The Nature Of Reality In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

If they were able to move and look around, they would have seen the truth of the statues, and the fire behind them. The cave is a metaphor for human existence. The people in the cave accept the shadows on the cave wall as reality because this is all that they have experienced. The echoes they hear are assumed by them to be real for the same reason. Plato is trying to illustrate that people know little truth about the reality of the world. The philosopher is the escaped person who goes into the light and can see the true reality of the world around them. Plato argues that it is the duty of the philosopher to inform the people in the cave of the light. This means the philosopher 's role is to tell people of the reality of the world. Plato is saying that, unless we become educated, we human beings are like the prisoners in the cave. We think that we understand the world around us. We think that the things we see and otherwise perceive are real. However, we are incorrect because the things that we perceive are mere shadows. There are true forms of everything that we think we perceive, but we cannot see those forms. In the allegory of the cave, Plato is trying to make us understand that we see shadows and we think they are the real thing. Thus, the main theme of the allegory is that we are ignorant about the true

In the beginning portion of “Allegory of the Cave,” Plato introduces the story of the prisoners in a cave to illustrate the foundation of why some do not like change. He begins by explaining there are three prisoners in a cave who are bound and can only see the shadows of objects projected by a fire behind them (Plato 201). The author begins with this portion of the example to set the context for the rest of the allegory. Plato then goes on to describe how one prisoner is released to the outside world to experience the

The journey out of the cave represents a prisoners’ unwilllingness to change and a resistance to accept new truths. The prisoners have to force themselves out of the cave into this reality. 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.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was an interpretation of the aversion humans have to things that are outside of their experienced reality, as well as a proposed solution.

Plato’s Allegory of the cave represents life/death/rebirth. Life/death/rebirth is a popular archetype that most authors use in fictional books. Plato’s Allegory of the cave begins with people that are locked in chains inside of a cave. The people inside the cave see shadows on the wall of animals and creatures that they think represents their life. This cave is an illusion of life that the people are experiencing. 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

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, it also suggests an alternate world, a world that isn’t recognizably like, in " Allegory of the Cave “and in "The Machine Stops" they both throughout the story

In the “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato breaks the story into four main scenes to demonstrate the path to enlightenment for the unenlightened reader. He uses a story of a man trapped in a cave,

In “The allegory of the Cave by Plato”, great philosophers offer a theory concerning human perception. Plato described it starting with three prisoners; these prisoners would have face the wall of the cave in a set position. They would not be allowed to move. A fire would be placed behind them with a walkway between. Along the walkway, people would walk carrying different items. These people as well as items would cast a shadow on wall for the prisoners to see. Socrates suggest that the prisoner would start identifying different items and classifying them, “Now if they were able to say something about what they saw and to talk it over, do you not think that they would regard that which they saw on the wall as beings” (Plato 1).

We, the students are the “chained prisoners”. We are only allowed to know what the “puppeteers” allow us to know. The “puppeteers” can be seen as the teachers. Now we have to ask ourselves, what are the “shadows on the wall” that we see everyday. I believe that the “shadows” represent all of the illusions that we live by as our reality. College students, myself included, tend to have a like minded way of thinking, similar to the men in the cave. We tend to think that we know everything that there is in the world, when in fact we don’t. We seemingly have a complete grasp of what our future will be, when really our future is bound to adapt based on changes in our life. The prisoner also believes he knew what was his future based on where he was at the time, until he ventured out and discovered things weren’t as easy as they seem. Upon his realization, that things were not as he perceived them, he had to adapt to the new way of thinking. Adaption is often scary, and many people will tend to avoid it at all costs. Some people deny the need to adapt, even though it is apparent that adaption is eminent, because of fear of the unknown. The chained prisoners are indeed in denial and not willing to believe their fellow prisoners new found thought because, it goes against their already perceived

They would actually be shocked to find out that whatever they had been exposed to by far and whatever they had presumed to be the ultimate reality, was in fact not so but were actually shadows of the real images. If now the prisoners were actually taken out of the cave and been exposed to the real world, the disorientation and shock would be even more severe. The light of the sun would be even brighter than that of the fire and they would be able to see the real world with their own eyes, absolutely crystal

Plato’s short story the Allegory of the Cave, Plato portrays a scene in a cave to the reader that analyzes human actions. The story is about a group of men that are chained for their entire life. The only thing they are exposed to are shadows on the wall of a fire burning by people behind them. The people exposing these men are hiding the truth of the outside world. Plato reveals that humans are easily fooled into believing what they see. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave the people think that their entire reality is the shadows that they see on the walls of the cave. Plato explores the truth and criticizes that humanity does not question what is real.

