Explain the Allegory of Cave.

 Allegory of Cave is a dialogue between Socrates and his disciple Glaucon. During the dialogue, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine people living in an underground cave, which is only open to the outside at the end of a difficult ascent. Most of the people in the cave are prisoners chained facing the back wall of the cave so that they can neither move nor turn their heads. A fire burns behind them, and all the prisoners can see are the shadows playing on the wall in front of them. There are others in the cave, carrying objects, but all the prisoners see are their shadows. Some of the others speak, but there are echoes in the cave that make it difficult for the prisoners to understand which person is saying what. Socrates goes on to describe the difficulties a prisoner might have adapting to being freed. When he sees that there are solid objects in the cave, not just shadows, he is confused. Instructors can tell him that what he saw before was an illusion, but at first, he will assume his shadow life was the reality. Eventually, as he leaves and steps into the sun, he is painfully dazzled by its brightness, and stunned by the beauty of the moon and the stars. Once he becomes accustomed to the light, he will pity the people in the cave and would want to stay above and apart from them. The new arrival will choose to remain in the light, but, according to Socrates, he must not. Because for true enlightenment, to understand and apply what is goodness and justice, he must descend back into the darkness of the cave and join the men chained to the wall, and share his newly acquired knowledge with them.

The allegory of the cave has deep allegorical meaning because variety of symbolic suggestions are used in this writing. The dark cave symbolically suggests the contemporary world of ignorance and the chained people symbolize ignorant. The raised wall symbolizes the limitation of their thinking and the shadow symbolically suggest the world of sensory perception which Plato considers an illusion. In his opinion, the appearance is false and reality is somewhere, which we cannot see. For Plato, the appearing world is just the imitation of the real world. The shadows represent such imitation and, the reality is possible to know with the spiritual knowledge. The chains symbolize our limitation in this material world so that we do not understand the true reality. The outer world of the light symbolically suggests the world of spiritual reality, which we achieve by breaking the chains that are used to tie us. The dazzling of the eyes for the first time symbolizes difficulty to accept ignorance after knowing the reality. Hence, in allegory of the cave Plato has given a criticism of human’s limited existence in the material world. In Allegory of the cave, Plato also described about the perception. He says that there are two types of perception: sensory perception and spiritual perception. Sensory perception is the world of appearance, which we perceive, with the help of our sensory organs. For this, world is the world of illusion or shadows, thereby a world of falsehood. The reality or truth is impossible to perceive with our senses, it is possible through spiritual perception, which is divine enlightenment. Spiritual perception is possible when we reject the world of sensory perception and break all the material chains.

In short, in his book, Republic, Plato uses the allegory of Cave to explain the relations with the world of forms. He uses analogy of people who have spent their while life living in a cave. They have only seen shadows on the wall created by their campfire. Compared with the reality of the world of Forms, real physical objects and events are equivalent to being only shadows. Plato also takes the opportunity to state that only those people who have the ability to step out into the sunlight and see the true reality (which are the Forms) should rule. Plato leaves no doubt that only special people are fit to rule. He describes the ideal ruler is a philosopher-king, because only philosophers have the ability to discern the Forms. Plato goes on to say that it is only when such a person comes to power that the citizens of the state will have the opportunity to step out of the cave and see the light.

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