Meaning Of Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Many people have never really been in the cave, but even more people have never been outside of it. The cave represents ignorance and in this world and generation, with every tiny information being a click
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave has two meanings, one of which is literal ; there are prisoners in a cave, behind them is a fire and in between them and that fire is a passage. On the whole length of that passage way there is a wall high enough to hide the people who walk there but not high enough to hide the objects those people are holding above their heads. The prisoners can see the objects’ shadows and nothing else and therefore believe those shadows are beings. When a prisoner is released, he cannot see the fire or the objects creating …show more content…
The others ridicule him, not seeing the point of going in the outside world if it is to waste their eyes. As he insists, they grow angry and kill him. The allegorical meaning behind the story of the cave is very different however. The prisoners shackled in their cave symbolise the ordinary people living in our ordinary, ignorant world. The shackles are the limitations on our senses, holding us back from the outside world, which is the form of the Good. The fire represents a copy of the form of the Good that allows us to see shadows, the illusions we experience, of mere trifles. The freed prisoner’s pain and blindness in trying to see the artifacts and fire is a representation of the denial of the material world. The images themselves that the prisoner sees eventually represent the realm of forms. When the prisoner goes back to the cave, he, as a philosopher, is simply fulfilling his duty, sharing what he knows. The blindness when he goes back to the cave symbolises his difficulty to accept ignorance after knowing the reality. The other prisoners killing him shows how the ordinary people refuse to believe anything they are unaware …show more content…
The literal one is about prisoners in a cave and the difference between the life inside and outside of the cave. The allegorical one is about our world and the ignorance and unawareness of the people who live in it, us, and the world in some people’s minds which shows the greater truths, which is the world of philosophers. Also, many people in modern times are inside the cave, especially people of my generation, because of internet and religion and other objects or ideas that keep us from learning truth. A few people are in between the cave and the outside world. They try to learn the truth and get out of the fakeness they live in. They know they live in a lie pulled over our eyes by ourselves to hide a truth that might be painful and a reality that might seem too big for us. Finally, there are the people who are in the outside world, who know the reality and the truth. They are known as enlightened, philosophers, or just inspiring people. Not all of them might be philosophers yet, but all are already starting to understand, or see, a certain philosophy of life and being and of the world that surrounds