Plato 's Allegory Of The Cave Essay

In The Republic, Plato argued that the good is the light of reason. By this, he means that the heightening sense of enlightenment found in the Form of the Good and the comprehension of universals is what incites reason and just living. Plato Flawlessly commands this argument through the meticulous articulation of his allegory of the cave and the analogy of the divided line.

Sigmund Freud’s theory is said to have probed deeper into the human mind than the others that can before him. Part of his theory was about the mind. “On the surface is consciousness, which consists of those thoughts that are the focus of our attention now, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg. The preconscious consists of all which can be retrieved from memory. The third and most significant region is the unconscious. Here lie the processes that are the real cause of most behavior.” (McLeod, S. A., 2013) He also later established the theory that psyche is composed of id, ego and surer ego. The id functions unconsciously in reaction to the pleasure principle or basic instincts. Ego grows form the id in early childhood, and helps to maintain good behavior. Lastly the superego also said to develop in childhood, is in charge of safeguarding that honorable standards are kept. In other words it encourages us to behave ourselves.

Plato’s logical strategy in the allegory of the cave is of deductive reasoning. Plato uses a cave containing people bound by chains which constrict their neck and legs in such a way that they are unable to turn around and there is a fire roaring behind them casting shadows on the wall. Since the prisoners cannot turn their heads to see what is casting the shadow the only thing they can perceive are the shadows and the sounds that seem to becoming from them. This is what Plato argues in the allegory of the cave “To them, I said, the truth would literally be nothing but the shadows of the images.”(The Allegory of the Cave Plato). Since these prisoners know nothing outside of the cave they are ignorant of the “light” and are content on

Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”: A Summary Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave” is about Glaucon and Socrates having a discussion about slaved men and their perception of knowledge. These slaved men have been chained by their necks, arms and ankles since birth and the knowledge they pertain is from the sounds and imagery they have seen that echo off a wall in a fire lit cave. In this cave people pass through on the walkway in front of the fire pit. They carry things on their backs and heads from the market and talk to one another.

Moreover this Super Ego is a development from both the ID and the Ego itself and represents our attempt to integrate values learnt from the society and from parents. Freud further explains that psychological health is maintained only when these three components are in balance. Any imbalance in between them leads to psychological disorders (Davey, 2011).Furthermore, Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages, the unconscious and the conscious mind completes the formation of the major components of psychoanalytic theory. (Cherry, N.D)

The Allegory of the Cave by Plato is an article about the lack of awareness of humanity and is caused by the idea of the unknown. I think some people are quick to assume based on what they see or think and do not try to figure out the actual facts. I truthfully feel that it is unjust to not be certain about factual events and base your opinion on close-minded knowledge to what only seems right to you. Those prisoners who suffered and were shackled only relied on the shadows that they had seen with nothing to relate it to realistically. This lend them to only draw close to the items that seemed familiar without even trying to learn or understand the other objects. You can apply that to right now situations.

The video describes Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from his Republic (380BC). Plato describes the responsibility of gaining knowledge and bringing back to the masses no matter what the results: “ It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good, but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.

In society today most people live by what is call “social norms”, most people follow these norms and some choose not to follow them. Social norms are certain things in life that everyone does to be accepted by their co-workers, family, friends and even strangers. Some may feel that they have to live by these norms to get through life without being rejected and to be known as a “normal” person, hence the word “norm”. If a person were to stray from this path and just do what they felt like doing and do what made them happy as an individual, would they be criticized? In Plato’s Allegory of a Cave he describes an example of people conforming to the norm they were born into and then shows the results of a person emerging from this community

Sigmund Freud, known as the Father of Psychoanalysis, explored the human mind more thoroughly than any of his colleagues before him. With his intense studies, he created the topographical model of personality. The topographical model distinguished three key things which creates ones' personality that deals with ones' consciousness. The most important aspect is the Ego, which is the balancing act for the Id and the Superego. While the Id seeks to fulfill ones' desires on impulse, the Superego tends to think of a more morally acceptable way to get ones' desire fulfilled. When the demands of ones' desires are too stressful to comprehend for the Id and the superego, defense mechanisms are commonly used to protect the Ego from the distressing anxiety.

Freud’s structural model illustrates that within every individual there is tripartite structure consisting of the Id, Ego and Super Ego.

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato uses this to describe how we learn and what the effect of it is on our nature. Along with Socrates, this theory is also associated with the Forms (or ideas) and that these Forms are the true definition of real knowledge (Appearance). The Cave theory also shows that the beginning of the history of philosophy was very two sided. The Allegory of the Cave is divided into three sections: Being inside the cave, leaving the cave, and returning to the cave (Appearance).

When you lose the person who matters most to you in this world, time alters. Time is no longer a linear progression of events. Time becomes a memory of another life. Ten years pass within a day, then you wake up and another decade has been added to the distance, an alien life form, a foreign place, another person inhabiting your body in the past, and, yet, the memories flood the goop of your brain, as if the single greatest loss of your life happened this morning.

Because of how we live, true reality is not obvious to most of us. However, we mistake what we see and hear for reality and truth. This is the basic premise for Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners sit in a cave, chained down, watching images cast on the wall in front of them. They accept these views as reality and they are unable to grasp their overall situation: the cave and images are a ruse, a mere shadow show orchestrated for them by unseen men. At some point, a prisoner is set free and is forced to see the situation inside the cave. Initially, one does not want to give up the security of his or her familiar reality; the person has to be dragged past the fire and up the entranceway. This is a difficult

Since ancient times, people have looked up to the sun as an important part to their lives. For example, the Aztecs built, Teotihuacan, to be able to locate the exact point where the sun will reach its highest point. In the Egyptian civilization, Egyptians worshiped the sun as if it was a god. They named the god Horus, who they offered many sacrifices including human flesh to satisfy the god (Ahmed 2010). All of these civilizations were interactive with their environment, but imagine if one knew only of the reality they believed inside of a cave not experiencing events within the real world. In Plato’s, Allegory of the Cave, he describes the scenario of prisoners kept isolated in a cave left to come up with a reality that they comprehended with the images that they saw in front of them. This applies especially to politics, because people are left to decipher the context of the speeches many of the government leaders give, but seldom explain their motives. The policies proposed by presidential candidates obscure the reality of their motives within their campaigns by appealing to the majority 's’ opinion on specific issues that the government needs to address.

The Ego is the conscious state, the rational mind which organises our thoughts and makes sense of them. This develops during the first two years of life.