1.2.3.

1 Reflection Paper (Allegory of the Cave by Plato)

1. What is the subject matter that Plato deals with in the story?

The subject is regarding reality and how limited one’s own perception of reality
truly is. Plato uses an allegory, a cave where chained prisoners are shown
shadows made with wooden animals and vessels. There is a fire that burns
behind and above them, which allows the people to display the shadows that the
prisoners see. They conceive these shadows as their reality as it is all they’ve
ever known. When one prisoner is freed, he comes to a realization that the
shadows were a mere illusion and what’s real were the wooden objects used to
cast them. As the prisoner ventures up the cave and into the open world, he is
blinded by the sun which shines brighter than the fire, he is also amazed by
what he sees outside as he realizes that this is the real world, much more real
than anything he’s ever seen his whole life, not the one in the cave where
shadows were casted. As Plato describes, “The journey upwards is the ascent of
the soul into the intellectual world.”

2. How does Plato describe the life of the prisoners?

He describes their lives as miserable, to quote “Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything rather
than think as they do and live after their manner?
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these
false notions and live in this miserable manner.” Plato uses Socrates’ and
Glaucon’s dialogue to enunciate how he feels about the lives of the prisoners,
that he would not care for such honors and glories, much less be envious of its
possessors. This is because being like the freed prisoner, enlightened and having
ascended to the intellectual world, he would choose to suffer anything than to
go back to the former ways of being restricted strictly only to the world
conceived by our senses. Therefore, he describes the lives of the prisoners to
be miserable, it is because unlike him, they have not experienced the life-
changing realization and ascension a freed individual has once they have seen the
intellectual world beyond the perception of the human senses.

3. What does the cave represent? What does the fire symbolize?

The cave symbolizes the world of sight, it is the shell which contains all of what
we believe to be true because it is everything we’ve ever seen, or rather
perceived to be true because of our human senses. The light of the fire is the
 sun, it shines bright and allows us to see the things we see and think to be true,
but beyond this, outside the cave when we have ascended, is the actual sun. This
sun, different from the sun that the fire symbolizes, represents “the universal
author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in
this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the
intellectual”. Compared to a fire that burns in the world of sight, allowing us to
see what we conceive to be true merely because we see it with our eyes, the sun
beyond the cave is what we strive to see, alongside the new world of realizations
we will come to once we have ascended. Witnessing this fire burn inside this
cave is a crucial step to ascension, because only then will we realize that there is
more to the world in which we live in, the fire allows us to see a poor copy of the
intellectual world, one which we must ascend to in order to experience the real
world.

4. What is education for Plato?

Plato thinks that education is wrong in the sense of putting knowledge into the
soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes because the power
and capacity of learning exists in the soul already. To explain, professors do not
actually teach their students new things that they have never come across
before, it is not like they can implant knowledge into a student like a kind of
miracle, rather, professors teach students how to reach their potential of
accessing this knowledge and capacity to learn because this already exists in
their students’ souls. He says that just as the eye was unable to turn from
darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge
can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned. This means that we
simply need a guide, a teacher, to help us turn the whole soul to reach this
potential and finally unveil the truths of the real world.

REFERENCES

Bedard, M. (2022, May 15). Plato’s Allegory of the Cave — Summary &
Meaning Explained. Studiobinder. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave — Summary & Meaning
Explained (studiobinder.com)