Platos Allegory of the Cave

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“The Allegory of the cave” by plato is an insightful, thought provoking piece of writing. Plato poses the idea that people in the world are in chains and are being manipulated to believe what is not. There are those with higher understanding of how it really works, these people have gone through what plato describes to be the stages of “Imagination, Belief, Thought, and Understanding”. Through these different levels of cognitive development humans ascend to a higher knowledge, higher knowledge that distinguishes between the ignorant and the enlightened people who have a greater understanding of the different meanings of education. Plato uses various metaphors such as the chains to represent the senses which keep humans from exploring and gaining higher knowledge. The puppeteers who represent those who know and use their knowledge to control the rest. The shadows which stands for what people believe they are seeing which relates back to the matrix, which their whole world is make believe , but there are those who challenge the system and become aware of what is really going on. The sun represents the fully enlightened stage, completely out of the cave which obviously stands for the ignorance most people hold. The fire is the hard reality which is hard to look at but once a person sees that the shadows on the wall are not what they seem to be the fire becomes the only way to enlightenment. As a part of the way the shadows are perceived, plato describes those staring at them without questioning as content, but there is a certain event, a sign, a hunch, that there is something else going on and there is more than just shadows that pushes humans to break from the chains and achieve true knowledge which is located outside the cave. The first stage of cognitive development is Imagination, the real beliefs that are unfounded. In this stage plato describes as the

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