Plato 's Allegory : Knowledge And How New Knowledge Can Alter A Person 's Entire Life

In Plato’s allegory of the Cave, he describes how prisoners are chained in cave and they can only see what’s in front of them. They can’t even see themselves or the people besides them, the only thing visible to them are the shadows of the people carrying objects and the animals. The shadows were the only things that the prisoners knew. One of the prisoners breaks free and leaves the cave. As he goes into the real world he is blinded by the bright light and the reality of life. The prisoner saw that the life he onced lived was a lie. We are blinded by the lies and things we want to believe. If we were to see the truth, then we would return to tell the others, but they would not believe us.

Plato: People need to be enlightened. People may be claiming that they are enlightened but in reality, they are not. Even some of the most educated individuals are in total darkness. The reason why educated individuals are not necessarily enlightened is that education system is all about forcing concepts into the minds of the students and expecting them to believe it, memorize it and pass exams. Educational system does not allow cultivation of inner freedom. Inner freedom is what give someone an inner sight. Inner freedom enables the person to see things the way they are and not the way the books or society or peers expects one to see

In Plato’s allegory, a group of men are held as prisoners in an underground chamber. In the chamber there is no light nor happiness. The men are only allowed to look one way and that is forward. For years, their scenery has been a dark wall with shadows from the objects or people that are behind them. They have never experienced the beauty of nature or the warmth of the sun’s rays. What crime have these men committed that forced them to face such a terrible fate? They are used to being in the dark, that when one man is set free he is amazed by what he sees outside of the chamber. The bright light blinds him and once he faces reality, it slaps him right across the face. He feels sorry for the men in the chamber. He feels sorry that they cannot

In his essay, “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato, argues his idea of how to distinguish the reality and truth from that which is a falsehood. Most essentially, he finds it as important to enlighten others that may remain in that

In his essay Plato is asking readers to seek intellectual enlighten. For Plato it is important that the reader not just accepts everything he/she sees as fact, but to question and analyze every situation that he/she ventures into. In his essay Plato states “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?” to which Glaucon responds “Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.” When trying to achieve the type of enlightenment that Plato speaks of opposition is often faced, because not everyone has achieved the level of enlightenment, so they will not only be scared, but they will also uncomfortable with all the new knowledge that is being spread, which jolts them from their comfort zone. But according to Plato once the reader has attained enlightenment the reader has a moral obligation to use this enlightenment to lead fellow

In this allegorical lesson, Plato discusses the way in which acquiring knowledge that was previously absent changes the way a human views the world, as well as the concepts of ignorance and the effects of an uneven disbursement of understanding among people in a similar environment. The Plato’s cave , there are multiple men who have been chained up against a wall, and thus their vision is fixed upon a certain setting, and they are unable to look away from that scene. There is a fire behind the men chained up, which casts shadows against the wall as people move in front of it. The shadows are what the men deem to be real, and is their only reality.

First, Plato argues that the mind is susceptible to false ideas because of the limitations of our senses. This is shown in the conversation between Socrates, a speaker in his allegory, and Glaucon, the second speaker. Socrates explains to Glaucon that the prisoners in Plato’s metaphorical cave are bound to assume that the shadows thrown on the wall, by the fire, are real and that the objects held by the passers-by, walking along the road, belong to the shadows. “And so in every way they would believe that the shadows of the objects we mentioned were the whole truth.” (Plato, 26). Plato believes that the world perceived through our senses is not a real world, but a poor copy of it. This prisoners do not know that they are prisoners, which makes them to be completely unaware that the reality they know is false.

4. In the Allegory of Human Cave, Plato describes human world as a cave, in which, our perception of “truth” is nothing but a shadow coming from the “sun”. Each of us has been chained so that we’re not able to look at the source behind our back. In my interpretation, Plato implies that the world in which human perceive is like a cave, we might be chained and unable to look beyond the “shadow”. Thus, what we see in the “reality” might not be the reality, but its shadow. Also, Plato describes that the one who broke the chained and explored outside of the cave, once comes back would receive the denial from others. This person, in my opinion, represents the role of philosophers, which is the one who always seeks for the reality or the “sun”. The philosophers are the peers who realizes that the world we perceive is just a shadow, and not that many people are able to realize that. Then, some would ask why we know whether if the world is a shadow. Yes, we don’t. We also don’t know whether if the world is not a shadow. In another word, there isn’t “absolute truth” about the existence of the “reality” we’re living in. Therefore, we need to keep seeking for the “reality” no matter whether it is what it seems to be or not. Then, how can we break the chain that ties us to the “shadow” of reality? One of the answers is to keep questioning. As mentioned above, there is no absolute truth. One could be right today and will be wrong tomorrow, vice versa. By questioning, we’re able to explore

