Coleman Rohde

4/21/21

Analysis of the Allegory (of the Cave)

The chained prisoners represent the shackled mind of a person under a restrictive

perspective. The chains make it physically difficult for the prisoners to move around and hence

their perspective is limited. It is the same for the mind and a restrictive environment, which like

the chains, prevent someone from seeing the truth.

The captors carry items back and forth simply because they are told to do so. They are

not trying to be deliberately deceitful. The prisoners only fear the objects they carry because they

are only aware of the shadows of the objects which seem frightful to them even though the actual

objects are harmless. It is not the captors actions which scare the prisoners but the limited

perspective through which they view their bringings.

The objects represent the truth but the shadows of the objects are warped perceptions of

the truth beyond all recognition. Thus the prisoners are unable to see the truth and thus the world

as it actually is because their perception is warped by their constriction.

When the prisoner leaves the cave they are overwhelmed by the light of the sun because

they have known nothing else except the soft and warm light of a fire. Light illuminates and thus

it can be seen as illuminating the truth. The overwhelming light of the sun is an apt comparison

because outside of the cave everything is illuminated fully and clearly defined by the light so that

the prisoner is not only overwhelmed by the light itself but the unwarped truth that the light of

the sun illuminates when their shackles are lifted.

When the prisoner returns to the other prisoners, who are shackled as the escapee once

was, they are unable to understand the escapee because they can’t understand what the escapee
has experienced. In the world of the cave the prisoners have only known the shadows and believe

them to be the truth. The escapee, however, has seen the actual truth but because the warped

truth is so far from reality, reality can’t be described in the dealings of the warped truth which

the prisoners know. This highly suggests that in order to truly escape the cave and free oneself

from the shackles, one must experience the full truth for themselves and not through the

descriptions of another.

What does the Allegory of the Cave have to do with Plato’s philosophy of “the forms”?

Plato in his philosophy of “the forms” believes that there exists a perfect object of

anything that is impossible to reproduce in the real world. Plato believed, however, that one

should attempt to achieve the closest construction of “the forms” in reality. That is why Plato

associates the shadows with ignorance and the unwarped perceptions of reality with a knowing

that must be shared with others, as when the escapee went back to the prisoners. Plato sees the

escapee’s perspective as closer to the representation of “the forms” than the shadows that the

prisoners experience and therefore he values the escapee’s perspective more.

The Allegory of the Cave is also representative of education because without education,

one indefinitely lives in ignorance. The prisoners can be seen as lacking education because they

lack the tools which provide them the perspective to understand that the shadows aren’t reality.

However, when someone drags the prisoner up from the cave and guides the prisoner through the

experience of the world they take on the role of the educator and the prisoner receives the

education to understand that the shadows are a menagerie of falsehoods.