Allegory of the cave meaning2/25/2023 Plato was trying to illustrate that the mind has the capability of finding real knowledge but this will always come into conflict with knowledge obtained through material sensations as was the case with the people in the cave. Some actually despise him and believe that there is no truth other than the one tied to their existence. However, most of them do not receive his ideas openly. He now finds the way of life of the people in the cave to be pitiable and therefore decides that his duty is to get his people out of their state of not knowing. This individual is therefore more enlightened than his counterparts who are still held in the cave. When one of the prisoners had the privilege of being exposed to the light and after he saw what the sun was all about, he soon found out that their previous life has been a misconception. Here, the mind has not been engaged fully and this has resulted in a less fulfilling life (Plato & Jewett, 516). Because they have never been exposed to another kind of existence, they are content with the little they possess. They do not realize that there is something wrong with their existence. The dim fire light and their state of darkness is what they had come to know. The people in the cave are content with their circumstances. Similarly, in order for the mind to truly conceptualize then it must challenge the status quo. In order for one to truly grasp how the world works, it is essential for that individual to abandon the old concepts formed through materials and experiences with tangibles. Physical objects often give mistaken views of what things really are. The same thing can be said about the process of acquisition of concepts. This prisoner had to be set free from his old perceptions in order to truly get to know what was going on around him. His reliance on his senses alone was not sufficient to grasp the world around him. The prisoner who was set free and shown the actual sources of the shadows actually realized that he had been mistaken all along. To get to understand what is actually going around us, one needs to go beyond the physical and grasp these things with the mind because that is the only pathway to conceptualizing reality (Brians, 52). Plato argues that this never really denotes the real meaning. Language therefore reflects their perception of reality through the physical. In fact, even the things they identify or name are all related to what they perceive passing before them as shadows and not the actual objects. They have not stopped to think that there could be a deeper meaning behind the shadows. These individuals have therefore interpreted what they see or their material sensation for reality. Although there are people who pass behind the prisoners through a roadway, it is never really possible to know that those are the real objects that reflect their shadows against the prisoner’s wall.Įven the echo that permeates from the real people is translated as sound from the shadows. The prisoners cannot turn their heads and the only thing they can see is a wall. Within the cave, there are prisoners who have been chained throughout their lives. The allegory of the cave proves that man is able to perform his day to day functions without necessarily comprehending his true reality. Learn More The nature of the mind and its relationship to other means of understanding the world
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