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The Allegory Of The Cave In The Republic By Plato

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The Allegory of the Cave
In The Republic the great philosopher, Plato, addresses his well known interpretation of how society perceives the world and not reality. The Allegory of the Cave can be symbolize to modern time how people live in a world of ignorance and are yet to be enlightened by the absolute truth.
In Book VII of The Republic, Plato asserts his metaphor of the cave that shows the lack of education affects our perception or consciousness of ones surroundings. Plato describes a cave in which prisoners are kept since childhood. These prisoners are held in a peculiar manner where they are all chained to be unable to see what is behind them and are only to face the wall of the cave. All their lives they were only able to see shadows …show more content…

The prisoner begins to question his reality so he starts to explore the cave and finds a passage leading to the outside world. This represents when one becomes enlightened and finds himself understanding the true form of reality while the other prisoners are seeing an abstract model of it. This can conclude that there is a way to get out of the cave in the modern time by becoming knowledgeable and leaving the illusion of the world we call perfect and to be perfect. It is impossible to perceive the truth or reality with our senses we tend to use every day, so Plato suggest we use a spiritual perception to reject and break the world of material chains as an ideal concept to become enlightened. This spiritual perception can be achieved through education in which each individual is given the power or chance to become wiser and start questioning our reality. The Allegory of the Cave can also resemble to Eastern Philosophy how society lives only through the human ego and in order to get out of the state of delusion living in one state of conscience we would have to lead a moral life, be mindful and aware of our thoughts and to develop wisdom and understanding

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The people who are chained up get set free by the keeper, who is a symbol of the sun, or the “Rooster” who wakes people up from their illusions. The people are blinded by the sun and they want to go back to their illusion of life. This is when the people are in the Belly of the Whale or when they are symbolically dead. Once the people realize there is no way of going back to the way it was, they are “reborn” from their illusions and live their lives to the fullest and not take for granted what they have. Plato’s Allegory of the cave is

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