Rhetorical Analysis of Plato's the Allegory of the Cave
Eden Scharer
Darrin Broadway
English III-4
5th December, 2010
From Darkness to Sunlight: An Analysis of the Allegory of the Cave
Imagine yourself sitting inside a dark, damp, cave where the only thing you can see are moving shadows on the cave wall in front of you. You can’t move anywhere or see anything besides the shadows, and these are the only things you’ve seen for your entire life, so these moving dark images are the most real things you’ve ever known. At some point in our childhood we were mentally in this state of darkness, we didn’t know anything about the world or have any complex thoughts. How then, were we brought out of our caves of darkness and misunderstanding? The Allegory of the Cave is a well known section of Plato’s The Republic. Plato tells a story of prisoners in a cave with no mobility and the only thing they can see are shadows cast by figures behind them. One day one of the prisoners is shown around the cave and has the shadows explained to him, he is then taken out in to the world above to be shown real figures and objects in the world. These three stages were written to represent three different stages in our mental development. Plato believed that the highest level of education is when you have fully experienced good, beauty, and truth. There are some people in the world have never experienced it because they have only seem it acted out by other people, or had it defined but never gone far enough out of their caves to feel it for themselves, and Plato wrote this story to try and tell people that they are living in a cave and could be experiencing a whole different world they don’t even know about yet. This story was written to criticize the education system because many people who have problems analogous with the problems of the prisoners do not think in that simplistic way on their own, but have their views of the world because of their education. Plato shows how the obligation of educators is to bring people out of their caves and
Darrin Broadway
English III-4
5th December, 2010
From Darkness to Sunlight: An Analysis of the Allegory of the Cave
Imagine yourself sitting inside a dark, damp, cave where the only thing you can see are moving shadows on the cave wall in front of you. You can’t move anywhere or see anything besides the shadows, and these are the only things you’ve seen for your entire life, so these moving dark images are the most real things you’ve ever known. At some point in our childhood we were mentally in this state of darkness, we didn’t know anything about the world or have any complex thoughts. How then, were we brought out of our caves of darkness and misunderstanding? The Allegory of the Cave is a well known section of Plato’s The Republic. Plato tells a story of prisoners in a cave with no mobility and the only thing they can see are shadows cast by figures behind them. One day one of the prisoners is shown around the cave and has the shadows explained to him, he is then taken out in to the world above to be shown real figures and objects in the world. These three stages were written to represent three different stages in our mental development. Plato believed that the highest level of education is when you have fully experienced good, beauty, and truth. There are some people in the world have never experienced it because they have only seem it acted out by other people, or had it defined but never gone far enough out of their caves to feel it for themselves, and Plato wrote this story to try and tell people that they are living in a cave and could be experiencing a whole different world they don’t even know about yet. This story was written to criticize the education system because many people who have problems analogous with the problems of the prisoners do not think in that simplistic way on their own, but have their views of the world because of their education. Plato shows how the obligation of educators is to bring people out of their caves and