Allegory Of The Cave

Submitted by doru69 on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM

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Allegory Of The Cave

Allegory of the Cave

Plato, the most creative and influential of Socrates' disciples wrote the "Allegory of the Cave" which symbolizes person's struggle to reach understanding and enlightenment .
The allegory is a description of a cave in an unknown location. Plato is saying
that all humans are prisoners and that the physical world is our cave. In the back of
the cave there is a fire , merely there to shed light on the forms, casting shadows into the cave.
The prisoners are chained in a way so that they are completely immobile .They
have their backs against the fire and they cannot even turn their heads to see who is
next to them. The fire represents the sun. All they can see it's the shadows on the wall of the cave. These shadows represent everything they can see and everything they had ever seen , therefore they constitute all that is real to them.
The essential point is that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy representation of it. They live all their life seeing only these shadows, and the voices they hear are only echoes from the wall.
A prisoner is released out of the cave, and into the light of the sun. The light
is so bright that the newly released prisoner cannot see. He believes he has gone
blind, but slowly begins to regain his sight. Now, he sees things for what they really are and he understands that he is in a better place .
He proceeds to tell the other prisoners, but they laugh at the enlightened one,
because the only reality they have ever known is a fuzzy shadow on the wall.
One day he is forced back into the cave. Because the light was so dim , he can no longer identify the shadows.
Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is one way to understand how a person becomes enlightened. Once we can make the connection between the cave and the real world,

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