Plato was born around 428 B.C. in Athens, Greece. The majority of his life’s work was influenced by another great mind- Socrates. Plato had been his student and friend up until Socrates execution around 400 A.D. He found it hard to understand how such an intellectual, brilliant man was put to death for attempting to enlighten the general population. As a result his philosophical studies drifted towards ethics and politics. This is what he believed would stop such tragedies as Socrates’ death. The “Allegory of the Cave” is an attempt to describe the struggle that Socrates and Plato went through to expose thinking and pure knowledge on people that other

Overall Plato’s work has been the most influential to me as a philosophy student and human being. As an ancient Greek scholar he was able to produce more revolutionary theories than later men with vast amounts of technology and history at their fingertips.

The “Allegory of the Cave” was used by Plato to describe his theory about the levels of knowledge and reality that he called the divided line theory. Plato divides our modes of awareness in four levels. These four levels are also divided in two to describe the objects that represent the different modes or levels of awareness. These two groups of four are then divided again. The objects of awareness are split between the intelligible world and the visible world. The modes of awareness are split between knowledge and opinion. Plato states that an individual must fully understand each mode of awareness in order to move on to next level. That is the basis for Plato’s divided line theory.

Plato now wants you to imagine that one of these prisoners was liberated. For the first time in the prisoner’s life he see the statues and the fire that are causing the shadows. At first he believes that the shadows are reality and the statues and bright fire are illusions. As he made his way farther up and out of the cave he would see real objects for the first time. The real objects represent the perfect forms, which we cannot see but only imagine. This is the first stage of the intelligible world. The prisoner would accept these as reality and begin to see the imperfection and insignificance of life in the cave. This is the third step for Plato in his divided line theory. The prisoner is thinking belief as a result of experiencing the objects like trees and animals, which are replicated imperfectly in the cave. Reality has shifted from imagination and belief in the visible world to thinking in what Plato describes as the intelligible world. The Prisoner has now passed from Opinion to Knowledge in his mode of awareness. As a result of this newborn knowledge the prisoner now understands how meaningless the other prisoners lives are. Their lives revolve around something that is not real. The escaped prisoner would feel compelled awaken the other prisoners to this new world. What Plato describes next has played out many times through the course of history, before and afte

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