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Kaplan University
HU250 – 08
In the book The Republic, Plato through “the Allegory of the cave” makes a difference between illusion as a truth and the truth as a reality. In that scenario, Plato used the cave, the flame, the shadow, the sun and the return to the old “world” to demonstrate:
That knowledge comes from what we see and hear in the nature, it uses the cave as the hotbed of misunderstanding. He believes that the shadow seen in the wall and being interpreted by the prisoners as the truth is simply the reflection of the truth and that anyone no matter his rank within this “world of truth” is ignorant of the truth in real nature.
Plato uses the sun as the light of life for philosophers and the knowledge of people and the period the prisoner spent out of the cave for its first time is seen as the journey of a philosopher trying to understand and establish the different between the “truth” in the cave and the reality. Once the reality established, the prisoner wanted to free other prisoners because he believes they were living a false reality and this persuasion created conflicts. This demonstrates furthermore how a desire to change old habits known as the “true” can be challenging (Parker, 2005).
I started a job a few …show more content…
years ago with my current company, at the same time it was my first job in U.S, I was so unsure for my capacity of teaching and fixing issues. The main reason was because of my origin and my previous believes. I was for a long time held in a cave because how the U.S.A and white people were perceived. The “white” person in my culture is perceived as a founder of all knowledge and teaching.
With a Bachelor Degree in IT, I did a lot of good things and I was still able to accomplish a great amount of work, but because of the stereotype, I got myself pushed back and I was perceived as an ignorant until the day I had to work alone when a major outage occurred and it was my responsibility to fix it or consequences will be consistent. I had to calm myself down and remember what I had done in the past. I made a relation with the ongoing network outage and similar situations I had had in the past to find common points. The issue was then fixed and my summary report was pretty neat. That was the beginning of a new light and this is similar to the prisoner who faced the sun for the first time.
This empowered me as I just discovered the truth that “white is not the sky nor its limit” and that I am better than most people around and to prove that I was promoted to a better position and salary after six months and a year later I got to a complete different department with great benefits.
I can easily use Plato’s theory in my family life with my spouse and my kids, when I grew up and because my parents believe otherwise or because of their position in the society, I was told that education is not the key to success and as I am raising a family I had to tell them a different story about education and the success in life.
The context is different as I was raised in Africa as opposed to my kids. Imagine what one can do in the U.S without a high school diploma at least and the reality is that I tried to what I wanted to be just with a minimum level of education and no funds, but I realized after few years that it was almost impossible and therefore I went back to
school.
I believe that if the technology advancement that was made fifty years ago was judged as sufficient or as the highest a human could achieve, that would have translated to our limits of understanding the truth desire of humans and their emancipation and therefore until you discover the truth, your “truth” will be further the development of ignorance built through shadows
References
Sayre, H. M. (2013). Discovering the humanities (2nd ed.). New York: Pearson Education.
Parker, P. (2005). The republic (Webster 's German Thesaurus ed., p. 488–497). San Diego, CA: ICON Classics.