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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, P. Shorey has several themes. One of the themes

highlighted in this piece of work is ignorance. One could interpret the chains that bind the

prisoners in the cave as ignorance metaphor. These prisoners never wanted to seek the truth and

consequently enlightenment but instead, choose to stay put as accept their situation. These

prisoners are misguided by the guards but they do not ask questions which means that they are

controlled and lack free will (Shorey 747). It is for this reason why even when one prisoner

escapes from the cave and returns to tell the others about the reality of the outside world, the

prisoners laugh and mock the truth.

The other theme that is developed in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is that true knowledge

cannot be derived through human perception. As it is explained, the prisoners have dwelled in

the cave in all their lives and in the cave, they are only able to see shadows. If a prisoner guesses

the next shadow to appear, the others regard him as a master of nature. It is only when on

prisoner escapes and realizes that all the time, their perceptions were wrong as life came from the

sun (Shorey 748). Still, other prisoners still hold to their wrong perceptions even when this

prisoner explains the real situation.

These two themes relate perfectly to the modern world in that people always dwell on

perceptions, especially what they are taught from birth to perceive as real. For instance, the

shadow of religious ideologies can be viewed as the root cause of modern terrorism because the
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involved have been swayed to see what they do as right and justified. Also, in the modern world,

humans tend to be ignorant. For instance, some people have a negative attitude about other races

and this is ignorance because they do not want to accept the truth that all humans are equal.
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Work Cited

Shorey, Paul. Plato: The Allegory of the Cave. Hamilton & Cairns Random House, 1963. 747-

752