Plato's Cave As An Allegory Of The Cave By Socrates

According to Plato, the world is divided into two, the visible: which we observe with our senses, and the intelligible: which we understand with our minds. A line runs through these two realms that starts at the lowest possible stage of human knowledge, otherwise known as illusion. The next stage is belief and it forms the border between the visible and the intelligible on the divided line. Crossing over into the intelligible realm, there is mathematics and reason and finally the knowledge of the Forms. The visible world is the universe we see around us, the intelligible world is comprised of Forms, which are abstract, changeless absolutes such as Goodness, Beauty, or Roundness that exists in permanent relation to the visible realm and makes everything in it, possible. Only the Forms are pieces of knowledge, because only they posses the eternal unchanging truth that the mind, not the senses, must understand. Only the minds that are trained to grasp the Forms, otherwise known as philosophers, can know anything at all. Their main goal is to know the Form of Good above all else because it is the source of all Forms, like Knowledge, Truth, and Beauty. In Book VII, Socrates presents the allegory of the cave as a metaphor that illustrates the effects of education on the human soul. Education moves the philosopher through the stages on

He cannot see anything around him, because he has been so habituated to living in the dark and with a very limited experience of the world. Soon, as his vision adjusts to the light and this new knowledge, he can see the things in the world outside of the cave. These things are even more real than the statues and the objects that made shadows on the cave wall. He now represents the cognitive stage of thought. He has seen the most real things, representing the world of Forms on the divided