Plato's Allegory Of The Cave - ClearlyAdvanced.com

The allegory of the cave is an interesting story indeed. It makes you ponder the nature of reality and is a beautiful allegory for the human condition & even humanity's path towards enlightenment: direct apprehension or intuition of essences, without reliance upon reason.

I like to think that if I am the guy in the cave I would not shun the light. I might believe the truth that I was seeing over the truth I had known my whole life, after all what do I have to loose? I think a person subjected to a life of looking at that cave wall would not like his life very much. It is true that he would not know his life was abnormal, that is to say that this person is so conditioned that their reality based on the shadows they have seen dancing on the wall all their lives.

This Plato's Allegory website has numbered steps and a diagram, much like the handout we received.

Allegory Of The Cave

I would rather die while being dragged from that cave then live my life enthralled in a false reality. But that is my higher level logical thought process I am using to make that statement. Plato suggests that: A life time of this kind of physical conditioning would result in total dependence on the false or skewed view of reality. I think these cave people could be shown their false world and told about how it fits into the real world.

Why did they kill the guy that brought stories about the real world? Because they already had a "real world" and they did not need him filling their kids heads with that three dimensional, colorful "world outside of the cave" crap.

I understand that but, damn did they really need to kill him? Why not banish him to his fancy new reality? Must be because they are so wrapped up in the shadow puppets that they thought it heresy to speak of such a "real world beyond the cave".