The allegory of the cave is a story from the book 'the republic' written by Plato, in it consists of two characters the Socrates who is a philosopher and his young follower named Glaucon. He explains to him that human beings are ignorant with the knowledge of knowing only what they have been told, and in the quest to know the truth, when faced with a little challenge they back out, in the sense that they go back to their ignorance. The Allegory of the Cave can be interpreted in many ways; one way is to make a comparison between the story and the way of thinking by individuals in a closed society. Socrates states that the cave is a world many of us would like to see, but are not really how the world is. It is almost like the movie "The Matrix", where Neo, the main character is to discover that the world he lives in is not the real world, but a world generated by machines and computers. Only in Socrates' allegory, the world is not created by computers, but by individual minds. Socrates wants Glaucon to be a wiser, better-educated man, who will later become a ruler of the State. He wants him to know not only the right, but also experience the wrong, because only a man, who knows the bad, can truly understand and appreciate the good. Socrates does this by telling him a story, to let him better understand the principles of life.
He illustrated what he meant by an example he gave saying the prisoners in a cave from their childhood whose limbs and heads have been chained, will see their shadows reflected by a ray of light from an opening as other people and when they hear the echo of their voices, they think it is the people they see talking. And if one of them is released, when he realizes that all he saw was an illusion he will definitely take what he has believed in since childhood until he is forcibly dragged on to see the real thing then he'll come up with certain theories. And a personal understanding of his illustration is him using the cave as the world, and the shadows cast on the wall are the particular things of the world. The fire in the cave is the sun. Outside the cave is the world of ideas. The prisoners who can only see shadows are non-philosophers who can only know the individual things of the world which are only shadows of the essential things. The prisoner who escapes and goes outside the world is a philosopher who rises above this world of senses and goes into the intelligible world, the ideal world. The chains on the prisoners are passions, prejudices, and sophistries.
The metaphysics which deals with the essence of being and the study of ultimate reality is explained with the idea of the released prisoner seeing what is reality deals with the metaphysics and also where he is able to discover the sunlight and other earthly bodies was the metaphysical knowledge of plat the writer and Socrates the story teller. We are all prisoners watching shadows in a cave this metaphor contains a puzzle. The specific platonic form of the philosophical predicament of attempting to say that if we are prisoners in the cave watching shadows, how could we have known that this is the case? If we only have experience of the shadow world, how can we come to see how it really is? They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows. So when the prisoners talk, what are they talking about? If an object (a book let us say) is carried past behind them, and it casts a shadow on the wall, and a prisoner says "I see a book," what is he talking about? He thinks he is talking about a book, but he is really talking about a shadow. But he uses the word "book." What does that refer to? Plato gives his answer at line (515b2). The text here has puzzled many editors, and it has been frequently emended. The translation in Gruber/Reeve gets the point correctly:
"And if they could talk to one another, don't you think they'd suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?"
Plato's point is that the prisoners would be mistaken for they would be taking the terms in their language to refer to the shadows that pass before their eyes, rather than (as is correct, in Plato's view) to the real things that cast the shadows. If a prisoner says "That's a book" he thinks that the word "book" refers to the very thing he is looking at. But he would be wrong. He's only looking at a shadow. The real referent of the word "book" he cannot see. To see it, he would have to turn his head around. Plato's point is that the general terms of our language are not "names" of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind. But if we are prisoners of a bench watching shadows we take for reality, Plato is also a prisoner and finds himself watching shadows, so Plato's description of the cave is just another shadow, and if it is a shadow, it cannot also be a true description of how things are. And if it is not a true description of how things are then, then Plato's theory of things not being in true physical is not the true description as he himself watches shadows too. So that could initiate that there is no truth.
The epistemology questions the certainty of knowledge, that is whether knowledge is possible or not. It deals with such issues as sources, scope, validity and limits of knowledge. Well in the allegory of the cave, we see that the prisoners acquired their knowledge through what they saw, therefore we could tell that it was actually not real that it was all illusions; hence we say their knowledge wasn't valid. Also their knowledge was limited in the sense that all they knew was what they had seen in the cage they had not been able to explore more in other to acquire a quality wide and valid knowledge. Suppose they were aware of the outside world beyond the cave, they would have sort or search out ways out of the cave as man's curiosity and search for knowledge is in his nature and cannot be denied. However, that search for knowledge was not possible as the cave was seen as the only home in existence and thereby they used their physical sense as the source of their knowledge. Plato maintains that true knowledge, is not acquired through sense perception because true knowledge is universal, objective and infallible. Hence the object of knowledge must be stable.
