The Allegory Of The Cave

394 Words2 Pages
In Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”, one of the famous story portraits his idea, was written 2,000 years ago. Surprisingly the philosophy is still applicable in 22nd century. As such, we could elaborate the philosophy from the allegory about the way of thinking and learning. In the allegory, a group of prisoners in a cave were chained and unable to move. 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. At the beginning, I used my imagination to infer the theories, and tried to memorize the knowledge rather than understanding. Although it was not a systematic method for learning, it was the best way of a high school student could do, as Plato mentioned “they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads”. We were not able to pursuit the knowledge deeper due to limited perceptibility, and trapped in the bottle neck. The situation did not improve until I further studied at college, my professor, like the one who brings the prisoner got out the cave, guided me the way for finding the truth. The learning process had dramatically changed from memorizing to understanding, and I found chemistry is easier to understand than I originally thought during high

More about The Allegory Of The Cave

Open Document