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Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

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The meaning and comprehension of life has been a common topic to debate about for a very long time. Philosophers still don’t fully understand the bigger picture of life, but to see a bigger picture, you have to first at all of the small pictures that make up the big picture. In Plato’s story, “Allegory of the Cave”, he has written a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon about one of these smaller pictures. It talks about unintelligent and intelligent people, the idea of good, leadership, and some other topics. With all this supporting the main theme, it is the idea of intelligence and knowledge and how it is linked to society. There are many links between these two topics in life. A big topic that is talked about in the book with a strong …show more content…

This is shown through word choice throughout “The Allegory of the Cave”. It is the idea that Plato believes in a religion and the story could be interpreted as having a religious idea behind it. After explaining all of the allegories he made in the first part of the story, he says “according to my poor belief[...]whether rightly or wrongly God knows”(146). This line proves that he does have belief of a higher power and does think about it throughout the passage. Later in the reading, he is explaining what would happen if the uneducated would lead a government and how they would lead off of compulsion. At the end, he mentions “the Islands of the Blest”(255). The Islands of the Blest are partially mythical islands also known as the Fortunate Isles and are rooted in Greek mythology. Greek mythology is big with gods, goddesses, and titans. Blest is also another term for blessed which is used in religion. Now how all this links to intelligence is belief. If someone believes strongly in a certain religion, they believe that they are in the light. Now these enlightened people will sometimes drop down to the cave, the prisoners being people that don’t believe in their religion, and try to make them believe what they believe and bring them into the light. This idea is slightly harder to see, but can still be

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