Plato believes that most people live in mental caves of ignorance and never perceive the truth. Assume, for sake of argument, that Plato is correct. How can the study of philosophy help remedy this situation?
Assuming Plato is correct is assuming that to attain the status of being able to see the truth, you have to be able to see past the shadows on the wall and realize that you can turn your head to the minds reality and see that there is more to the truth of being then what you can physically see with your own two eyes. In other words the study of philosophical means enabling our minds to see the truth about reality. Also, if Plato is correct, the soul of man inherently contains knowledge of good but can only perceive this in degrees of experience until the highest level of knowledge is attained. Does it have mathematical meaning, explain a vision of the whole world, or is it just a comparison to the field of social work? I personally feel that "The Allegory of the Cave¨ is a great explanation of how people in the world live. People are just like the men chained inside the cave, people only know and believe what he or she might have seen.
Well religion has to do with the study of the nature of religion and religious beliefs. During the life time of Plato he said wonder was the beginning of philosophy and religious philosophy came as a result of wonder. It was also contemplated through thoughts in which the things of time participate. Before the theory of the allegory of the cave, Plato said there is something above called "essential form of good". Plato had many ideas on how one's mind, body, and spirit came together to perform actions and thoughts. One important idea he broke down, was the conception of the soul in "Allegory of the Cave". He broke this idea into three different parts and each of these parts played a role in the feelings of man. These parts were referred to as the sun, the line, and the cave.
The sun symbolized the Form of the Good; the ultimate object of knowledge, according to Plato. The prisoners in the cave looked at nothing but shadows on a wall from the statues which was made to make them believe that the shadows are the most real things that are in the world. In order to reach the Form of the Good, you must be able to see what's real, resulting in a prisoner's release to the outside world.
The prisoner released is now able to look at the fire and the statues, but is in disbelief that the shadows are not the most real things in the world. This is where the line comes in. The line represents the four stages of cognitive activity that a human being is capable of doing. The prisoner now believes that the fire and the statues are the most real things in the world.
After the prisoner is dragged into the outside world, he sees real objects. The cave illustrates the effects that education has on a human being. The prisoner doesn't have to imagine what real things are because he now knows what the most real things in the outside world are. He sees real trees, real flowers, and even the sun, which he learns is the cause of the real objects being seen.
The Allegory of the Cave is a process of the growing mind. We grow from imagination, to belief, to forms, and finally, we grow to understanding. This is the closest thing in Plato to traditional conceptions of God.
Plato's aim in the Republic is to describe what is necessary for us to achieve this reflective understanding. But even without it, it remains true that our very ability to think and to speak depends on the Forms. For the terms of the language we use get their meaning by "naming" the Forms that the objects we perceive participate in. The prisoners may learn what a book is by their experience with shadows of books. But they would be mistaken if they thought that the word "book" refers to something that any of them has ever seen. Likewise, we may acquire concepts by our perceptual experience of physical objects. But we would be mistaken if we thought that the concepts that we grasp were on the same level as the things we perceive. This hereby explains the saying of man's nature seeing is believing as Plato believes that what you see is inferior to what you believe which explains the fact that the eternal holds more hope for the non philosophers than the physical...
Politics' focus is on one social institution- the state and seeks to determine its justification, ethical composition, and organization. And also who should rule, and how best to rule. In the allegory of the cave, I really don't see any relations to ruling except that; the people who chain these prisoners should let them go so that they can be able to discover the truth. That is the people of this world should set free and go in search of the truth they should become philosophers and be no more ignorant of reality and the truth. Plato is of the view that non-philosophers should have no place in government as they are still in shadows and have no knowledge of the light. He believes that those who should be in power are people in experience. A philosopher king should be the one to rule. He believed that the unlearned should not have any business in government whatsoever as they will only act on impulse and not with knowledge. He believed that those who are to govern must visit the dark after the light so that they can be ten times better than those in the dark. He says that;
"And you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst."
He believed that the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy and that those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task for, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight. He believed that those whom they should have as leaders should be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honors and another and a better life than that of politics. Plato was an idealist who believed in an ideal state
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