Plato's Allegory Of The Cave: The Theories Of Reality

Appearance is what we perceive around us; it is sometimes known as the empirical, which means known through the senses. Reality is most commonly defined as all that exists regardless of whether it is perceived or not; in other words, it exists independently of anyone’s perception.The metaphysical problem of reality and appearance can be described as the difficulty of telling the objective from the subjective. One of the proboems of reality and appearance has already been illustrated by Plato, which is that reality is genuine as opposed to deceptive. He suggests a rationalist approach to answering this question relying on reasons that focused on our senses. Our sensory knowlege and experiences are our only perceptions of reality, but that can still mean that its not really there. All that us humans have are our own paradigms of what reality “really is” which is based upon a series of assumptions and beleifes that in turn, determines their views of reality.

In Platos Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners only realities were derived entirly from their sensory knowlege. As the allegory begins we are faced with prisoners who’s paradigmed appearances are completely based off of shadows. After one prisoner is brought up out of the shadows into reality it is clear that what he had thought was real all along was

just one big lie. This represents how the prisoners were only able to draw a sense of realities through their own sensory knowlege. The objects and shadows the prisoners were seeing were not real, but actually just mimics of the real thing; everything that is physcially there is just a copy of that perfect form.

Because of everyday experiences, people often find themselves in situations wear the appearance of things seem to be misleading. In some cases these things can be obvious, such as carefully constucted illusions, or things that may need more knowlwge or examination, such a rainbows. These appearances that wehumans are faced with can be easily realted to the prisoners in Platos allegory. We see the illusion or rainbow as something that is not actually what it appears to be. The point of the story where the shadows are generated by objects illuminated by a light other than the sun is meant to show that they are somehow produced by real things, but in a very indirect manner.

So why is this question of reality and appearance even relavant to humanity?
Well, according to our own common sense what we see and the appearance IS reality since the objects the we see around us continue to be when no one is looking or observing them, this is also known as realism.

There seems to be two things wrong with our common sense how it affects the true appearance of reality. Everything we see is an illusion of some sort, a simple misimpertation and wrong representation of reality. Which are like the shadows in The Cave, illusions and misrepresenations of reality. The second reason why the on going question of what is the problem between reality and apperance is that everything we see around us and everything that has built up

our