Allegory of aCave

“The Allegory of the Cave” is Plato’s explanation of the learning of the soul toward enlightenment. My own understanding of this allegory is parallel to Plato’s explanation of growth intelligence through experience. Each stage in “The Allegory of a Cave” is similar to the stages that a person goes through when growing up.

Plato describes a situation in which people are born and raised in a very dark cave, and chained by the neck and arms so that they can only face the back of the cave. Behind them is a puppet theater by which the prisoners can only see the shadows cast on the wall by the fire that burns near them. Throughout their lives they never interact with other people or see the daylight. All they ever see are the puppet shadows, and that to them is reality. “To them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”

Being raised in a cave and having to use your imagination to think of what is real is the first stage in the Allegory. This stage is similar to that of a baby or infant, the young stages of life. During the beginning of life a child decides what reality, or truth, is based on what their parents tell them or what the

y see. Because of their innocent minds, children accept the answers that their parent give and made it the “foundation of ‘their’ belief system,” (Ruggiero, 25). Like the confined people in the cave, young children are not allowed to wander off and explore everything in sight. The knowledge that they possess is based on what they are allowed to do. Because those that are in the den are totally isolated from reality and have no understanding of what is and is not real, they have no idea that the shadow they see is only an image. Because an image such as the shadow is all that they know, they would never know what it really is unless they are set free to discover the truth.

As Plato explains, there is yet another stage that the prisoners go through. When the prisoners were first released, they experienced pain when they tried to move their necks. When they were forced to look at the sun, they unexpectedly suffered more pain. This stage is similar to the adult stages in life. During the teenage years, one may think that they know everything about the world and life and experienced the most pain that one could ever think possible. But it is during the adult stage that they will encounter more responsibilities that they did not have during the teenager years, such as a career, relationships, children, and finances. “At first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves.” By this stage, a person will be able to consider everything that they learned from their childhood, teenage years, and adulthood and see what everything really means; they are able to see the whole picture. When the prisoner was unwillingly forced up a steep ascent to look at the sun, he wa

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