Show What Ideas Plato Was Trying to Convey in the Analogy of the Cave (25 Marks)

740 Words3 Pages
Plato’s analogy of the cave, overall, is an analogy of how we, in our physical state, cannot gain knowledge of the true forms. Plato was an absolutist philosopher in classical Greece. He was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues and a student of Socrates, which some may say, after Socrates dramatic death, fueled his fire to prove classical Greece wrong. However, millenniums after the analogy was conjured, it is still not clear what Plato actually meant: it is down to interpretation. Firstly, we come across Plato’s metaphor of chains. He tells us to imagine being held to our seats by chains as we watch a shadow play unfold in front of us. My interpretation of this is that we are being bound by our physical bodies. The body is a boundary and a distraction, preventing us from gaining pure knowledge. Due to our human state we cannot even begin to fathom the extra-terrestrial. In response, I ask, we lived in these bodies all our lives, how do we figure out they are boundaries? Secondly, Plato tells us to imagine that we break free of these chains. We turn around and realise that the shadows we have been watching aren’t even the objects we thought we saw. There stands a huge fire with puppeteers in front of it holding subjects and feeding us our beliefs. I interpret this as we have decided to think “outside the box” and tried to contact the extra-terrestrial despite our society, i.e. the puppeteers, telling us what to believe in. But what makes this one person break free? If we have thought one way our whole lives, how do we break that tradition? Then, Plato goes on to say that we are beckoned by a light and we decide to walk towards it, (as it is the way out). This seems to be the beginning of our questioning process. This light is enlightenment or the way to pure knowledge. What makes us follow what we have never encountered before? Plato uses the

More about Show What Ideas Plato Was Trying to Convey in the Analogy of the Cave (25 Marks)

Open Document