Power In Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

Power is used in our everyday life in many different forms, in many different ways, through many different people. But this leads to the question of what is really power? Power is when someone with a higher authority has the control over someone or something. Power was usually represented in the Renaissance with kings, queens, and or the churches. People of the lower, class such as peasants or knights, usually followed orders of those who held the higher power. Today, people have power within our politics, family households, work, maybe even in friendships. So, we are experiencing power wherever we are including school, work, home, etc. Truthfully power can mean something different to anyone, but the main concept you can take away from it

It also made the point that knowledge can be led in a positive way, but it can also go back to a negative as well. “If he again recalled his first dwelling, and the “knowing” that passes as the norm there, and the people with whom he once was chained, don’t you think he would consider himself lucky because of the transformation that had happened and, by contrast feel sorry for them?” Plato acknowledges that those who have the ability to expand their knowledge, have a privilege to see other views that others have not been able to have for themselves, and should most definitely take it and use it to their best abilities to get a broader idea of what occurs on the world outside of them. Later on Plato talks about how the prisoner who had been freed and came back to tell the others what the outside world held. When the prisoner came back, Plato described how the other prisoners were dumbfounded and did not want to have any belief in what the prisoner had said. Although this point of power is very different from the point of power in The Prince, Machiavelli talks about in order to maintain power you must be more feared than loved. In this case I think that the other prisoners were in fear of hearing what the other prisoner had told them. They were in fear of change, which does not follow the idea being feared is better than being loved. From this contrast, this leads me into Machiavelli’s The Prince and its power told within the