At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,-what will be his reply? And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error.Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:-Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.The Republic, Book VII, translated by Benjamin Jowett 2 Quotes about the Allegory of the Cave.However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not reality at all. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic and the theory of forms. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education ( παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". An Illustration of The Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic
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