most humans perception is sensory and are stuck in a dark cave with no clue of the reality of the outer

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