Frankie is the prisoner being showed the images and his mother is the person holding the objects. Frankie believes that his father is writing to him and that the man who comes to visit him is his father because it is what his mother tells him. In Plato’s cave one of the prisoners decides to escape from the cave and leaves. He sees that the images he sees on the wall are projections from people carrying the objects and the fire. He now knows 100 times more than he did just sitting in the cave just watching the projections.
Behind the prisoners there is a fire and the shadows were cast on the wall, which are the only thing the prisoners could see. As a result, they imagine the reality by the shadows and become their beliefs. Then one prisoner gets out the cave, and walks outside to the real world. The bright light from the sun shocked him initially, but later on he learns about the concept of the world, and finally recognizes the sun is the ultimate truth. I believe there are similarities to our learning process, for instance, when I studied chemistry at the high school, many chemical formula and equations which I found very difficult to understand.
Plato used this analogy to help his less educated contemporaries at the time understand why the physical world of sense is nothing but an illusion and that the intelligible realm is where the truth can be found. In the analogy Plato presents human beings living in a cave, which represents humans inhabiting the sensible realm. In the cave, prisoners are chained up by their necks and legs and are therefore unable to turn around. Since they have been chained up this way for their entire lives they have no experience of life outside the cave. Behind the prisoners is a low wall, a walkway and a large fire that lights up the cave.
THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE The following is an excerpt from Plato’s dialogue called “The Republic.” In this section of the dialogue called the “Allegory of the Cave,” Socrates creates an allegory to help illustrate his theory of knowledge. “Now then,” Socrates said, “let me tell you a story about ignorance and education which will explain the condition of man’s nature. Imagine that there is an underground cave with a long entrance open to the light. In this cave men have been chained from birth, fettered by the neck and legs so they cannot move. They cannot turn their heads around; they can only look forward at the wall of the cave.
Runyon 1 Joseph Runyon Jr. Prof. Chris Birch Humanities Jan 12, 2009 What is Reality? Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Francis Bacons The Four Idols give great incite on the flaws of human nature and their perception of reality. In The Allegory of the cave Socrates tells of people who are enslaved in a cave and the only reality they know is the shadows on the wall. When one of the prisoners is finally released from this cave he finds himself face to face with a whole new world. The prisoner slowly sees that what he thought was the real thing was nothing but an illusion of reality.
'Ralph realised that the boys were falling still and silent, feeling the beginning of awe at the power set free below them. The knowledge and the awe made him savage. "Oh, shut up!"' The meaning behind this simply is that, they feel awe at the fire's uncontrollable and fierce power, something that they had set free. The second sentence, the awe is for the fire, and the knowledge is that he made a mistake; the mixture of the two emotions creates savagery.
The prisoners in this analogy are meant to represent normal people, with their false knowledge/opinions being the shadows. The cave itself is mean to be the physical realm (the world as we see it). The sun is used to represent the form of good (the source of all things); the escaped prisoner’s journey is his ascension into enlightenment, where as the prisoners return to the cave is when the prisoner has already been enlightened and has gained the knowledge. Socrates, student of Plato, describes how he thinks the prisoner would be feeling and thinking during the prisoner’s journey through out the Cave analogy. Socrates describes the prisoners experience as starting out as fear and confusion as he starts to realise that the shadows on the walls are not reality.
Most people live their life with a cloud over their eyes. They refuse to accept the truth and believe what they want. In the "Allegory of the Cave," people see reality as the visible world, when reality is more than what meets the eyes. "Here they have been from their childhood and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them." (Plato) The prisoners are chained, unable to see elsewhere , but with fire, they can see shadows and begin to accept that as reality.
We see that ideas are eternal and perfect, even though the physical world crumbles. The "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato represents an extended metaphor that is to contrast the way in which we perceive and believe in what is reality. The thesis behind his allegory is the basic tenets that all we perceive are imperfect "reflections" of the ultimate Forms, which subsequently represent truth and reality. In his story, Plato establishes a cave in which prisoners are chained down and forced to look upon the front wall of the cave. When summarizing the "Allegory of the Cave" it's important to remember the two elements to the story; the fictional metaphor of the prisoners, and the philosophical tenets in which said story is supposed to represent, thus presenting us with the allegory itself.
The story tells us that there are prisoners in a cave chained in shackles facing a wall, as they have been there their entire lives this is all they have ever known. Plato uses this to symbolise the human condition with the prisoners representing ordinary unenlightened people, however Plato also says that their condition is no different to ours, people do not see the Forms clearly just the illusory physical world. The shadows cast upon the wall by the fire are illusions (Eikasia) but to the prisoners are real, Plato used this to explain his theory that everything in the physical world is a pale/imperfect copy of that in the Forms. They represent the sensory world of appearance, showing that things are always changing. The prisoners are not aware of what is happening behind them, and so for them the whole of their reality consists of the shadows cast upon the wall.