Interpreting the Allegory of the Cave

“In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” he is asking us to imagine men chained up in a cave, where they are unable to leave and are forced to stare at the side of the cave opposite the entrance ever since they were children. The shadows are a false view of the truth, an illusion of the reality. In “Allegory of the Cave”, the teacher guided the prisoner who are chained up from the darkness into the light; which the light represented the truth.

Education is about seeing the truth. Plato believed that you must have the desire in life to learn new things; if someone doesn’t want to learn what’s true in life; then you can’t force them to learn.

My first initial reaction to this reading was that I was very confused, I had to read over it about two to three mores time and look at the picture a few times to fully understand what exactly was going on. To me the point of reading, “Allegory of the Cave” is to show people the true difference between knowledge of the truth and the people who really do see the truth. The main theme of Plato’s “Allegory of the cave” is that we as humans don’t tend to understand the true reality of our world. Reading the story again, I have understood that there are a couple of things that I can compare the story to modern day today. Social media is one of them, there is even religion to some people, and especially the government. For example, social media depicts the Middle East as Muslim terrorist or that they are all suicide bombers. Another one, the Irish only drink Guiness all day, and if you really pay attention to where it is coming from its most all the time social media.

We do have a cave today around us; we are chained to a wall called stereotypes. People today believe that the stereotypes in social media are the exact same in real life, which isn’t true at all. We the people need to break away past the wall and get past the fire and get out of the cave to see things as they truly are in this world. We need to get into the light and into the truth to reteach ourselves on what to believe about the different cultures and nationalities around us today.”

Did you like this example?

429

23