The Allegory of The Cave
Junwoo Lee
THEO 190 003 SP15

This work written by Plato tells us about the theoretical environment, which is supposedly happening in a cave. Since a very young childhood, a group of prisoners have been held and bound by tight chains designed to prevent them from turning their head around so that they could not see the source of what is happening in front of their very eyes, which is their observable and perceivable reality. The world of shadows, which in fact, is performed by people and their puppets behind them is thought to be the only reality both because of the physical constraints and the consequent prison of their minds artificially created from the controlled and limited exposure to the actual reality.
What is going to happen if one of the prisoners were freed to see the world freely and allowed to come back to the darkness? Socrates explains, it will take time to adjust his eyes to either the outside world or the cave if he comes from the darkness or light respectively. Basically the extreme two ends, the Sun and the shadow world in the dark cave, are inherently incompatible to each other because of the difference in their natures. The prisoner examines everything in detail, and after hard time trying to figure out what it is all about, he is finally “illuminated” to a degree where it is impossible for him to go back to the dark cave because of two following reasons. First, his fellow prisoners will not only laugh at him and think he has lost his eyesight for exploring yet untrodden roads but also they will not hesitate to kill him for trying to allegedly rescue them, which for