The Cave image is significant: link between philosophy and the cinema. Like Platos cave the cinema is dark where we are transfixed by mere images that are removed from reality. Watch images that are projected onto a screen. Images are copies of the real things outside the cinema. Highly realistic images vs the cave shadows.
We are prisoners as we are prevented from grasping the true order of things by the limits of everyday experience, the limits of out ordinary conception of the world. To gain knowledge is to escape from this.
The implication is that we can be effectively controlled by other people when we take for reality the images they feed to us, when we believe what they wasn’t us to believe.
Only if we become critical, if we come to see these false images for what they are, we will be in a position to free ourselvfes from this kind of enslavement.
Growing up when we are young we uncritically accept whatever we are told about the world. As we grow up we realize weve accepted things without question when infact they are questionable.
Cave calls to mind forms of imprisonment and their overcoming in a wider social context. Ex. Advertisement. This is a far more effective form of social manipulation than coercion because we are willing to do what people want us to do.
Plato uses the cave to illustrate his account of knowledge. Questions faith that we place on our ordinary senses, all that our senses reveal to us are mere shadows and illusions removed from reality.
Descartes questions reliance on sense experience for knowledge.
2 arguments: Dream argument dreams can be lucid, how do I know that I am awake right now and not asleep. There are no sure signs where you can distinguish being awake from being asleep.
Platos cave connection: if the cinematic image is an illusion, it is an illusion we voluntarily subject ourselves to an are fully aware that its an illusion.
The problem is that any test we come up with for