Allegory Of The Cave

In the United States, feminism can be a polarizing topic of discussion. Often there are those who like the movement and those who strongly appose it. Sometimes there are even those who appreciate the movement but want to do nothing to help it. Most often the people who do not understand the movement have the most opposing opinions on it. With the lack of understanding about the feminist movement one can relate a person’s developing knowledge about the movement to Plato’s allegory of the cave. The comparison of the allegory of the cave to a person’s understanding about the feminist movement allows one to understand the varying opinions that people have about this movement. One of the many things that Plato is known for is his theory of forms.
In this cave, prisoners are chained to the ground and their head is fixed to look in one direction. There is a fire in the distance and people carrying artifacts along the wall which creates shadows on the walls. Due to the prisoners being stuck in one spot, they “believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts” (187, 515 c-d). The prisoners think that the shadows tell all that they need to know about the world. They are developing their knowledge through their imagination of what the shadows mean. A prisoner is then freed and allowed to move around the cave. When they move around they become “pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows [they’d] seen before” (187, 515 c-d). When the prisoner moves around, their idea of what is true changes. By moving around the prisoner is able to see the objects that created the shadows causing their understanding of the world to change. They now have a belief of how the world works. The prisoner is then dragged outside of the cave toward the light. It would take time for their eyes to adjust, being able to “see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in the water, then the things themselves” (188, 516). Now being able to see more things, the prisoner’s thought of how the world works changes again. They now know more about world than they did when in the cave. Once the prisoner’s eyes have full adjusted to the light, they would be able to see “the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it…[and] would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all things that [they] used to see” (188, 516 b-c). The prisoner now truly understands how the world works and knows that the sun is the source of everything in the world. They are able to see the form that allows for everything in