Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave provides an accurate analogy for how we acquire knowledge. In the following essay I will explain why Plato’s explanation on how we gain knowledge is true. The Allegory of the Cave is Plato's idea of the education of the soul toward enlightenment. He opposes that they must "go back into the cave" or go back to the everyday world of politics, money and power struggles. The Allegory also attacks people that rely upon or are slaves to their senses. The chains that restrict the prisoners are the senses. The fun is to try to put all the details of the cave into your interpretation. Basically, what are the models the guards carry? The fire? The fight out of the cave? The sun? The shadows on the cave wall? The cave is…show more content…
Initially, Plato believed that one can only learn through dialectic reasoning and open-mindedness. Individuals had to travel from the visible realm of image-making and objects of sense to the intelligible or invisible realm of reasoning and comprehending. "The Allegory of the Cave" represents this journey and how it would seem to those still in a lower realm. Plato is saying that we are all prisoners and that the physical world is our cave. The things that we perceive as real are actually just shadows on a wall. Just as the escaped prisoner arises into the light of the sun, we collect knowledge and rise into the light of true reality: ideas in the mind. Plato splits everything into two worlds, and each of these two worlds into two subsets. The lowest section is the world of Images. If I tell you that cash will bring you happiness, and you decide to trust what I have said with no earlier knowledge of either happiness or money, you have been exposed to the bottommost world. Yet, if someone walks into the light of the sun and sees true reality and then proceeds to tell the other prisoners of the truth, they laugh at and mock the enlightened one, for the only reality they have ever known is a vague shadow on a wall. They could not possibly understand another dimension without observing it themselves, therefore, they label the enlightened man…show more content…
In 1837, Darwin was traveling onboard the H.M.S. Beagle in the Eastern Pacific and plunged anchor on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin found a wide selection of animals. The differences in animals sparked Darwin on research, which continued well up to his death, ending the publishing of The Origin of Species in 1858. He stated that had not just emerged out of thin air, but had developed from other species through natural selection. This sparked a firestorm of disapproval, for most people believed the theory of the Creation. In this way Darwin and his scientific followers equal the escaped prisoner. They walked into the light and witnessed true reality. Yet when he told the imprisoned public what he saw, he was mocked at and labeled mad, for all the prisoners know and recognize are just shadows on a wall which are just horrible distortions of reality. Darwin walked the path to enlightenment just like the escaped prisoner in "The Allegory of the Cave." Plato's allegory greatly symbolizes man's struggle to grasp the light and the suffering of those left behind who are forced to sit in the dark and gaze at shadows on a wall. Now then, says Socrates, as he presents the allegory, envision mankind as living in an underground cave which has a wide entrance open to the sun. Deep inside are human beings looking at the inside wall of the cave, with their necks and legs bound so that they cannot move. They have never witnessed the

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