Compare Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

After Socrates, Plato’s teacher, died, Plato decided to continue with Socrates’ ideas but in a different way. During his life, Socrates, had the idea that things such as like virtue and justice could not be defined but Plato came up with a way to define these terms, this is called the Theory of the Forms. He believes you can find a true being of virtue and justice, in other words, you can find its form. Plato believed that all things have a true being and according to Plato the world we live in is an imitation of the real world. Our world is constantly changing and we rely only on our senses to understand these changes. For example, animals die, fruit rots, plants grow and even us as human beings are in a constant state of change, we are not the same person we were 5 years ago or 5 days ago or even 5 hours ago, even our ideas are changing.

This is described as people chained to a wall of a cave facing a blank wall of a cave during their entire life. In the cave there is also a fire and the people chained to the wall all they see are reflections of things passing in front of the fire, and they start designating name to these shadows. The shadows is the closest to reality these prisoners get to experience because they can’t even see the persons carrying the objects, just the objects themselves, and the sounds the people make when carrying the object the prisoners think these sounds are those from the shadows. Then as one prisoner is freed and goes outside the cave, then this prisoner can perceive the real world, as he is going outside the cave the sunlight burns his eyes and this representative of the reality the prisoner is experiencing. After experiencing the real world, he returns to the cave to share what he just saw with the prisoners, however, when the prisoner tells the other prisoners about the world that is awaiting outside, they don’t believe him and threaten to kill him if he sets them