Allegory of the Cave

The Allegory of the Cave is a written dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates. It is presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in the seventh book of The Republic, (A 10 book dialogue written in 380 BC). Plato wants to show us that the ability of our minds is almost unaccountable for when it comes to becoming educated. Plato wants us to see that it is up to us to get an education and that it is all about how bad we want it. I can connect this to a point in my life when I came to the realization that nobody is going to aid me in life and that it is up to me and only me to determine where I will end up and how successful I will be.

In The Allegory of the Cave Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to give names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners can get to viewing reality. He then explains how one of the prisoners is freed from the cave, and has to be forced to leave his sitting position in the cave. he has to endure a lot of pain, but when he comes to the top of the cave he comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, since he can now see what true wisdom and reality is. This enlightened prisoner then goes back to the cave and tells his comrades about his sighting out side the cave, they off course think he has lost his mind, They try and test him to see if this "genius" can guess the upcoming shadows. But the prisoner had his vision weakened since he had been in the light and now was in the complete darkness of the cave. The other slaves see how weak he is, and end up killing him because he wast a danger to them; they believed that he would take them outside and they were afraid of loosing their sight and intelligence just like the freed slave had.

An allegory is a story, poem, or painting in which almost everything has a symbolic meaning to something else in the real world. In the Allegory of the Cave, the slaves in the cave represent us humans, "They are very much like us humans," (Plato). The sun represents the truth, it represents the first principle of knowledge and wisdom. The people projecting the shadows can be seen as the government or media, since they control the perspective we get of reality and in a way control our opinions and thoughts. The base of the cave represents the world of conventional opinion and conventional practice, it is the world of ignorance. But Plato gives the base of the cave a more metaphysical (branch of philosophy that studies reality) interpretation. He says that the base of the cave is more of sensible physical world. while the world out side of the cave is more of an intellectual world; a world of ideas. It seems as if Plato believes that mental reality: the world of ideas and of intelligence is more real than the material world where things come and go. For example a triangle, the idea of a triangle is a three sided figure that has interior angles that sum to 180 degrees, while the material world is just a triangle. Now the material triangle can come and go, just like shadows, but the idea will always be there, as long as there is a mind to think it. The base of the cave represents the place of conventional opinion, people there have just accepted what has been shown to them and have not though about it. The process of leaving the cave represents the process of getting educated, yet this process is not easy. As the slave ascends into reality, he has to fight what he once believed, he has to go against everything he once thought was reality. The person freeing the slave can be seen as a teacher or a mentor. When the slave comes back and tells the other slaves of what he saw, they think that he is crazy and end up killing him. This represents the killing of Socrates, because he had seen what no one had before and people were afraid of the unknown, especially because it went against what they believed was true.

I believe that the main meaning Plato is trying to convey in the allegory is education. "If I am right then, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into a soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes," (The Republic, book 1). Some call this view the "baking model" of education. In this model the professor has capital (knowledge) and the students all have empty accounts, the students sit there while the professor distributes his capital into the students' accounts. The students will once in a while make a deposit of their own, in the form of a test or a paper, but only to make the ultimate withdrawal at the end: a degree. But Plato says that a system of education where the student passively sits there