Socrates The Allegory Of The Cave

Socrates’ description of a philosopher in Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” suggests the creation of a new hero. In this text, Socrates portrays the role of a philosopher in the creation of a just society. This philosopher represents a new type of hero, who seeks the Truth through extensive thought and questioning. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Socrates depicts the prisoner’s journey outside the cave as a journey of the mind and soul toward enlightenment and the absolute Truth. A philosopher must venture outside the cave to experience the authenticity of world outside the one he used to know and be able to separate illusions from reality. The philosopher is a leader because of his quest of the Truth, but he is also altruistic. The philosopher

“The Allegory of the Cave” exemplifies a path of intellectual transformation that has important parallels to the journey of a hero. Socrates’ description of the Allegory of the Cave represents education and the role of education on the soul. This analogy consists of several stages that highlight the philosopher’s heroic journey. The first stage is an image of cave prisoners who spend their entire lives looking at shadows. The prisoners are “chained not just by their legs but by their necks, so that they can’t move and can only looks ahead of them” (Plato 239). Due to this, as they are unable to change or skew their vision, the prisoners’ only reality lies within their lines of sight. Behind the prisoners lies a wall, which puppeteers use to cast shadows of their puppets. These shadows are fabrications of the truth, while the puppets themselves are replicas of reality. However, since these cave prisoners are limited to one point of view, they “think of as the truth would be nothing but the shadows of the manufactured objects behind them” (Plato 240). This illustration represents the monotonous world of the prisoner before he crosses the threshold. Therefore, the prisoner begins his journey trapped in a realm of appearances and is completely unaware of the reality outside of the

This stage begins by describing the perspective of a prisoner who is freed and forced to look at the fire and puppets that produced the shadows. The fire epitomizes a falsified truth because it shines light on the puppets, which themselves are imitations of veracity. Socrates asks, “What do you he’d say if someone told him that what he saw before wasn’t worth seeing anyway, and that he was seeing better now because he was that much closer to the truth of things [?]” (Plato 241). The freed prisoner, after dealing with initial pain and refusal, ultimately realizes that the puppets he sees are more real than the shadows. Next, the freed prisoner is dragged outside and is exposed to the things that the puppets represent. Furthermore, he believes that these things are more legitimate than the puppets and accepts the cave as a filter or imitation of the truth. Finally, the freed prisoner is “able to catch sight of the sun, not just reflected in water, or as it appears in any alien location, but the sun itself, by itself, in its own place, and observe it as it is” (Plato 242). Thus, the freed prisoner looks at the sun and realizes that it is the source of light that allows him to see. The sun, which shines outside the cave and remains unknown to the prisoners, represents the ultimate Truth. By passing Campbell’s threshold, the freed prisoner passes the