Prisoners In The Allegory Of The Cave By Plato

In Book VII of Plato’s The Republic, the allegory of the cave paints a picture of ordinary people imprisoned in a cave. They are facing away

Once the cave prisoners and Neo are released from their state of ignorance, they start to become more understanding of the outside world, as represented by the cave dwellers escaping the cave, and Neo leaving the matrix. As the prisoners are in the cave, watching the shadows pass on the wall, one of their prisoners is released from the shackles. Because of his natural curiosity, the prisoners turns his head to look outside the cave. Whilst looking outside the cave, the light from outside and will cause him to “suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will not be able to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows” (33-35). Because of the looming darkness always present in the cave, the bright light of the sun blinds the prisoner momentarily.

“ If they lost you, with all the training you’ve had now, they’d have all those memories again themselves.” (pg 144)

We are asked in Book VII of The Republic to imagine a group of people sitting inside a cave, with their hands and feet bound. It is by

In "The Allegory of the Cave,” by Plato, there are prisoners in a cave with a fire that is located behind them. They have always faced the wall of the cave and have only seen what was outside of the cave from the shadows. They believe that the shadows of the objects carried are real but in reality, it 's just a shadow of the truth. The prisoners play a game where they guess what the shadows are and end up believing that it is the truth. However, when one prisoner escapes and faces reality, where the sun is a source of life, he realizes that the game was pointless. He seeks for meaning and truth from his journey outside of the cave. Socrates then insists that he must return to the cave and share what he has found with the prisoners because it will benefit everyone as a whole. However, when he returns and informs the prisoners, they react by not believing him and threatening to kill him if he set them free, because they are scared of the change that would occur after knowing the truth. Socrates believes that knowledge gained

When the prisoner makes his way back into the cave, he will have to readjust to the darkness, since he has been out in the daylight- however, he knows this does not matter as he has seen what is beyond this cave. The prisoners would not want be freed: the cave is all they have come to know, it is their reality; the cave is where they are most comfortable. Leaving the cave would mean they would have to adjust to new factors and face the fact that their whole understanding was based upon an illusion. Even if the prisoner goes back to tell the other prisoners about all that he has seen in the world outside the cave, they won’t believe him; they will not understand what he is speaking of. Those who live in the cave are accustomed to that life only; if someone leaves and discovers that reality is drastically different, then that person is going to have a hard time convincing the others that there is anything other than what they know. The person who tells them otherwise will be criticized and labeled "crazy" by the inhabitants of the cave because they simply don't know any

Imagine living through life completely bound and facing a reality that doesn’t even exist. The prisoners in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” are blind from true reality as well as the people in the movie “The Matrix” written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. They are given false images and they accept what their senses are telling them, and they believe what they are experiencing is all that really exists. Plato the ancient Greek philosopher wrote “The Allegory of the Cave”, to explain the process of enlightenment and what true reality may be. In the movie “The Matrix”, Neo (the main character) was born into a world of illusions called the matrix. His true reality is being controlled by the puppet- handlers called the machines who

In the cave, the prisoners’ limited perception of the world is based on the shadows depicted on the wall and the freed prisoner has a higher perception because he has rationalized the world outside of the cave. As Socrates state “visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light inside it to the power of the sun, if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm” (Grube, p. 189), anyone who accepts rationalized ideas from

His body isn’t ready for the direct sunlight and his mind cannot comprehend the world in comparison to what he felt he knew. In time, the man is able to see that all of the previously “known” information he had was completely false but also that he must start a different journey in order to find himself as the way of life he was previously use to, in which guessing was the way of judging knowledge, is ineffective and useless to him now. Finally, the prisoner returns to the cave with a new base of knowledge. He tried to share this information with his fellow prisoners but after hearing about his travels and that they were in fact wrong the prisoned men said to him that “up he went and down he came without eyes, and that it was better to not even think of ascending” ("The Simile of the Cave." Republic, 1974) . He is then met with resistance in offering them help and freedom from their binds. They threaten “if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender and put him to death”, it is as if they feel that his “loss of sight” is death to them and they are perfectly happy with the information that they know to be true ("The Simile of the Cave." Republic, 1974) .

At the worker level, there are many hardships. They are forced to work and pay taxes. Like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, they don't know what is capitalism and consumerism. They might have heard of the word but the level above them have kept a strict circulation of information about it. Happiness is success to them. They think of success as being promoted to the upper level. It could be done by producing an heir that helps them escape or through their own hard work. Plato's Cave refer to this level as the people who have yet to start questioning society. They will live in this cycle until they find a way to escape. Education is merely feeding information into them by those of the upper levels. Love and compassion are things they indulge in but it's only superficial. They love in order to temporarily escape from their reality. The prisoners of this level blindly believe in their religion as right.

In the "Allegory of the Cave," the chained down prisoners are limited with their perception on reality. At

The “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato represents the differences in the way we perceive reality and what we believe is real. In his story, Plato starts by saying that in a cave, there are prisoners chained down and are forced to look at a wall. The prisoners are unable to turn their heads to see what is going on behind them and are completely bound to the floor. Behind the prisoners, puppeteers hide and cast shadows on the wall in line with the prisoners’ sight, thus giving the prisoners their only sense of reality. What happens in the passage is not told from the prisoners’ point of view but is actually a conversation held between Socrates and Glaucon (Plato’s brother).

In the cave are prisoners held in captivity all their life one day one of them gets freed and he explores the world outside and is overwhelmed with everything happening. He goes back and tells the other prisoners and they assume that he was brainwashed and don’t believe him. He tries to free them but they decline. The prisoner who was freed became enlightened and understood the surrounding environment he was placed in. The others stayed ignorant because they've seen the same events happening around them since they could remember. This would be hard to understand from someone who has never seen the actual world out of the

" 'Death,' I said, 'any death but that of the pit!'...At length for my seared and

The prisoners don’t know what life is and it’s purpose. So putting into conclusion, the prisoners seem to believe that the only way to life is the cave and the images they see. These prisoners see shadows of people and objects projected by the light of the fire. The fire is lit behind the wall they are shackled to, so they don’t know exactly what they are seeing.