Plato Analogy of the Cave

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Explain Plato’s teaching about reality in his analogy of the cave. (25) Plato presented his analogy of the cave, in order to explain his views about the realm of the Forms. The analogy of the cave was made to portray his understanding of the world, reality and true knowledge. He states that the world that we see around us is just an illusion created by our senses. In the analogy of the cave there are the prisoners, representing the ordinary, ignorant man and then there is the man who escapes the cave, representing the philosopher’s discovery of true knowledge. Plato explains that the prisoners are in this illusory world because all they see is the shadows cast by the statues on the wall in front of them and so the prisoners believe that the shadows are reality because it is all that they can see. Through this he can apply this to the rest of humanity in that he majority of humanity live in an illusory world where one cannot differentiate between reality and appearance. Just as the prisoners are content in accepting the shadows as reality, people are content in accepting what their senses tell them as facts without questioning the deeper understanding. Plato believed that behind every concept or object in the visible world, there is an unseen reality, which he calls its Form. The return of the prisoner back to the cave symbolizes someone who has discovered true knowledge and therefore tries to enlighten those who have not. However Plato does acknowledge that the journey to the discovery of true knowledge is not an easy one. As the person in the cave is released and forced to the surface, they suffer as they are forced to adjust to the sunlight. At first, the person from the cave may not want to be up on the surface of the earth but as he becomes used to the light he realizes that his former view of reality was not accurate. Looking at the fire makes him

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