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Plato's Cave Analysis

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"Critically assess Plato 's Cave in terms of what it reveals about the nature of truth."

What is the truth. Plato defined the ultimate truth as “Aletheia”, which literally translated to mean “unhidden” or “that which does not remain unnoticed”. However, not all people’s thought are same. Oxford dictionary states that truth is “that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality” or “a fact or belief that is accepted as true”. As this, truth can be thought differently by people. Then what is the truth? By investigating through Plato’s Cave allegory, we will go to find out how truth is shown in Plato’s cave allegory and what is the truth.

What is the truth in the Plato’s cave allegory? The ‘Truth’ in Plato’s cave allegory can be divided into two. One is prisoners’ perspective and other is people except prisoner’s perspective. From prisoners’ perspective, the shadow on the cave wall is the only thing they believe as truth. Another tried to tell them the outside of the cave, but they thought that person as crazy, therefore refuse to become free. The prisoners were in their imagination shadow world with believing the shadow as truth because that is the only thing they knew. However, people except prisoners thought that their world and what is tangible are the truth. The world they are living now is what they have learn from when they are born. …show more content…

However, later one prisoner finds out that there is thing that is more realistic by looking at the sun and other objects and starting to believe that world out of the cave is the truth and shadow wasn’t the truth. Then wouldn’t there be more realistic world and this world we are living could not be the truth and another world that is more realistic could be the truth. Just as the shadow of an object is faded copy of the actual object, the world as we perceive it is insisting of perfect copy of the

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