Plato's Cave interpretation

Christian Casagrande

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Lessons to be learned

To begin explaining this Allegory I feel it's best to put it into four stages. First stage we have cave prisoners who are chained and forced to look at a wall. They don't know they are chained they don't know they are prisoners they see and hear shadows in the cave wall and believe them to be real and these prisoners represent people who believe that knowledge comes from what we see and hear in the world – empirical evidence. The cave shows that believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a ‘cave’ of misunderstanding(Trumpeter 15). Now in the second stage imagine a prisoner thats forced to break free. The prisoner is freed from the chains and turns around to see an elevated walkway in which people are carrying objects in front of the fire and these objects cast shadows. So now the prisoner understands that his world is actually an illusion and the shadows are less real then the objects behind him casting the shadow, so this is a transition from appearance to reality. The third stage imagine the prisoner sees sunlight entering the cave and is forced to follow the sunlight and exit the cave. The prisoner at first is blinded by the sunlight, but eventually his eyes adjust. At first he sees reflections, but then starts to see the actual objects themselves and unless he would have thought critically about the shadows on the cave wall he would have never discovered this. And the fourth stage I see it as the prisoner feels he has an obligation to go back to the cave and help those who are still chained.

So when he returns he stumbles because his eyes are adjusting to the darkness now and were used to the sunlight. The prisoner tells the others of the higher reality, but they ridicule him because the prisoners only know the shadow reality in comparison for when they killed Socrates with hemlock.

Plato distinguishes between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who really do see the truth(Trumpeter 7). The lesson I get from this is the world inside the cave represents the physical, visible and changing world. So when people think critically they leave the physical realm and discover the non physical and visible essences of things or as plato would say the forms outside of the cave. Think about beauty and applying these four stages to explain beauty. So if I were asked by someone what I thought beauty resembled I might show a picture of a garden or a women that I thought was beautiful. But that picture is just an imitation of the actual beautiful person but the actual beautiful person is just an imitation of form and definition of beauty.

So you may think there is no definition of beauty that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and maybe thats correct, but how would you know this unless you tried if you never thought through it and through the possible theories of beauty that are out there, it might surprise you to think into it instead of just uncritically accepting any position. And thats one way to look at Plato's allegory is that he wants you to think critically about everything not to just accept everything that seems rational don't just accept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder because it feels right and people tell you it is. Don't just accept what seems right like the cave prisoners do. Now one more big lesson Plato teaches us has to do with justice. If you were to ask me what justice was I might have some uncritical point or I might point to just people like those in law enforcement. But according to plato he would most likely say I don't know what justice is until I can define it in a universal way. So that we include all just acts and exclude all unjust acts so that we need to discover the just principles.

So we cant really understand justice if we only point to just people and actions we have to be able to move out of this physical tangible way of thinking to abstract universal principles to understand the existence and form of justice. The general idea is that there is a hidden reality behind the curtain the world around you isn't all there. There is something higher and more real the forms are more real because they're eternal and govern all things. So plato says wake up your being manipulated your limits

of your understanding are not the limits or reality. We should be more aware of who and what it is that is manipulating us it could be society, advertisement, friends, its interesting to think about that. I think the biggest lesson to take from this is a combination of all of it. So we need to apply this to our own lives and understand the process of exiting the cave is not just receiving new information, the deepest knowledge isn't just going to school and soaking in information rather it's an awakening turning your eyes to knew things understanding your formal reality is an illusion a shadow world that is deceptive.

Works Cited

Trumpeter, Amy. Uncategorized. WordPress, Web. 8 Oct 2012