Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Knowledge, you can say is everything that is known through view or what is seen. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave believed that knowledge is acquired not just through what is perceived, but also rather through the process of thought and thinking. What is not seen, or what you cannot see Plato considered being the real source of knowledge. On the other hand, William Golding, in Thinking as a Hobby, categorizes the level of knowledge and thought, taking further from the point made by Plato. Golding puts people into three categories of thinkers: grade 1 thinker, grade 2 thinker, and grade 3 thinker. Through out the essays of William Golding and Plato, you see perception through different levels of thought and reality one achieves enlightenment.
Plato
“And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.” (Plato 657) “I would put the Thinker [The Thinking Man], sunk in his desperate thought, where there were shadows before him.” (Golding 146) Just as William Golding compares the Thinking Man to a grade three thinker focusing on the shadows and being overshadowed by reality, the prisoners inside the cave have no comprehension, thus believes the illusions that are produced by the shadows created by all else in the cave themselves.
The reality of a world that the escaped prisoners encounter with light that blinds them at first sight, they are unable to understand. As grade two thinkers they are unable to fully comprehend what they see and are still blinded and are not ready to believe apart from the illusions they have seen in the cave. “And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make
Once they are no more blinded by the light, the prisoners are later able to comprehend their existence in what they can differentiate as the real world whilst their cave being an illusion created by the darkness that they have lived within. Golding tells us that he once met someone who he thought to be a grade one thinker, “he was a German who had just fled from the Nazis to Oxford as a temporary refuge. His name was Einstein.” (Golding 144) He uses Einstein to show us of a grade one thinker, one who is able to go beyond what is presented in front of them and think for himself. He was able to think past the illusions and material shown to him and what they wanted him to think was reality, and come to reason on his own reasoning and thoughts and comprehend the world for the reality it truly is. Golding put Einstein in the mere one percent of the population, which he believed were grade one