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.
The “shackles” are like a symbol of how they all have this same way of living and thinking. Each of them have been tied together in this world of not knowing the life outside of the “cave”. The thought often scares those without the ability to understand that reality is what one may make of it when embracing the situations you may encounter daily. (The Republic) Yes, I do believe it is important for people to escape “the Cave”. According Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" The chained man was suddenly released from his bondage and let out into the world.
The same shared dream continues to crop up throughout the novel. Unlike most men in their position, they have something to look forward to and something to share: ‘With us it ain’t like that. We got a future.’ Since George is continuously placed in a position of inferiority throughout, the dream becomes a way of expressing his distaste to the brutality he receives. He wishes to be in a position of control and power where he can give others the same treatment he was put through. This can be seen while he once more shares the dream with Lennie stating ‘If we don’t like a guy we can say, “Get the hell out”’.
After having set eyes on the sun, this man cannot go back to the cave, to the dark, and see the world as he used to before he started contemplating the truth. This man is Segismund. The limit of Segismund’s world is the walls of his cells; what he knows of the world, he has learned from Clotaldo the jail keeper. Basil, the King of Poland and Segismund’s father, can be likened to the people behind the wall in front of the fire; they are presenting images of what they deemed was acceptable to show the men in front of them just like Basil did to Segismund. Basil is like these men also because he feeds images to his son while he thinks he is living the truth, when these men are just as ignorant of the world that lies outside the cave they live in as the men that have been shackled since birth.
Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner is the journey of a boy, as he tries to find peace through atoning of his sins. Amir is the protagonist who goes on this journey. Amir’s father, Baba, has high expectations of Amir, which causes a strain relationship as Amir is unable to fulfill what is expected of him. This strain then acts as a catalyst for Amir’s crime against Hassan. This crime against Hassan and Amir’s subsequent guilt permeate the texture of the narrative.
Furthermore, within the work, he defends himself against the charges and also typifies his accusers. How does Socrates characterize his accusers? He thinks of them as artificial students of Sophists. A Sophist is someone who is a shallow thinker and has been taught to win arguments with flowery rhetoric. There, he is admitting their education, but dismissing it all at the same time.
However it is reachable by passing through different limitations His Both Plato and Descartes argue that humans are trapped by wrong assumptions and beliefs. In his essay Allegory of The Cave, Plato proves how people are fooled to believe in wrong ideas. He uses a cave to present the world of sight, in which people are prisoners since the day they were born. The people in the cave cannot see the light, neither each other’s, because their hands and neck are chained and they cannot move. These people only see what in front of them is.
For example a prisoner confined to an eight by ten cell without the interaction of friends, family, and even other prisoners would eventually succumb to the loneliness of his solitude While in his cell initially he would aquire thoughts on his activities preceding his current state of affairs, how he may change in a manner of improving himself, and how his actions are affecting others. These are all positive effects of a forcible solitude. After time however this solitude will exume a state of loneliness and possibly negate the positive effects of the solitude. However there are levels of solitude that we can use to gather ourselves without completely disassociating with society. Daily meditation is a perfect example.
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher born in 428BC and The Cave is one of his best known analogies. Plato uses this analogy to try and help him explain his philosophical position on the relation between the intelligible realm (abstract ideas of forms eg. truth, beauty and justice that can only be accessed by reason and intelligence) and the sensible realm (the 'real' world which we can experience as humans and in which we should try to perfectly replicate the forms put forward by the intelligible realm). This is known as the Two World Order. 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.
Socrates Through out the history of mankind there have been many influences on the way we think, and the way we view the heavens and the earth. In this paper I am focusing on one in particular, and his name is Socrates. But my question is what makes these people so smart that they can tell us how to think, what to question, or even what to believe in? Socrates for one was one of the guiltiest of this concept. He was known for corrupting the youth, questioning government, questioning religion, studying the heavens and the earth, and telling others about what he thought was the right way to think.