The Theory Of Forms In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

The Theory of Forms is Plato’s idea of what people perceive with their senses as imperfect copies of eternal ideas or forms. Plato uses the Allegory of the cave to further explain his Theory of Forms. In the Allegory, the prisoners in the cave see and name the shadows of objects without actually seeing what the objects look like, resulting in the prisoners to mistaken the appearance of reality since they have never seen what the world outside of the cave looks like. The main idea of the Allegory is that humans have perpetual experiences of physical objects in our everyday world, and the shadows represent how our world is imperfect unlike the perfect world of forms. Ultimately, humans are born into this imperfect world only having innate ideas
of things from this alternate reality because our souls are found in the realm of forms. Plato’s Theory of Forms is a probable argument because when referring back to the Allegory, our world is the cave, and the world of forms is outside of the cave. Furthermore, from the moment a person is born into this world, society teaches us to have certain beliefs, values, and perceptions of reality. This is just like the Allegory since the prisoner in the cave represents the common human being, who does not know what reality is because humans believe what they see which is just like the shadows on the cave wall. In addition, because this world can only present appearances, we are lead to form opinions, rather than knowledge. Everything that we experience in our lives is part of our sensible world where our lives are constantly changing every second and every day. Forms, however, are eternal and unchanging for the reason being that they are not perceived by our senses which initially proves that Plato’s theory is true.