Reasoning Used in Platos Cave, Essay Example

The movement of Plato in Plato’s Cave proceeds in three stages. The first stage is imprisonment in the cave. The second stage is departure from the cave. The third stage is the return to the cave.

Socrates begins by telling Glaucon to imagine a cave where there are people imprisoned. The prisoners of the cave are chained up so that they cannot move their necks or heads, and they have to look at the wall ahead of them. Socrates then told Glaucon to imagine that there was a fire behind the prisoners. The people behind the prisoners held puppets that cast shadows against the wall that the prisoners were facing. Also, the people controlling the puppets make noises that the prisoners assume belong to the shadows on the walls. Socrates proposed that the prisoners’ reality was the shadows puppets on the wall, because that was all that they had ever known.

Socrates then told Glaucon to imagine that one prisoner was unchained and forced to turn and see the fire. Socrates said that the fire would hurt the prisoner’s eyes and the prisoner would turn back to the reality that he has always known—the puppets on the wall. Socrates then supposed that the prisoner was dragged away from the cave and forced into the light of the sun. The prisoner would be angry and in pain, and would attempt to turn away from his new reality. Socrates proposed that only after the prisoner was forced to look at the sun could they begin to accept their new reality.

The freed prisoner would then consider his reality to be superior to the reality of the other prisoners. He would feel sorry for the other prisoners and would return to the cave to try to free the other prisoners. When the original prisoner returned to the cave, his eyes would not be acclimated to the dark, and he would have a hard time seeing. The other prisoners would think that his journey out of the cave had harmed him, and would try to kill the original prisoner for trying to bring them out of the cave.

References

Cohen, M. (2006). Allegory of the Cave. Retrieved from University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm