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Allegory Of The Cave Essay

Decent Essays

In Plato’s Republic, there are a several key passages including “The Good”, “The Sun”, “The Divided Line”, “The Cave”, “The Summoners”, “ The Curriculum”, and “The Model Recruit” that help us better understand the four main points of this reading. The four main points are intelligibility, the good, and dialectic and how these things make people more moral individuals. During the final stages of producing philosopher-kings, we discover that The form of the Good is a major key in deciding who can be a philosopher-king. The individuals can understand The From of the Good, which means that they possess the highest level of knowledge and intelligibility, a very rare trait. The good is what most of the discussion surrounds and he gives us three analogies to describe “what is the offspring of the good and most like …show more content…

He describes a scene where people have lives in a dark cave and have never seen the light of day. These people are bound and can only see the wall that is right in front of the. Behind them is a fire and they can only see shadows that are cast on the wall in front of them, in this stage these people represent imagination, the lowest stage on the divided line. Next, a prisoner is released and is able to see the fire and the statues that cast the shadows on the walls in front of them. This stage is the stage of belief, when the prisoner begins to understand how the fire casts the shadows on the walls. Then, the prisoner is released to the outside world, and is able to see “real” objects and develops the use of thought. Last, the prisoners begins to understand how the sun is the reason why he call see these things and reaches the stage of understanding. “In the knowledgable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen , and it is reached only with difficulty” (1135B). We are encouraged to “put knowledge back into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind

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