Plato's the Allegory and the Cave
What might "the chains" symbolize in today's society; here at D.A., here in NYC, here in the United States, and in the global society?
-What are we "imprisoned by" as a people; as a community, as individuals?
-What does Plato mean by "shadows" in his Allegory of the Cave? What are the "shadows" of our times?
-After the prisoners are released from the cave, why are they unable to see ID QUOD EST, namely, REALITY as it is?
-What does "the Sun" symbolize? Why do you think that? How so?
Because I love Socrates I find everything Plato writes thoroughly interesting. The minute he opened this part of The Republic with “how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened,” I was interested. The part in the Allegory of the cave that stood out to me was the transformation of the man from the shadows to the sun then back again. It is here that everything seemed to fall in place. The people in the shadows seemed, t me, to have an erroneous conscious, simply because they were living in the shadows. The shadows represented the gist of reality. It was the appearance of an object but not the depth of it. The shadows seemed like a false reality, there to see but unable to be grasped in any way. When the ,an went from the shadows to the sun he refused to believe there was such a thing other than what he had learned from the cave, therefore the sun would represent what reality actually is. The prisoner of the cave was unable to accept reality when he was first introduced to it because for all of his life he had only been able to reach the shadows of reality, not the full thing and he believed he had learned all that there was of reality so he refused to believe there was anything else to say about the manner. The transition from the fake world to true reality took him a while but after one begins to live in reality when he is sent back nothing else will ever make sense. The sun, reality, was able to change a man’s mind, one who had been in the dark for his entire life, but
-What are we "imprisoned by" as a people; as a community, as individuals?
-What does Plato mean by "shadows" in his Allegory of the Cave? What are the "shadows" of our times?
-After the prisoners are released from the cave, why are they unable to see ID QUOD EST, namely, REALITY as it is?
-What does "the Sun" symbolize? Why do you think that? How so?
Because I love Socrates I find everything Plato writes thoroughly interesting. The minute he opened this part of The Republic with “how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened,” I was interested. The part in the Allegory of the cave that stood out to me was the transformation of the man from the shadows to the sun then back again. It is here that everything seemed to fall in place. The people in the shadows seemed, t me, to have an erroneous conscious, simply because they were living in the shadows. The shadows represented the gist of reality. It was the appearance of an object but not the depth of it. The shadows seemed like a false reality, there to see but unable to be grasped in any way. When the ,an went from the shadows to the sun he refused to believe there was such a thing other than what he had learned from the cave, therefore the sun would represent what reality actually is. The prisoner of the cave was unable to accept reality when he was first introduced to it because for all of his life he had only been able to reach the shadows of reality, not the full thing and he believed he had learned all that there was of reality so he refused to believe there was anything else to say about the manner. The transition from the fake world to true reality took him a while but after one begins to live in reality when he is sent back nothing else will ever make sense. The sun, reality, was able to change a man’s mind, one who had been in the dark for his entire life, but