Response paper
The Allegory of the Cave is one of the most philosophical writings based on reality I have ever read. I have read a lot from Henry David Thoreau, from C.S. Lewis and others, but this piece of Plato’s book ‘Republic’ made a big impression on me mostly because it was written in Ancient Greece in the fourth century B.C. My favorite part of the book is in the first paragraph: “like the screen at a puppet show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top.” I think he criticizes uneducated and simple people, that they have no will to see what is beyond the screen, they are just satisfied with what is given to them and they just act and behave according to these borders.
Another fact, which I have caught, was that simple people are just satisfied with simple life without truth, and they do not even care if they know the truth. They are satisfied with the fact that without truth they can live simpler life. They do not want to see the sun, because they do not want to deal with the entire thing that might be enlightened by it. People would just stay in a cave to live their simple life without purpose, with seeing what they want to see, with making, what others want them to do. In my opinion, this social criticism is really applicable also for today’s society, but it is also very hard written. Maybe dividing the text into simpler sentences would help people to understand it much more into its point.