Plato's The Allegory of the Cave Essay

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The Allegory of The Cave
Junwoo Lee
THEO 190 003 SP15

This work written by Plato tells us about the theoretical environment, which is supposedly happening in a cave. Since a very young childhood, a group of prisoners have been held and bound by tight chains designed to prevent them from turning their head around so that they could not see the source of what is happening in front of their very eyes, which is their observable and perceivable reality. The world of shadows, which in fact, is performed by people and their puppets behind them is thought to be the only reality both because of the physical constraints and the consequent prison of their minds artificially created from the controlled and limited exposure to the actual reality.
What is going to happen if one of the prisoners were freed to see the world freely and allowed to come back to the darkness? Socrates explains, it will take time to adjust his eyes to either the outside world or the cave if he comes from the darkness or light respectively. Basically the extreme two ends, the Sun and the shadow world in the dark cave, are inherently incompatible to each other because of the difference in their natures. The prisoner examines everything in detail, and after hard time trying to figure out what it is all about, he is finally “illuminated” to a degree where it is impossible for him to go back to the dark cave because of two following reasons. First, his fellow prisoners will not only laugh at him and think he has lost his eyesight for exploring yet untrodden roads but also they will not hesitate to kill him for trying to allegedly rescue them, which for

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world with a very unique theory called Allegory of the Cave. The theory described “prisoners” living inside of a cave, only seeing what was placed directly in front of them; shadows. The shadows are the closest things that the prisoners get to seeing reality. Essentially, one prisoner escapes and discovers the outside world. He brings back his discoveries to tell the other prisoners, but they are too skeptical to believe that what he saw was the truth. Plato’s cave theory develops the thought that humans…

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difficult to change something and try to believe that it is true because we have been so used to the way things have always been. This quote relates to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave because the video shows that the prisoners in the cave don’t believe it is their friend when he comes back to tell them something. The prisoners were so used to staring at a cave wall, chained up, and not seeing anything that was behind them. Once their friend left and explored the world, the other two prisoners didn’t recognize…

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Sometimes things are not always what they seem to be. Plato, a philosopher, uses an allegory to describe just that. His allegory is commonly referred to as the “The Allegory of the Cave.” Plato’s allegory enlightens readers that we must not give up trying to educate, even though people may resist new ideas or learning challenging things. It also portrays how when people grow accustomed to seeing the world through an intermediary, it can blind them to the real world. Television is a modern form of…

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