Even though there are people willing to risk it all to go back to the life they had, there are some that become submissive and stop fighting. In Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford phycology department. They recruited college students to run a mock prison so they could study the effect of becoming a prisoner and a prison guard. In this experiment that was supposed to run for two weeks ended up being stopped by the researchers on the six day because it was getting out of control. This is stated by the heads of the experiment Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, W. Curtis Banks, and David Jaffe in their report of the experiment. In the six days that the experiment ran they saw the personalities that the prisoner and prison guards took.

Plato tells of a group of prisoners held in a dark cave chained to the walls. These people have never stepped outside into the world and can only experience shadows that are displayed on the opposite side of the cave through the light outside of the cave. One of the slaves, now liberated steps outside of the cave and is able to experience reality, or what we can distinguish as objective truth. After returning to explain to the other what he has seen there seems to be quite a difference in opinions(Plato). In his article Plato’s Cave, T.F Morris attempts to dissect Plato’s allegory and explains his belief that “… the shadows on the wall of the cave correspond to what we call reality…(Morris 417)” As Adler previously stated objective truth exists whether or not the human being has experienced it, in this instance the forms that cast shadows while passing by the cave. It can be inferred that both Adler and Morris agree that the negative response of the remaining prisoners in the cave towards stepping out and experiencing reality is a subjective truth and depends on the opinion of each prisoner, thereby belonging to the sphere of taste. Plato is able to present a situation in which both objective and subjective truth can cause a rift in the relationships that human beings can

In Plato’s dialogue, the cave allegory, I am given a story about a prisoner and allowed to depict an image of what the cave looks like. Inside the cave are prisoners, a fire, a rocky path, and people who carried various artifacts that project shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The fire represents the sun, the rocky path symbolizes the journey of the soul, the prisoners represent us, the shadows were what they believed to be the truth, the people carrying the artifacts symbolize influences in life for example parents or teachers. The cave as a whole represents the visible realm. In the dialogue, the prisoners are chained so that they can only see what is in front of them and being depicted on the wall. “They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them,” (514b). A prisoner is freed and dragged outside the cave,

Also, outside the cave realm, people were engaged in their daily work; however, a wall had been built between these two worlds and restricted the cavemen from seeing the world. They could only see the shadows of people along the wall and accepted those shadows as the reality (Plato, trans. 1997, p. 514b-515b). This masterpiece of Plato is one of the most famous and perceptive assay to illustrate the nature of reality. The cave stands for the state of most human beings, and the tale of escape from the cave is the origin of the true understanding. In this composition, Plato believes that the world is made up of two parts; the forms, and the reality. The first part, material world, which one can see, touch, hear, and smell is really the half-seen images of the reality of forms. Relying on one’s physical senses alone, trusting what one sees, or hears make him or her effectively blind. Plato, in the story of the prisoners in the cave, represents metaphorically how far is one’s perceptions through physical senses from the reality. Those prisoners in the cave who were kept there since their childhood, had been chained in a manner that they were unable to move around their heads and incompetent to experience the happenings and real things in their surroundings. They were only able to see the opposite wall and the reflections of the statues, objects and other items in the form of humans and animals which were projected by the fire behind them to opposite wall, they presumed to accept those shadowy images on the wall to be real. Comparing this situation from the story to one’s real life, it can be inferred that in most cases people just see one side of a coin while the reality is perceivable only when one be aware of the two sides. The allegory of the cave also portrays that understanding of the reality is obtainable