Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

Plato’s main idea in “The Allegory of the Cave”, was that people see reality as the visible world and nothing more. It begins with the supposition that if a group of prisoners were chained to the wall of a cave, and are able to see what was in front of them; with a fire behind them, they would only be capable of seeing the shadows of the images as they passed by the fire. The prisoners would begin to identify the shadows as their reality. However, if one of the prisoners were to escape from the cave, he would be incapable of seeing anything at first, because the light would be too bright. As time passed, his eyes would gradually begin to focus, he would begin to see images more clearly. If the freed prisoner was to go back to the cave, he would find that it would be impossible to abide back to his old world. He would not be able to recognize the shadows in the cave,
because his eyes wouldn’t be adjusted to the darkness. If the freed prisoner were to try to tell the other prisoners about the light and that the shadows were quasi, they would dismiss him and would accuse him of trying to disrupt their way of life. This seems to incorporate Pecks notion that we are afraid of revising our maps of reality, we denounce the new information as false and try to destroy the new reality. Plato is stating that ideas go beyond the physical world, we don’t see the reality of ideas, because it isn’t an entity. It seems to contradict what Zerubavel in “The Social Lens” considers to be reality. Because ideas are created by man, they are mental entities that our society teaches us to make and do not actually exist in reality. Plato also argues that humans are the prisoners in the cave. Humans live in a world of shadows, where they do not see the reality of ideas.
The Truman Show portray people as only accepting the reality of the world in which we are presented. It holds similar key ideas to “The Allegory of the Cave”, we can see how the important symbols of “The Allegory of the Cave”; light/fire, the shadows of the objects, the breaking of the chains, the prisoners, the free prisoner, the cave, and the real objects are incorporated in The Truman Show. Truman was a prisoner in the cave, he only knew what he was being fed to believe, and when he tried to look for the truth, or rather look past what they were telling him, they would throw him curveballs to keep him from knowing the truth, and from doing what he wants to do. The question that Plato is trying to answer the question is: “is there change and if so, what is change?” he was trying to answer this age old philosophical question brought on by Heraclitus and Parmenides. which is the world that we live in and the world of forms and ideas which he defines as reality, or rather the real world.
In The Truman Show, the protagonist, Truman starts off in the town, which would be his version of the cave, and he would be in the prisoner.
His chain would be his phobia of going out into the water, caused by the trauma of his ‘father’ being ‘killed’ in a boating accident. That represented the chains, that stopped him from exploring the world. Later he broke this chain and he became the free prisoner. The townspeople, were mere shadows of the real world, he did not question it, until he the girl he fell in love with the, whom represent the real objects in Plato’s allegory; started telling him that his reality was fake, which caused Truman to question his reality. He was no longer contempt with what they fed him to believe, he pushed himself to find the real truth, which incorporate My Ishmael’s belief that to be able to find the real truth, Truman had to first realize the nature of his captivity to be able to break free from his chains. In doing so, he overcame his fear of the water, Peck’s concept can also be seen here, revising our maps of reality requires a lot of effort and can be very
painful.