Plato uses the description of “Darkness” to possibly imply there are false realities that we each have and uses “sunlight” to stand for being enlightened by the “new world”, which is what the released prisoner was to experience. The “cave” is referred to as the “little world” that they are living in. I feel as if it is just a small part of the world that they know V/S the Larger world they should explore They are not free because they don’t know what experiences is outside the cave. They have been sheltered and not allowed to see for themselves what life can really be. The “shackles” are like a symbol of how they all have this same way of living and thinking.
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. In the analogy Plato presents human beings living in a cave, which represents humans inhabiting the sensible realm. In the cave, prisoners are chained up by their necks and legs and are therefore unable to turn around. Since they have been chained up this way for their entire lives they have no experience of life outside the cave. Behind the prisoners is a low wall, a walkway and a large fire that lights up the cave.
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.
According to Plato, the outside world represents the world of forms. The cave in Plato’s analogy symbolises the empirical world. Plato believed that the empirical world only the appearance of truth as it was constantly in a state of flux and that the empirical world has no form of its own, it is only substance. However, the forms in the world of knowledge are reflected onto this substance and the image of their truth can be recognized in this substance, based on the quality of reflection. The shadows on the wall of the cave symbolise the drama and objects in the empirical world.
Some of the bearers speak and others are silent, as you might expect.” “I see,” said Glaucon [Socrates’ student]. “Truly a strange place and strange sort of people.” “Actually, they are just like ourselves.” Socrates explained, “What do you think these chained men would know of themselves or each other or anything else? They will know only the shadows which the firelight casts on the opposite wall of the cave.” “They could not know anything else if they were chained so that they could never turn their heads,” exclaimed Glaucon. “True;; and what about the things being held above the wall? Would not they only know the shadows of these things?” asked Socrates.
Plato refers to untutored humans as the chained prisoners who can’t be able to turn their heads in the cave. The cave represents the world humans live in for the things they see do resemble their true forms just like the prisoners could only see the shadows cast on the wall, hear the echoes produced by the real objects behind them. They could not be able to turn their heads to see the puppeteers walking behind them and the fire that is producing the light that enables the puppeteers reflect their real objects on the wall. It is easy for the prisoners to mistake reality for the images in appearance. If an animal shadow is cast on the wall, the prisoners will talk about having seen an animal thinking they have seen the real animal.
Allegory of the Cave The Allegory of the Cave can be decoded in many different ways. It says that people are chained to the wall of a cave and they have nothing to look at but shadows on the wall that are provided by another. This is all that they know and have never been out of the cave. That tells nothing on the surface, but once one looks really hard a few messages or meanings can be interpreted from the Allegory. The main point of the Allegory of the Cave is to give an example of the way that we all live our lives.
The story Pastoralia was about a cavewoman name Janet and a caveman with an unknown name that are put to a test or an experiment. They have to learn how to get along with each other and how to survive without using the modern objects that they normally use. They needed to do an evaluation to each other at the end of every day, but the confrontation between then gets bigger day by day. In the story “Pastoralia” the author use altruism to describe how the caveman protect the cave woman even thought she is not behaving well putting his own job at risk if they discover that he is laying. “Janet was speaking in English, the caveman says she was doing her job” (Pg: 1-3).
In Plato’s essay, “The Allegory of the Cave”, he explores the different levels of “truth” which one can attain through knowledge and wisdom. Plato labels an assembly of individuals who have had a life bound to the barricade of a cave throughout the duration of their lives, fronting a bare wall. These people who have not even seen the light of day observe shades pitched on that empty partition by unknown items transient in the very face of a fire which lies blazing at the rear of them; these individuals instigate on attributing “forms” to these shades. Conferring to what Plato notes, these shadows are the closest these prisoners get to observing reality. He then elucidates on how the philosopher is very similar to a convict who is unbound from the cavern and understands that the shades on the front of the wall really have no constitutive of reality at all, since he can distinguish the true form of reality instead of the shades that the prisoners had perceived.
In other words, what would happen if people accepted philosophy and become enlightened by it? In the beginning of the Allegory of the Cave Plato represents man’s condition as being “chained in a cave,” with only a fire behind him. He sees the world by watching the shadows on the wall. He sits in darkness with the false light of the fire and does not realize that this way of life is wrong. It merely is his life — he knows no other.