Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Plato was born in Greece in 428 BC. Student of Socrates and teacher to Aristotle, their collective work has contributed in laying the foundation of modern western philosophy. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is taken from his work, The Republic. He uses the metaphorical situation where people are chained so their movements are restricted in a cave. They have never seen anything but the shadows of people projected on the wall. For these prisoners shadow is a reality; for us, their perspective on nature is very narrow. The shadow represented only one side of the picture, a false idea about reality. Plato communicates the allegory with the objective of education, questioning our nature of existence as what we perceive reality and what actually a reality is. To achieve intellectual freedom one must free self from bias thoughts and be willing to explore and experiment beyond the confines of our comfort zones. Just like one of the prisoners
In the essay, the forms are reality, and shadow just a reflection of the reality. “Last of all he will be able to see the sun and not mere reflection of him in the water” (Plato, 360 B.C. p. 286). Social media applications are widely used in this day and age. For example, Instagram which is one of the most widely used application. Its popularity is based on the fact that we can take a picture and use number of features to make one look different, some of the key features are editing photo before uploading and publishing. Features such as making pupil of your eyes look blue and skin appear free of any spots, acne, wrinkles etc. Although that person in the picture is a real person it is merely an appearance, just like those shadows projected on the walls in the cave. The real person is still there who does not look anything like what we see via a popular