One of Plato’s first points found in “The Allegory of the Cave” is that the pursuit of truth grants man knowledge of himself. Man can never force someone into recognizing “light” and or “truth”. Socrates says to Glaucon, “And supposed once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated?” (Plato 3). Once someone is introduced the light for the first time it will be difficult to understand truth

The thing Plato saw and suggest to his readers that the majority of humanity live in “the cave”, dark, and with the possibility of knowledge is what can bring them out from darkness. He explain it like these, because “the conversion of the soul is not to put the power of sight in the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to make sure that, insisted of looking in the wrong direction it is turned the way it ought to be.” This makes Plato to reject the sophists, who bring into being “true knowledge” with his three worlds: the cave, the dark, and the bright that it is impossible due to invariable transform. In this sense, Plato understood there is a “true idea of justice”.

The Allegory of the Cave is an allegory or metaphor used by Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.). Plato uses the Allegory of the Cave to represent the ascent from opinion to knowledge (Kranak, 2002) and ultimately enlightenment. For Plato, opinion was belief, hearsay, imagination and sense experience, for example, experiences that involve sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings. Plato proposed that this type of empirical thinking was unreliable and fallacious (Dennick, 2008). In comparison, knowledge is justified true belief, belief or opinion that needs to be justified with evidence and logical reasoning (Daniel, 2003).

Knowledge is awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Whereas ignorance is lack of knowledge or information. According to Plato in the story “The Allegory of the Cave” ignorance is much more common than knowledge itself. People are too comfortable in their ignorance that when they are introduced to knowledge they discard it. He believes that the “truth would literally [be] nothing but the shadows of the images.”(3). Shadows are the ignorance of the world. How they only believe what is right in front of them never questioning or wanting more. If the a prisoner in the cave were introduced to “suddenly stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains”(3). The pains would

In Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave he uses a parable as a metaphor that demonstrates ones fear of change and what they don’t know. In the text, Plato describes a situation where prisoners have been living in a cave located underground for their entire life. There is an entrance at the top with a bridge, where a fire burns causing shadows. The prisoners in the cave have their hands and feet bound, which causes them to be stuck facing a large wall. People enter the cave with objects held over their head and shadows are cast on the wall. As this happens, the prisoners play a game where each one of them tries to guess what the shadow depicted on the wall is. Whomever guesses correct is praised and idolized. The prisoners are only seeing the shadows, so that is all they believe to exist. One of the prisoners manages to get free and the world he finds outside the cave walls shocks him. What he discovers goes against everything he has ever known and it

As defined by Webster’s Dictionary, an allegory is “a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms, or a figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.” Allegories are used in many different ways to help people grasp a concept that is not easy to fully grasp. Allegories are constantly used in philosophy to help describe different ideas and teachings. Out of all the philosophers Socrates is the one that is best known for using allegories to make people think. In Plato’s reading the Republic, Plato talks about how Socrates uses three symbols, the sun, the line, and the cave as ways to describe the good in the world.

Plato is known as the most progressive and fruitful philosophers of his time. He created the practice of questioning everything, and he illuminated the knowledge ignored by the majority. His ideas were rejected, despite his intentions of expanding knowledge and creating a more clear vision of the world. However, his students of philosophy, Aristotle and Glaucon were the most prominent of those who chose to learn from him. Plato engaged in dialogue with these two in particular, and he used one of his conversations with Glaucon to exemplify the message that people did not want to be enlightened in the "Allegory of the Cave", a section of his book Republic. Through the use of counterpoints, metaphors, symbols, and paradox, Plato was able to accomplish presenting a paradigm where humans find it difficult to accept the reality of enlightenment over the comfort of a simpler fantasy they have always known in the “Allegory of the Cave.”