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.
A) Explain the analogy of the cave Plato’s analogy of the cave is taken from the republic and is used to illustrate his theory of the forms. The analogy uses elements of the story to symbolise the situation in which people find themselves in reality. The analogy can be broken into three different sections: the description of the cave, a prisoner breaking free and the prisoner returning. Within the cave there is a section facing a wall with prisoners chained in such a way that they cannot turn their heads or move from their spot. Behind them, out of their view is a walkway on which people walk across holding objects above them.
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.
Silhouettes or shadows of these figures are reflected on the cave wall from the light of a fire. As the prisoners have never known anything else, they mistake these images for reality and think that this is all there is to life. One prisoner, becoming free from his shackles, is able to turn and see first the objects casting the shadows and then the source of the light. He makes his way out of the cave, painfully blinded at first by the brightness of the sunlight beyond the entrance to the cave. He now sees reality, and recognises the shadows below for what they were.
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.
Explain the Allegory of the Cave The allegory of the Cave was made by Plato when he tried to explain human ignorance and how almost all humans don’t see our true reality. It refers to the Cave as what we perceive reality to be and how we are chained to a wall to only see this perceived reality. Plato tries to make us a see a world in which the prison was to be released from his chains. Where he would feel intense pain by the light outside and dazed but the new world he begins to see, where he would also struggle to adjust at all to truth of reality and his new surroundings. After he realises that what he previously thought to be reality was in fact a lie, he tries to forget about his past life.
As the prisoner is exposed to the real objects casting shadows on the wall, he is confused, realizing that the shadows are not reality. Then, the prisoner will see the light given off by the pathway leading out of the cave, and feels repelled by it, as his eyes have been adjusted to see in the dark all his
Because of the fire, the statues cast shadows across the wall that the prisoners are facing. The prisoners watch the stories that these shadows play out, and because these shadows are all they ever get to see, they believe them to be the most real things in the world. When they talk to one another about “men,” “women,” “trees,” or “horses,” they are referring to these shadows. These prisoners represent the lowest stage on the line—imagination. A prisoner is freed from his bonds, and is forced to look at the fire and at the statues themselves.
“The Caves in Our World” In the story, “The Allegory of the Cave,” there are prisoners chained in a cave who have never seen the outside world, but only distorted views of people and the objects they carry along the wall behind the prisoners. In one sense, the cave could be seen as the darkness that people live in when they do not know Jesus. They live in a dark world, where the fire is Satan, who lies and distorts peoples’ views of things by casting the shadows on the wall. People who do not know Jesus are tempted and lied to by Satan. He makes it near impossible for those people to see the truth spoken by the Bible.
The cave symbolises the World of Sense, a figure of captives are tired by their ankles and necks so that they are unable to change direction. They have been brought up like this since birth this is why they don’t know anything else but this. The prisoners are individuals who act like marionettes before the fire which burns so that they would be able to see shadows which flicker on the wall before them. The captives observe this flickering shadow which appears on the wall before them, eventually they developed a pattern over-time. 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.