Understanding happens when we grasp the world of Forms with our mind. If we want to truly understand reality, we are to understand the Forms. These Forms (or Ideas) are concepts that are perfect, abstract, unchanging, non-physical, and universal. The physical realm of things, the one we experience through our senses, is only a shadow, or image, of the true reality of the realm of Forms. Plato’s theory of Forms, or theory of Ideas, is his view that the physical world is not as real or as true as timeless, absolute ideas. The freed prisoner is the philosopher, seeking true knowledge outside the cave of enslavement. The shadows are the temporal objects known through the senses. The prisoners are people untutored in philosophy, bound to a worldly, temporal and perishable existence, a mere imitation of true reality. It is also not a place where people can obtain knowledge of true reality. It is a weaker world that hosts the senses. The cave represents the physical world, that is, the world that we know. However, the others think him mad, and, in the comfort of their safe zone, the only zone that they know, if they were able to, they would try and kill anyone trying to drag them out and into the light.īeing an allegory, Plato, through Socrates, uses the different characters and objects in the allegory as metaphorical devices. Excited, he wants to share the news, so he returns to the cave to the tell his confined companions. The freed prisoner sees the outside world as superior to what he experienced in the cave. As his eyes adjust, he makes his way through the cave, eventually making towards the entrance, where he gets to see the rest of reality, This philosopher sees real people, and trees, and birds, and things, and the blazing sun. Unbound, he stretches his stiffened limbs for the first time, turning his head around for the first time, blinded by a flame he sees for the first time.
COOKING COMPANIONS THEORIES FREE
Now imagine one of them breaks free from the shackles. They constitute the totality of their reality. To the prisoners, the shadows are all that there is. These shadows are throw on the wall by a fire behind them which they have never seen, and in front of which cutout images are paraded. There are shadows of people, of household objects, of trees, and so on. Stiff and inflexible, their whole existence is made up of sitting down, watching shadows dancing on a wall in front of them. They cannot, not were they ever able to, look around the cave, at each other, or themselves.
Imagine a group of prisoners who have spent their whole, entire lives in a cave, chained facing a wall. The story is presented in Book VI of his celebrated Republic as a dialogue between Glaucon (Plato’s older brother) and Socrates (Plato’s own teacher.) Plato attempts to explain reality by giving us an allegory, a story meant to reveal deeper truths. So does reality exist? And if it does, what is it? Sounds like Th e Matrix (1999), or The Truman Show (1998), but it’s actually Plato, almost two and a half millennia ago.
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