Socrates Allegory Of The Cave

Jacob Lumpkin Professor Morrow PHIL-1123 25 January 2017 WIT: Plato’s Cave Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is something that speaks to me in a very deep and direct way. It shows that we know much less than we think and that we are prisoners. We begin our lives in the cave accepting what we are taught by our parents, religion, school teachers, and government etc. What we perceive as reality is not always accurate as is shown in this story. We are chained up by our own preconceived beliefs and bias’s, seeing puppet shadows believing them to be reality.

That is just the beginning of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. His allegory envisions the world as a dark cave, the human beings as prisoners who are trapped and every life experience as nothing but shadows on a wall. Plato’s theory, with the cave, represents people who believe that knowledge comes from what we see and or hear in the world. The shadows represent those who believe that what they see should be taken as the truth, but if you believe that then you are merely seeing a shadow of the

“An unexamined life is a life not worth living” - Socrates. Both ‘The Matrix’ and Plato’s allegory of ‘The Cave’ develops a question of reality and how the world is perceived. This can be closely connected to one of the great Greek philosopher’s sayings where an “unexamined life is a life not worth living”. Socrates states this due to the increasing number of citizens who lived their lives without questioning the world around them. ‘The Matrix’ and Plato’s allegory explore how when the world is properly examined the outcome is a new understanding and perception of life.

Socrates uses many different appeals to logos. For example, when he states that it is improbable that he could succeed in making people worse while so many others are invested in making people better, he is using the topos of greater and lesser. The allegory of all allegories, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is not the rosiest take on the reality of human existence. You might even call it downright bleak: it envisions the world as a dark cave, human beings as trapped prisoners, and all of our experiences as nothing but shadows on a wall. "See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling," instructs Socrates, "with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the

In Book XII of “The Republic,” also called The Allegory of the Cave, Plato paints a detailed picture of the process in what it is to become enlightened. As humans we have limited perceptions of reality and we mistake these perceptions as truth and goodness. Plato tells us that what we are actually seeing are mere shadows of their true forms and is very clear in his point that traversing to the world of enlightenment is both difficult and painful. Not only that, but there will be those out there that are unwilling to seek this truth and seem to prefer the shadows. Plato asks us to examine ourselves and our beliefs and ask if these beliefs are biased or based on our own prejudices.

Socrates compares himself as a gadfly, because it represents him fulfilling Heraclitus 's challenge of not living one 's life as a sleepwalker. A sleepwalker is a person who is not stimulated to think critically or reflect upon life. Heraclitus warned "One ought not talk or act as if he were asleep" meaning Just doing day to day tasks is not enough for one 's intellectual development or to enrich one 's life. A gadfly is defined as an annoying, biting insect that attaches itself to a horse who needs arousing. Socrates wanted to arouse individuals to make the mind awake and alert.

Plato tells us that the prisoners are confused on their emergence from the cave and that the prisoners’ will be blinded once they had been freed from the cave. After a period of time they will adjust their eyesight and begin to understand the true reality that the world poses. The stubbornness to develop a different perspective is seen in much of today’s society. The allegory of the cave is an understanding of what the true world is and how many people never see it because of their views of the society they are raised in. The material world is the one we can see, touch, hear and smell, are just false truths of the reality.

They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me. (Bradbury 28)" In “The Allegory of the Cave,” the prisoners were forced to see the shadow of objects, and had to live based off of that, and they even had to argue their view, and what they saw. In “Fahrenheit 451”, Captain Beatty casts a shadow of what life should be lived like, but Montag is in disagreement, and feels as if life should be lived

James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is a tale of two complex interplaying narratives that De Mille uses to portray the critical shortcomings of several of the readers. Fundamental to De Mille’s critique is the use of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, wherein Plato alludes to three individuals chained inside a dark cavern deeming the shadows of passing objects as real, until one of them is released and realizes the outside world as real, albeit the remaining prisoners are hostile to this change in philosophy (Plato 317-20). Plato uses this image as an allegory to members of society being too comfortable in their ignorance and hostile towards matters that might challenge their perceptions of the world; in turn, never breaking from the figurative shackles of society (Plato 317-20). Hence, by analyzing the limitations of the readers Adam More, Lord Featherstone, Oxenden and Congreve, and Melick it will be clear that De Mille’s depicts several unskilled readers to satirize our views of the world through the use of Plato’s Allegory to the Cave in order to demonstrate what constitutes as a good reader from him. In the embedded

First of all, even though Odysseus changes the Phaeacians’ minds about him in Books 8-13 when he tells his story, Athena tacks initial problem-solving on the victim. According to Athena, and to Homer, it is the victim’s duty to protect themselves from what the xenophobic public might do, by hiding who they truly are. Odysseus is used to being powerful -- the most important man in the room. Hiding himself must be torture for him, which is maybe what Homer was trying to achieve. Secondly, this is not a long-term solution for Odysseus or anyone seeking long-term guidance from the story.