What Is The Allegory Of The Cave

In Plato’s parable, The Allegory of the Cave, he writes it as a dialogue between his brother and Socrates. Plato thinks of a “game”. It consists of a few prisoners, who are chained down and cannot turn their heads in any direction, a cave, a fire, and some objects with a group of people who carry them. The prisoners can only look straight ahead at a wall, and the people behind them put objects in front of the fire. The objects in front of the fire cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners are looking at, and after seeing these shadows all your life, you believe them to be “real”. They begin to guess which shadow would appear next and when a prisoner would guess right, the others would praise him, and call him a master of “nature”. Eventually,
one of the prisoners escapes, and they leave the cave. After going outside and seeing the actual world and freaks out and believes it to not be real. After being in the real world for some time, he realizes that it is real, and the cave that he was accustomed to, was in fact not real. He understands that the Sun is the source of life and not the fire, and then they begin a journey to discover the truth and meaning of life. He then returns to the cave to tell the other prisoners of what he discovers and they do not believe him. After continuously saying things he has found, the other prisoners threaten to kill him if he tries to get them free to see what he is talking about.
In Plato’s parable, The Allegory of the Cave, I think he is trying to teach us that human perception is often misunderstood and in order to fully understand, we must gain this knowledge that he is talking about through philosophical reasoning, rather than knowledge gained through ourselves and our senses.
Going back to the parable, we can understand the meanings of the “story”. The Cave itself would symbolize people who think that knowledge comes from our senses of the world. This would be empirical knowledge. The cave signifies that people who believe in empirical knowledge, are in a sense, locked in a misunderstanding of their senses. From there, we can see that the shadows to Plato represent the views of people who believe empirical evidence guarantees true knowledge. The meaning behind the game would be that one single person could not be a master of something if this “master” only knows stuff in the empirical world. Since the empirical world is necessarily “fake”, then this master actually knows nothing, because he only believes what he sees, and not what is actually true. If we go back to the prisoner who freed himself, we can say that he would be characterized as a philosopher, someone who tries to find the actual truth on his own and give others insight of his
learnings.