Platos Analogy of the Cave

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Explain Plato’s Analogy of the cave (25) The Analogy of the cave is one of the most famous passages in Platos Republic. It is one of three similes that Plato uses to illustrate his theory of Forms. The Cave in which Plato describes is allegorical, which means that every element of the story has hidden symbolic meaning to the individual person. Plato uses the story to illustrate his theory of the World Of Forms although each individual debate on how to interpret elements of this analogy. Plato begins his analogy with a cave; the cave is said to represent the empirical world that we see and hear around us. Inside this cave there are prisoners who are facing a wall; these prisoners have been underground since they can remember and are chained into position by their necks and ankles. The prisoners are unable to look anywhere but at a wall. However behind the prisoners there is a fire, when the guards walk by the fire they carry statues on their head. 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 chains in which the prisoners are bound by are the illusions we experience during our life span. These illusions keep us from progressing in life and making the discovery to our true reality. The shadows on the wall represent our senses in literal meaning – our innate senses cause us to accept all that

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