Introduction
I decided to expand on Plato’s allegory of the cave because, I believe it was a really persuasive way of presenting the idea of the world of forms. I also believe that Plato’s allegory is important in today world. It relates to the current conditions of the society we live in.
Plato
Plato is an ancient Greek philosopher who founded the first University in ancient Greece called the academy. Born in 428 B.C. Plato was a student of Socrates. Plato’s experienced the was Peloponnesian war in between Athens and Sparta. The Spartans won the war and replace the existing democracy in Greece with an oligarchy rule by the Spartans. The execution of Socrates in 399 B.C. sparked a huge interest in Plato to learn philosophy. Plato traveled across the Mediterranean region, studying mathematics with Pythagoreans in Italy and astronomy and religion in Egypt. Plato was a popular sophist. Plato’s goal is to establish a pattern for a good state. A good state is where one can lives a good life. Plato believe a part of establishing a good state is to believe that goodness exists. Plato disagreed with many ideas regarding knowledge and belief. He believes that beliefs can be true or false, but knowledge can’t be true or false. Plato’s starts to develop the theory of forms. Plato’s believes that there is another world that includes the perfect form of everything and he calls it the world of forms. For example, take a perfect Square. When we see a drawn square, we believe it’s perfect but its isn’t, because the perfect square only exists in the world of forms. This example leads to Plato’s divided line. The divided line consists of two sections; the visible world and the ideal world. The visible world is what we see with our eyes and the ideal world is what Plato refers to as the perfect example of the visible world.
The allegory of the cave
Plato presented “the allegory of the cave” to help us understand the divided line. The story begins by imagining a number of men living in a cave which has an entrance that opens toward daylight. These men has been bound since childhood and their legs and their neck are fastened so they cant look around. Then imagine a fire behind them at an elevation above them. People walk buy carrying statues of figures made of wood and stone and they make noises. The prisoners now think that the shadow of these object is the most real thing because that’s the only thing they have seen. Suppose that one of the prisoners breaks free and escapes he looks behind him and finds the fire, now he forgets about his former reality and replaces it with an actual object “Fire”. The prisoner proceeds to step outside the cave and starts to look around at the sun, trees, and objects around him, after observing the surroundings he draws the conclusion that the sun is the reason for the shadows that the prisoners believed was reality. The prisoner who broke free decides to return to the cave to tell the truth to the other prisoners, but they didn’t believe him. “As an allegory of the cave carries with it these implications and comparisons: The Cave world, whose light is a fire; the visible world, whose light and source of both phenomena and perception of phenomena is the sun; the ideal world, whose light and source of both being and knowledge is the form or idea of the good. (The Origin of Plato’s Cave page 132). Plato assumes that in the ideal world, the truly educated are those who lack education and in the visible world those who only believe in what they see. The prisoners now know that their whole life was controlled by other people and now they know the truth.
Conclusion
I believe that Plato’s allegory is important in today’s world because its main purpose is to show us that we only believe what we see and when we know the truth. We can see that in our society. The media, government and military always tried to hide the truth full information and show us what they know we will easily believe and that’s how they spread lies.
Works cited
“Plato.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 19 Oct. 2017, www.biography.com/people/plato-9442588.
Sze, Corinne Praus. “ΕΙΚΑΣΙΑ and ΠΙΣΤΙΕ in Plato’s Cave Allegory.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, 1977, pp. 127–138. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/638375.
“THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE.” Law, Politics, and Philosophy, 9 Aug. 2008, tamayaosbc.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/74/.
Wright, John Henry. “The Origin of Plato’s Cave.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 17, 1906, pp. 131–142. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/310313.