Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Perceptions of Reality

The basic premise of Plato’s allegory of the cave is to depict the nature of the human being, where true reality is hidden, false images and information are perceive as reality. In the allegory Plato tells a story of a man who is put on a Gnostics path. Prisoners seating in a cave with their legs and necks chained down since childhood. They are chained in such a way that they cannot move or see each other, only look into the shadows on the wall in front of them; not realizing they have three dimensional bodies. These images are of men and animals, carried by an unseen men on the background. Now imagine one of the prisoners is liberated into the light, the Gnostic path will become painful and difficult, but slowly his eyes will begin to accommodate what he sees and his fundamentalist view about the world will begin to change; soon he sees everything through anarchic thinking and reasons. When he return into the cave, his fellow prisoners don’t recognize him or understand anything he said. He has developed a new senses and capability of perception. This is the representation of the condition of the human nature, we live in a cave with false perception of reality that we’ve been told since childhood, these includes bias belief; but we must realize these present perception are incomplete.

To awaken the unconsciousness one must experience reality and develop new senses. The cave overall incorporates the idea of a movie theater, where individuals sit facing a screen with no knowledge or desire to know who is playing the movie, only to sit in the darkness and watch the screen. Many of us take what they see in the movie as reality, not distinguishing between, a story, fantasy and reality, and soon begin to behave like the characters in ...

... middle of paper ...

...use Afghanistan has terrorist that’s going to attack our country, we’ll perceive that as truth. If the school district system were to say tomorrow that 2+2=5, no longer 4 many will follow the new rule because they are the mathematician and they now more than we don’t, hence what they say is true. All these people play a role in creating this false reality that we all perceive as true reality. We don’t have individual autonomy despite the system stating that we possess such fundamental freedom. Since childhood, the government and school system gives us guides to follow and never to question these guidelines.

To sum up, Plato’s cave is an allegory of the human condition, each of us is a prisoner, chained down with distorted illusion of reality. To gain individual autonomy

one must awaken the unconsciousness, we must kill our imperfection and liberate one senses.