Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

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The defining traits of an ideal society has been chronicled from antiquity through the nineteenth century philosophical thought. These peculiarities have been narrated through the works of numerous contemporary philosophers and historians, where they identify the elements deemed necessary for an ideal society during the time and society in which they lived. These foundations of ancient Greece were rooted in humanity’s enlightenment. The view of an ideal society looked a bit differently with the rise of Christianity as ideas were shaped based on humanity’s knowledge of God and divine wisdom. Through the philosophical works of Enlightenment writers, the notion of an ideal society develops through education. The philosophers of critical theory…show more content…
An ideal society, in ancient Greece, is best illustrated in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” In this text, Plato’s ideal society is achieved through human enlightenment. Using dialogue between his brother, Glaucon and his mentor, Socrates, Plato is “compar[ing] our nature in respect of education” and the lack of it to nature. Through this dialogue, Plato incorporates his personal thoughts into the histories he wrote to construct a dialectic that demonstrated how this problem of a lack of education or relative ignorance could be fulfilled. As the founder of the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, Plato believed people should strive to achieve the highest levels of education. The allegory of the cave is an illustrated outline of humanity’s symbolic unenlightened suffocation and he offers a way in which mankind can find its…show more content…
After finally becoming acclimated to new sensations such as the sunlight, the prisoner begins to see things the way they truly are rather than viewing manipulated images and taking that view as face value. This now enlightened prisoner now has the responsibility to lead the ignorant, unenlightened prisoners out of the cave. Plato’s vision of an ideal society is one in which people are not prisoners of their own ignorance and for those who are enlightened, they are obligated to to help other prisoners achieve a higher level of

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