The misperception of our reality is that what we see, hear tends to be the truth. However, it is not, instead it is only half of the truth. In Plato’s allegory of the cave contains profound messages about how we human beings see our reality, how the truth is in the apparent invisible surface of our world. However, for human beings to understand the depth of our reality, we need to enlighten ourselves. We need free what resides in our body, the souls from the deception of our eyes, the five senses that tell us what we see, listen is the ultimate truth while it is only the half of it.
In the dialogue, Socrates (Plato’s former teacher) asks Glaucon (brother to Plato and former student of Socrates) to imagine prisoners who have been in the cave since childbirth. Moreover, each one of them held down by chains from their legs up to their necks unable to move. Forced to face a wall in front of them, above and behind them is fire. In between the fire and the prisoners, there is a staircase in which people walk upon carrying all sorts of things.
These people are puppeteers carrying items displaying it for show on the wall, and the prisoners cannot turn their heads. The prisoners can only see the shadows of the passing people, believing that what they are seeing is the actual truth. Human beings view this world through our five senses and the preconceptions that people give, us. This what the people of the cave came with the conclusion. Because they only see the shadows, nothing but it. They assumed it is real. When one of them was compelled to walk out of the cave towards the light, suddenly he experiences pain in his eyes from the light of the sun. He feels the pain of seeing something and not knowing it.
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He questions himself about his existence and the perspective he had in the cave. His eyes there, in the real world, started to adjust in the light of the sun. Moreover, he begins to see what the shadow figures represent the objects that are there. Now if he were to return to the cave, he would have to readjust his eyes, explain what he had learned. His people would undoubtedly think of him as a madman. They will not be able to fathom these new complex ideologies. They (prisoners of the cave) rejected everything he told them, and they were hostile towards him, (the prisoner who had escaped). They even threatened to kill him if he tried to free them.
Plato’s uses these people as in society they are the most stubborn and ignorant out of the people. They don’t want to change or understand the world better. The people of the cave would ridicule him, and state that “it was better if you had stayed in the cave and not left” they would rather him, the prisoner stay ignorant like the rest of them and not question their way of life.
The reason for the education is that Plato wants us to free the soul of the things that our site is unaware, and to reorient it towards the truth. The text allows the reader to think profoundly about the text and how we perceive our reality. Plato’s theory is that the cave represents those who think knowledge comes from what the five senses perceive. The shadows represent the perception of those who believe what their five senses perceive is the evidence of real knowledge. So, if one believes what one sees is the actual truth, then one only sees half of the truth.
The escapee can comprehend that the sun is the source of all things. Moreover, he represents philosophers, those who go out of their way to seek real knowledge, outside of what their five senses perceive. now the word light or the sun used to represent the ultimate truth, the answer is found to those enormous believes that one thought was actual.
I thoroughly agree with Plato and I think we can apply the same logic too. I in this article I learned how the cave people see reality has the visible world when reality really is more than the visible world. This text helped me understand how we humans tend to view our world through our five senses when there are other ways for us to view our world by taking it a different approach and go out of our comfort zone.
