Allegory of the Cave

Group Members:
•Ayaz Nadeem
•Saad Ismail
 Introduction
• The Allegory of the Cave can be found Plato's best-
known work, The Republic.
• It (the Allegory) is a lengthy fictional dialogue
between Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. The
Allegory is related to Plato's Theory of Forms.
• According to this theory, is the Forms, or Ideas, that
possess the highest and most fundamental kind of
reality. The world that we experience through our
senses here and now is not the actual one.
 Main Idea of the Theory
• Imagine prisoners that have spent their entire
lives chained deep inside a cave. They have
been chained so that they cannot see behind
themselves and they are forced to stare at the
cave’s wall in front of them. Behind them a
fire is burning and between the prisoners and
the fire is a walkway.
• Now imagine that each day an object crosses
the walkway and of course the people carrying
their things to the other side of the walkway.
Now, their shapes created shadows on the
wall in front of the prisoners.
• This is the only world prisoners have ever
known. The shadows appeared and the
echoes of unseen objects were now ringing in
the ears of the prisoners.
• Now, imagine that a prisoner is released. After some
time adjusting to the blinding light the free prisoner
will begin to experience the world outside of the
cave for the very first time and there is like nothing
that he could have ever imagined. With this
perception of the world, the free prisoner would
want to return back to his prisoner friends to share
about his experience and his incredible discoveries.
• But the prisoners can’t recognize their own
friend. He appears as all things do. His voice is
a distorted echo and his body is a grotesque
shadow. They cannot understand his fantastic
stories of the world outside of the cave. To
them it will never exist. This of course, does
not make the world outside of the cave any
less real.
 Interpretation
• The prisoners in the cave saw shadows on the
wall made by the light at the opening. Plato is
hinting that few of us see the truth, that we
see rather shadows of the truth which we
mistake for the truth itself, until we wise up
that we are in the dark and finally turn to look
in another direction, at the real thing, the
light, which is a traditional metaphor or
symbol for the truth.
• Plato is urging us to doubt that what we know
is really the truth, is very often an illusion, a
shadow, a fake. Note that instead of just
telling us "Look for the truth!" he creates a
tale, and images, to demonstrate concretely
his meaning. He makes us think to find his
meaning, and thinking is what Plato was all
about.
 Conclusion
• Plato sums up the meaning of philosophy in
one analogy. We all live in a constrained view
of the world (cave) and philosophy is the
activity of broadening that view (leaving the
cave).