INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY-PHILOS 001

Allegory of The Cave

According to Plato, human beings experience reality at two different levels, one consist of unchanging eternal truths and the other consist of constantly changing particulars depending on the availability to our senses. Therefore, the Allegory of the Cave can symbolically illustrate how people tend to believe in an illusion and accept it as reality. In his urgument he describes a group of ordinary human beings who since childhood have shackled on their legs and necks in an underground chamber so as to remain in the same spot. He made us imagine the position they are undergoing which only permits them to see the shadows of the cave which are produced by the light of fire burning higher up at a distance behind them. Due to their ignorance they tend to believe whatever shadows of the puppets they see to be real, (p.747). The shackling of legs and neck represents imprisonment of the mind within the human body, and the shadows they see represents the imitation of the forms that occupy the world of the senses. The analogy makes us believe and accept an illusion as reality.

Shattering of an illusion and revelation of reality to a person can occur in two forms where one being force liberation. It brougght a revelation that reality happens suddenly and since it comes with so much confusion and one tends to desire to return in the illusion at it offers a familiar ground with no confusion. Genuine liberation however, comes where there is someone to guide you through the confusing new reality. In the sense that one is able to adapt to it slowly until he is finally free and no longer want to go back to the chains of imitation, (p.748). In the modern life people tend to be imprisoned in different cultural beliefs such as racism and tribalism which they acquire mostly from their cultural patterns. 

Works Cited

Plato. The Republic: Book VII. Recorded Books, 1988.