The Republic: The Allegory Of The Cave

Plato’s dialogue, The Republic, contains one of his most famous and influential philosophical passages known as “The Allegory of the Cave”. This passage describes Plato’s teacher, Socrates, definition of wisdom; the ability to see the true nature of things in the realm of ideas and past the deceptive, physical appearances they have. While reading the passage, I noticed that, even though the passage was written over 2300 years ago, its principles were still applicable to my life in the 21st century.
In the passage, several prisoners had spent their entire lives living chained inside a dark cave. The chains prevent the prisoners from seeing the world outside and only able to see the shadows that the real world reflects into the cave. When one of the prisoners escapes and finds out the truth about the world, he is ridiculed and threatened by his former colleagues. The freed prisoner, who now knows the truth of the world, is seen as insane by the people who are still living in the dark. To me, the passage illustrates the concept of how knowing the truth, or being knowledgeable, can make you seem crazy in the eyes of society. When I …show more content…
During the 1930s for instance, America was not aware of the horrors occurring in Europe that was the Holocaust. Due to their lack of knowledge, European immigrants fleeing from the Nazi Regime were not taken into America with open arms. The immigrants had to go through strict immigration policies and some were denied, and had to return to Europe and face Nazi persecution. Americans couldn’t even imagine that Hitler had decided to physically exterminate the Jewish people in Europe, and may have not even believed the immigrants stories of horror. While this particular event is an extreme and is on a much larger scale than my own life, it’s still the same basic principle. The immigrants knew the truth while the Americans did not and remained in the