The sole way of becoming emancipated from this confinement is by being open-minded and by looking at things from all perspectives.
Despite having very many civil liberties such as the freedom of speech, we have failed to use these freedoms to think positively, basically confining ourselves to a cave. The allegory corresponds very much to our lives today. The reason why the descending man went back to the cave after having been liberated was to inform his unenlightened colleagues about the beauty of the world outside the cave.Īs a result of his bid to educate his fellow men he was put to death. This narration is essentially about how Socrates was persecuted by his contemporaries because of his wisdom. His objective is to show them that what they believe to be real is just a shadow of the reality but the reality itself is different. He then returns to the cave to enlighten his fellow men on what he learned outside the cave.
#The allegory of the cave pdf full
This is a person who has escaped from the cave and achieved full education. The last component of the parable is that of the descending man. The fire gives us a blurred notion of what the real forms look like but, until you emerge from the cave, the only notion that you will have is an ‘‘image’’ of the reality.
He realizes that the shadows were only a glimpse of the reality but not the reality itself. After his escape, the ascending man ultimately gains a grasp of the real objects and he attains complete knowledge or education. This is a person who is lucky enough to be liberated from the fetters of the cave in which the ordinary man resides. Yet another component is that of the ascending man. In this way, the fire contributes to the creation of the realities as perceived by the ordinary man. The purpose of the third component, the fire, is to shine light on the real objects, casting off shadows on the cave’s wall. As the shadows form the set of all the things we have ever observed, they represent the reality to us.Īttaining education entails gaining the capacity to discern everything both in and outside the cave. The images stand for all the things that we have observed in our lives. This man perceives nothing apart from the images on the cave’s wall. The ordinary man symbolizes all persons before they have attained complete education. What people believe to be right or wrong or true in life is based on limited knowledge and experiences as opposed to complete knowledge. The same case applies to the ethics of decision-making and acting in real life, as well as our ideas regarding the truth. He believed that most concepts formed by people through the five common senses do not represent real objects but they are only images or shadows created from distorted perceptions. It relates to the concept of ‘‘forms’’ one of Plato’s many concepts which have withstood the test of time. The shadow is perhaps the most complex concept to understand in this allegory. It is composed of five components namely the shadow, the ordinary man, the fire, the ascending and the descending men. The parable is a criticism of people who are enslaved by their senses.Ī key theme of the parable is how people are shackled to warped perceptions, unaware of the reality. The cave or ordinary world is characterized by greed, self-interest, and struggle for political power. He argues that once a person has been enlightened to the level of a philosopher, he should go back to the mundane world (the cave) and try to educate his fellow men. Plato compared the parable to the processes that a person goes through as a philosopher. The parable of the cave by Plato was an attempt to highlight the importance of education to the achievement of wisdom.
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