Behind the prisoners was a large fire and between the fire and prisoners was a walkway. The fire cast shadows upon the wall and the prisoners believed the shadows to be reality. The walkway allowed people to walk through the cave with great ease. As the people crossed through the cave, past the fire, an illusion was created; the fire cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners were watching. The prisoners spent their lives debating what the shadows were as they couldn’t see the walkway and had no knowledge that this existed.
As well as the shadow of the fire, the prisoners can also see shadows of people crossing the footbridge behind them, carrying stone animal statues; again they believe these shadows to be real. One of the prisoners escapes from the empirical world of the cave, making a hard journey to the outside, into the real world. His eyes take a while to adjust in the sunlight in the real immutable world. He then chooses to go back into the cave to tell the other prisoners the knowledge he had gained from the outside world, however they did not believe in his knowledge and decided they wanted to ridicule and mistreat Plato- a similar thing happened to his early teacher Socrates, when he tried to share his knowledge and theories with people. Furthermore, this could also show the prisoners are content with what they already know in their idea of
“The Caves in Our World” In the story, “The Allegory of the Cave,” there are prisoners chained in a cave who have never seen the outside world, but only distorted views of people and the objects they carry along the wall behind the prisoners. In one sense, the cave could be seen as the darkness that people live in when they do not know Jesus. They live in a dark world, where the fire is Satan, who lies and distorts peoples’ views of things by casting the shadows on the wall. People who do not know Jesus are tempted and lied to by Satan. He makes it near impossible for those people to see the truth spoken by the Bible.
Allegory of the Cave-Plato “Allegory of the Cave” presents a vision of a group of prisoners chained in front of a fire observing the shadows of artificial objects carried by persons walking in the trek behind them and what would happen if a prisoner is set free. Through a serious of metaphors, Plato argues that a hero is man of wisdom, prowess, and endurance. First of all, the cave, chains and shadows show a full-scale condition of US citizens-they are confined by the ideal democratic and peaceful images pictured by the government such as those promising speeches given by candidates for presidency. The prisoners--Citizens in the US are only exposed to those appealing words of the government—“Mission accomplished:)”-- that they are unable to make a positive change because they cannot see the relatively cruel reality until someone is set free to “walk with eyes lifted to the light” and come back down there to inform them. As this free man sees the light, an “eye ache” is inevitable because he’s been in the dark for too long.
Explain Plato’s analogy of the cave [25] Plato’s analogy of the cave describes some people who are prisoners and they are only able to see one wall of the cave. Behind them was a lit fire which gave light to be able to cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners were facing. These shadows were cast by puppeteers who were behind a wall and held things up to tell stories to the prisoners via the wall. One prisoner is forced out of the cave, where he has been his whole life, to see the ‘real’ world. He finds out, after adjusting to the new sunlight, that the shadows were just representations of real objects and that the shadows he had believed to be real objects were in fact not.
This statement about monsters and men made by Michele’s father is very ironic as his father is the “monster” who kidnaps Fillipo and hides him into a hole, not the “monsters” in his make-believe stories. As the two chapters progress, Michele experiences a change in his innocence. Michele alters his fears throughout chapter one and two. At first, Michele is frightened when he sees Fillipo’s leg and due to this instinct, he runs away: “I felt my ears boil, my head and arms hang heavy. I was going to pass out”p28.
Only true reality can be found in the world of forms, in which everything is unchanging. Plato’s analogy is set in a cave, the cave is meant to represent the physical world, from which people only see what Plato describes to be an illusion. The prisoners within the cave know of nothing but what they have seen for all their lives. Behind the prisoners are a low wall and a walkway, in the walkway a fire burns, every now and then people walk past the fire carrying objects that reflect into the cave as shadows. The prisoners see the shadows and think that what they see is reality, like we think about our world now.
The cave symbolises the World of Sense, a figure of captives are tired by their ankles and necks so that they are unable to change direction. They have been brought up like this since birth this is why they don’t know anything else but this. The prisoners are individuals who act like marionettes before the fire which burns so that they would be able to see shadows which flicker on the wall before them. The captives observe this flickering shadow which appears on the wall before them, eventually they developed a pattern over-time. They try to prognosticate movements of the shadows; the sounds are made by individuals with the shadows, this is what they think as true reality.
Plato cave analogy is that anyone who was not or is not a philosopher, are like prisoners in a cave 'Behold! Human beings are living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light'. As prisoners they were forced to watch the shadows on the walls. These shadows were created by a fire, which were being manipulated by puppeteers. Furthermore, until they got to see what life was really like and not the artificial reality they have been experiencing.
In his description of the parable of the cave, he describes prisoners in a cave ‘with a long entrance open to daylight as wide as the cave,’ the prisoners legs and heads are restricted of movement so they can only look straight ahead of them. ‘Behind them and higher up’, is a fire and between the prisoners and the fire is a road with a curtain ‘like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and the audience, above which they show their puppets’ (Simile of the cave). Men go past this screen, carrying tools and gear behind the curtain and the prisoners believe that the shadows they saw are real and that they were able to speak. The prisoners believe they are real because it is all they have been seeing since they were children. They never question the source of the shadows, they simply accept that they are there.