Plato's Allegory The Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a fictional account of a man’s journey from ignorance to enlightenment. In this story, Plato creates a hyperbolic analogy to the limitations of human perception. He implies that the shadows the prisoners see mold their reality, because it’s the only sensory information they have been directly exposed to. The point he is trying to make is that the knowledge of man is limited by what we perceive, just as the prisoner’s in the story. Obviously, we are led to believe that what we experience is the only reality but it is merely one amongst myriads of ways to represent the universe. Outside the realm of speculation, mankind has no way of knowing the metaphysical truth about the universe. An ancillary theme of Plato’s story is truth, and how perception defines our belief system. The …show more content…
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is an ideation of the problems man face when searching for absolute truth. It also subtly questions the premise of interpreting the world through empirical observation. Systematic investigation makes sense pragmatically, but Plato questions the extrapolation of arbitrary information that is based only on what we think the world is. The issue with basing our understanding of the world through our perceptual devices is that we have no other information to compare it with. Thomas Nagel illustrated the limitations of the human scope when he published, What is it Like to Be a Bat? in 1974. In this philosophical essay Thomas Nagel proposes a thought experiment in which you imagine yourself as a bat. He argues that though we can come up with some idea of what it may feel like, there is no way to perceive a bat’s reality because they have different means of sensory observation. Nagel’s paper can also be applied to the epistemological issue of limitations in human