The prisoners represent the citizens of the world within the analogy of the cave and the people who carry the objects are the politicians of the world. Plato had a strong dislike for politicians as he believed they told people only what they wanted to hear, which is represented through them creating shadows of real objects (false hope) to the prisoners. The
He leads them from the cave and shows them reality, challenging all they have ever known. Returning to the cave the prisoners reject what he has shown them, although the saviour realises he cannot go back to his former vision. He becomes an outcast with knowledge without friends. The difference between the fire and the sun is key to understanding the analogy. The light of the fire gave the prisoners their limited vision, showing only shadows, whereas the brightness of the sun allowed and expansive view of reality.
A prisoner is freed from his bonds, and is forced to look at the fire and at the statues themselves. After an initial period of pain and confusion because of direct exposure of his eyes to the light of the fire, the prisoner realizes that what he sees now are things more real than the shadows he has always taken to be reality. He grasps how the fire and the statues together cause the shadows, which are copies of these more real things. He accepts the statues and fire as the most real things in the world. This stage in the cave represents belief.
The prisoner reached the real world outside of the cave and, blinded by the sun, saw the real world in its glory and realised the illusion of the shadows. The prisoner returned to the cave with his enlightenment and tried to explain to the others of the reality. The other prisoners did not believe him, he was over-excited, blinded, confused and clumsy. The prisoners became frustrated with the man and wanted rid of the man disturbing their reality. In some versions of the story the released prisoner is even killed by the others.
The prisoners see the shadows and think that what they see is reality, like we think about our world now. The sounds made by the people walking past are thought to be from the shadows, what is seen and herd here is thought to be real. The shadows represent the images of the forms which are all that is seen in the physical world. The prisoners in this case represent the ignorant individuals who need to discover the philosophical truth; they believe that the shadows they see are the real objects because they know of nothing else. Plato relates this to the 5 senses, touch, taste, smell, sound and sight, it is easy for people to believe what is seen, touched, tasted because it is what we believe to be true.
The statues infront of the fire cause a shadow to be reflected onto the wall for the prisoners to observes. Since the shadows are the only things tat the prisoners can see they become accustomed to them so far as to predict the shadows movements. The prisoners believe that that shadows that are reality because that is all they see. They learn to associate the noises of people talking behind the wall to the shadows; to the prisoners this is their reality. In this analogy the prisoners represent us; the ordinary people in the everyday world that are yet to experience the true world that is out there – the World of Forms.
The memory of the World of Forms is lost in the trauma of birth and the physical demands of the body. Plato uses the cave to represent the world of sense experience and the area outside of the cave is the World of Forms and transcendental ideals. He shackles his prisoners in the same way the soul is shackled by the body and the trauma of birth. Therefore Plato believed that after transmigration the soul forgets everything that it learnt in the World of Forms, thus learning is remembering. The prisoner who escapes is a philosopher, a seeker of Truth, whose journey out of the cave is a
They try to prognosticate movements of the shadows; the sounds are made by individuals with the shadows, this is what they think as true reality. The detainees in this scenario are presented to be ignorant unenlightened individuals yet to discover philosophical truth. They are bamboozled into believing that the flickering shadows which are seen on the wall and they believe that what they see at face value are real objects and also the sounds the people make are being made by the shadows. Plato’s argument is that shadows and games are comparable to the five senses which mislead an individual. His theory is that objects which are seen in the World of Sense, Plato believes that that objects we see in the physical world are imitations of objects in the World of Forms.
Explain Plato’s analogy of the cave [25] Plato’s analogy of the cave describes some people who are prisoners and they are only able to see one wall of the cave. Behind them was a lit fire which gave light to be able to cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners were facing. These shadows were cast by puppeteers who were behind a wall and held things up to tell stories to the prisoners via the wall. One prisoner is forced out of the cave, where he has been his whole life, to see the ‘real’ world. He finds out, after adjusting to the new sunlight, that the shadows were just representations of real objects and that the shadows he had believed to be real objects were in fact not.
Allegory of the Cave-Plato “Allegory of the Cave” presents a vision of a group of prisoners chained in front of a fire observing the shadows of artificial objects carried by persons walking in the trek behind them and what would happen if a prisoner is set free. Through a serious of metaphors, Plato argues that a hero is man of wisdom, prowess, and endurance. First of all, the cave, chains and shadows show a full-scale condition of US citizens-they are confined by the ideal democratic and peaceful images pictured by the government such as those promising speeches given by candidates for presidency. The prisoners--Citizens in the US are only exposed to those appealing words of the government—“Mission accomplished:)”-- that they are unable to make a positive change because they cannot see the relatively cruel reality until someone is set free to “walk with eyes lifted to the light” and come back down there to inform them. As this free man sees the light, an “eye ache” is inevitable because he’s been in the dark for too long.