- The Allegory of the Cave | Plato

 


The Allegory of the Cave by Plato depicts the way people think and they live. The ones who are not courageous enough to face the realities of life are bound to live what is reflected as reality to them and therefore imprison themselves to an unreal imaginary world. the men in the cave are chained and cannot turn around to see the real world and they perceive the shadows of the people passing by carrying different objects as their realities. This represent illiteracy and the chains represent the rules authority and power imposed by the laws, the stronger, families and so on. However, if a person is courageous enough to realize himself and find the truth, and reaches knowledge, he becomes mature and produces his own ideas rather than perceiving the world around them through the perspectives of others.

It can be deduced that the context of Plato’s allegory is education and that it tells about what Plato thought about the nature of philosophical education. In other words, The Allegory of the Cave is a metaphor which helps us understand what Plato though about education The people in the cave are like the people in a society, and the cave symbolises a physical world where what is seen is not what it actually is. The world outside the cave represents the world of ideas, thoughts, reality and knowledge, which are all associated with education. In order for people to understand the reality around them, people need to think deeper. Plato tries to express that what people see and elicit out of what they see may not be the reality. He asserts that the reality can only be reached by reasoning rather than physical senses.

The people in the cave are content with their lives without knowing what awaits them outside the cave. When the one who gets out of the cave sees the daylight, he feels pain and struggles to discover the world outside the world. This may indicate that truth can be painful and being educated requires struggle. However, it is better to be thinkers who observe critically and understand the world around them rather than observing the confined reality passively like the men in the cave. The outside word refers to the educated world where it is possible to have access to knowledge and discover reality while the cave represents ignorance and a confined artificial world where people are made to be believe that they are exposed to.  

According to Plato, when people become educated, they start to consider what they see differently. As they get more educated, the way they conceive the truth change. All human beings can learn as long as they wish to learn and they dare to learn since finding out about the truth requires a cognitive process which is like a struggle. As people continue to find out more and more about the truth around them, they can never be the same as they were since education make people improve themselves.



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