Explain Plato’s Parable of the Cave Plato’s parable of the cave is an analogy of what Plato thought reality was. It tells us a story of a group of prisoners found deep within a cave. The prisoners were chained together and forced to watch a large wall in front of them. This was their life since childhood, watching this wall. Behind the prisoners was a large fire and between the fire and prisoners was a walkway.
In his description of the parable of the cave, he describes prisoners in a cave ‘with a long entrance open to daylight as wide as the cave,’ the prisoners legs and heads are restricted of movement so they can only look straight ahead of them. ‘Behind them and higher up’, is a fire and between the prisoners and the fire is a road with a curtain ‘like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and the audience, above which they show their puppets’ (Simile of the cave). Men go past this screen, carrying tools and gear behind the curtain and the prisoners believe that the shadows they saw are real and that they were able to speak. The prisoners believe they are real because it is all they have been seeing since they were children. They never question the source of the shadows, they simply accept that they are there.
Plato describes the cave as having prisoners chained up facing the cave wall. These prisoners are in an illusory world (our world- the world of appearance). These prisoners are chained to the floor, these chains could symbolize our senses, saying our senses (the chains) cause us to accept everything that we see and hear around us. There is a fire burning behind them, of which they can see the shadows of on the wall in front of them, they believe the shadow is real and is the reality of the fire. As well as the shadow of the fire, the prisoners can also see shadows of people crossing the footbridge behind them, carrying stone animal statues; again they believe these shadows to be real.
Although all three had some differences I saw the greatest difference in the Meditations I reading. In the Matrix the character Neo was made aware by Morpheus that the world he was living in was not the real world and was given the opportunity to see what the real world was like. He was made aware that he was really a prisoner trapped inside of a computer program and that everything that he perceived was created by a machine and was really a false reality. In the Allegory of the Cave the prisoners were chained to some rocks with their hands, feet and head bound in such a way that they were only able to look straight ahead. They were very aware that the cave in which they sat was real.
Plato’s Cave Plato’s cave includes prisoners locked up in a cave by hand and feet with their heads in a fixed position so that the only thing they can visibly see is the wall in front of them. Shadows appear on the walls seen in front of the prisoners allowing them to think the shadows are the reality of what is outside of the cave. Little do the cave prisoner’s know, the shadows are produced by a fire burning at the cave’s entrance and allows the objects being carried by the fire to produce shadows that reflect off the wall. The prisoner’s that are kept in the cave are to believe the cave is reality. If you then took one of the cave dwellers into the real life, they would feel threatened by the bright sunlight shining directly into their eyes.
Plato cave analogy is that anyone who was not or is not a philosopher, are like prisoners in a cave 'Behold! Human beings are living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light'. As prisoners they were forced to watch the shadows on the walls. These shadows were created by a fire, which were being manipulated by puppeteers. Furthermore, until they got to see what life was really like and not the artificial reality they have been experiencing.
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.
Only true reality can be found in the world of forms, in which everything is unchanging. Plato’s analogy is set in a cave, the cave is meant to represent the physical world, from which people only see what Plato describes to be an illusion. The prisoners within the cave know of nothing but what they have seen for all their lives. Behind the prisoners are a low wall and a walkway, in the walkway a fire burns, every now and then people walk past the fire carrying objects that reflect into the cave as shadows. The prisoners see the shadows and think that what they see is reality, like we think about our world now.
A number of prisoners are bound by their necks and legs so that they cannot turn around. They have been this way since birth and know no other life than this. Behind the prisoners are a low wall, a walkway and a fire that burns. From time to time individuals carry objects like marionettes in front of the fire and shadows are cast against the wall in front of them. The prisoners observe the shadows that flicker before them and have developed a game over time.
The quote "See human beings as though they were in an underground cave like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to light across the whole width of the cave" explains a symbol; the cave where humans are in symbolizes that humans have don’t have an open mind and their mind is trapped in a "cave". They just look at one way and they don’t turn around to see if there is something more around them or outside of the "cave" which shows how ignorant they are. What humans need to do is get out of their cave and open their mind to other ideas and beliefs, that way they can have a sense of ownership in their lives. You don’t clearly illustrate what the cave is symbolically. I would argue that it is more metaphorical than symbolic.