The Allegory Of Plato's Cave

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3. Plato’s Cave Plato’s Allegory of Cave is an analogy used in one of his works to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education”. It talks about certain prisoners, who are chained in an underground cave. They cannot move their body and heads. They all are forced to sit in a single position and look at the wall. Behind them is a fire, where gives them light. They can only see shadows of the objects moving behind them. According to Plato, shadows of those objects are as close as they can get to reality. For the prisoners, the shadows is the reality and they can never form an impression about the real object. But somehow, one of the prisoners is allowed to escape and move out of the cave. The escaped prisoner realizes that…show more content…
We’re just mere prisoners and our reality is restricted to the world around us. The highest reality is the world of forms, where the ‘forms’ or our ‘ideas’ lie. They are perfect and constitute the highest form of reality. I agree with Plato’s theory that the forms constitute the perfect and ideal world. We all live comfortably in our “reality”, a reality we are not ready to question. It is something which has been injected in our minds by our Parents, Teachers and other people around us. Philosophers are few people who break these mental constraints, and look at the details from a new perspective. And we start to question small things, we realize that our whole perception of “reality” is flawed and full of gaping holes. Just like the way, escaped prisoner is enlightened with the reality about the sun, animals, people, and nature, only when he escaped the cave. We too, can only unveil the reality if we try to question our assumptions and get out of our comfort zone. Had the prisoner not made an effort to escape and face the reality outside the cave, he would have always thought that the reality was restricted to the mere shadows in the cave. And that the sounds coming from the outside, came from

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