Groff 1 Kirstyn Groff Ms. Campbell Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” Response Questions 8/15 Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” Response Questions Q1: The cave in Plato’s allegory represents the reality we chain ourselves in. The chains being our inner selves fear of letting go of the reality we created. We allow the chains to hold us back because we don’t have the courage needed to free ourselves. We lock ourselves in the darkness of the cave that puts a blanket over our eyes to blind us from the light. The light at the end of the cave represents the good in life, the perfection in the world in front of us.
In the analogy one of the prisoners is released, he turns around and discovers the fire, people and the rest of the things behind the prisoners. At first it was painful for the prisoner to look at the fire as his eyes were only accustomed to the shadows, gradually however he becomes used to the light and can see more clearly. Plato uses the cave to represent the World of Appearances or the Empirical World- the world in which we live. The shadows on the wall represent images, shadows and other illusions which we can see from the sun, here depicted as the fire. The prisoner is dragged by force out of the cave into the true sunlight.
Behind them is a fire, and behind the fire is a partial wall. On top of the wall are various statutes, which are being manipulated by another group of people, lying out of sight behind the partial wall. Because of the fire, the statues cast shadows across the wall that the prisoners are facing. The prisoners watch the stories that these shadows play out, and because these shadows are all they ever get to see, they believe them to be the most real things in the world. The prisoners make up games to do with guessing which statue or object will come next, believing this to be a skill.
Plato, through the spoken words of Socrates, attempts to illustrate the value of education in the form of an allegory to Glaucon. In book seven of Plato’s Republic, Socrates verbalizes a realization that the average person living within their society could both think and speak without any cognizance of the Forms. In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave; with this he begins to lead Glaucon to understand the difference between genuine knowledge and opinion or belief. The allegory of the cave is supposed to explain how the people of society can appear to function well without any knowledge of Forms. Socrates invites Glaucon to imagine prisoners who have been chained since childhood
Emily Dickenson’s poems“Tell all the truth” , “The brain“ and Plato’s “allegory of the cave” are speaking of truth,and the wonders the mind can hold. In plato’s “The allegory of the cave”, the prisoners eyes are hurt by the light he was shown; in Emily Dickenson’s” Tell all the truth”, she says “ the truth must dazzle gradually”. Each could help one another out in their points because they are portraying the same message.“The truth's superb surprise” is shown very clearly in both the poem and the allegory, for in the poem, it has been directly stated ,and in the allegory, we find that the truth is not what the prisoner had thought it was , that he will “ ..be perplexed”.“ Success in circuit lies” is telling the reader the only way to get anywhere is to move; in the allegory, the prisoners do not move and do not know of anything other than where they sit, until the one prisoner is freed. At that point, the only one who got anything done was the liberated prisoner.This all shows how truth can have many different ways of showing itself, and both plato’s writing and Emily’s writing can work together to prove one point about truth. In Emily Dickinson's” The brain” we can see her point of how much the brain is truly capable of; also, in “the allegory of the cave”, it speaks of these chains holding the prisoners’ heads in place;one can infer from the reading that this is metaphorical and really, it is just the prisoners’ own thoughts and feelings holding them back.
The philosopher then goes back into the cave to try and share his ideas with the other prisoners. The sun in the outside world illuminates the truth. When the philosopher first goes out into the light he is blinded by it. This could show that it’s painful to accept reality
Travel through the catacomb, which with the darkness, evil-smelling foul air, the damp, nitrous wells, and full of human bones. These descriptions allow readers to put themselves in the story and get the same feeling as the characters. The danger is getting closer, but Fortunato doesn’t know his fate. Move to the scene where Montresor walls-up Fortunato, the setting become the most perverse part of the story. Just before dying behind the wall, Fortunato still ask for Amontillado.
When finally able to turn its head around, the prisoner first starts to acknowledge that what they have been seeing are only the shadows of the objects that pass by the fire. That’s when the idea of what is the true reality kicks in. that of which it has known all of its life or that which it has been shown to be the true reality. He is then taken out of the cave and see’s the world of what it is now being shown as it that being the true reality of the world not the shadows that he has only seen. Seeing this, the prisoner would start o contemplate what is the true reality that which it has known or this new world that it is being shown.
It will take ample time for you to get use to and to adjust your mind to gain information from your previous mindset. (657) Grandin said, “People have tremendous difficulty with change. In order to deal with a major change, I needed a way to rehearse it.” “In the Cave” Plato releases one man to the world, showing him the direct light of reality rather then keeping him imprisoned and seeing illuminations of life by the shadows casted by the fire light in the cave. The fire in the cave represents the illusions we see in life and the light represents the truth of reality. (667) He would start “ By night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon than by day the sun and the sun light then finally, he would be able to look upon the sun
This also ties into Socrates’ “Allegory of the Cave”. In it, Socrates explains that if we are showed the same non-existent thing, we start to believe it. The people in the “Allegory of the Cave” are chained in a cave, facing a rock wall. The images presented on the wall are what they presume to be real. Without the proper teaching, they obviously believe what they see.