Allegory of the Cave
Allegory of the CaveA report I had to do on Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Plato
was born 427 B.C. and died 347 B.C. He was a pupil
under Socrates. During his studies, Plato wrote the
Dialogues, which are a collection of Socrates' teachings.
One of the parables included in the Dialogues is "The
Allegory of the Cave". "The Allegory..." symbolizes man's
struggle to reach understanding and enlightenment. First of
all, Plato believed that one can only learn through dialectic
reasoning and open-mindedness. Humans had to travel from
the visible realm of image-making and objects of sense to
the intelligible or invisible realm of reasoning and
understanding. "The Allegory of the Cave" symbolizes this
trek and how it would look to those still in a lower realm.
Plato is saying that humans are all prisoners and that the
tangible world is our cave. The things which we perceive as
real are actually just shadows on a wall. Just as the escaped
prisoner ascends into the light of the sun, we amass
knowledge and ascend into the light of true reality: ideas in
the mind. Yet, if someone goes into the light of the sun and
beholds true reality and then proceeds to tell the other
captives of the truth, they laugh at and ridicule the
enlightened one, for the only reality they have ever known is
a...
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