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Allegory of the cave meaning12/19/2023 Socrates proceeds further: “Suppose now that you suddenly turn them around and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real images will they believe them to be real? Will, not their eyes are dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to something which they can behold without blinking?” (Plato Book VII). ![]() In the author’s mind, this scene serves as an allegory to how people perceive an objective reality – they often tend to think of this reality’s emanations as such that provide them with the full insight on reality’s actual essence, thus indulging in the fallacy of assumption. It is needless to say, of course, that prisoners’ idea as to what this world might be all about, has very little to do with the actual state of affairs. Given the fact that prisoners have never been outside of this cave, the shadows of moving objects they are being exposed to and also the sounds, associated with these objects, is only the mean for prisoners to make judgments about realities of an outside world. These prisoners had spent their whole lives inside of this cave ever since the time they were born, with only the link that was connecting them to the outside world being the shadows of people moving in front of the cave’s entrance, projected onto the wall in front of prisoners’ eyes: “Imagine human beings living in an underground den which is open towards the light they have been there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den.Īt a distance, there is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over which marionette players show their puppets” (Plato Book VII). He presents Glaucon with the vision of the cave, which contains prisoners chained to the walls. In Book VII of “The Republic”, Socrates engages in dialogue with Plato’s brother Glaucon, while trying to enlighten the latter onto the true essence of ontological knowledge, as an objective category. ![]() ![]() In the next part of this paper, we will describe Plato’s allegory of the cave and will also introduce readers to our interpretation of this allegory. In other words, ancient Greek philosophical thought was being largely concerned with discovering the true nature of objective reality as a “thing in itself”, which in its turn, points out at Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle as individuals who, for the first time in history, we’re able to conceptualize European psyche’s subconscious longing towards the “higher truth”, as such defines the existential essence of Western civilization. The second and lower kind of belief is our mental state when we see only shadows and images of physical objects” (Patterson 52). ![]() The first degree of belief is present when we see physical objects, trees, stones, etc. In his book “Plato’s The Republic: Notes”, Charles Patterson provides us with such an insight: “The highest and best kind of knowledge is knowledge of Goodness itself the second level of knowledge is of the other Forms. Before we proceed with a detailed description of the allegory of the cave and its meaning, we will need to gain an insight into how ancient Greeks used to grade different forms of knowledge.
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