Plato s The Allegory Of The Cave - 1214 Words

In the ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, Plato uses a philosophical situation to help us as the reader to examine our perception of life by what is around us. Plato uses such an abstract situation to show that we can mistake the information that we gain due to our position in a situation for truth. In Plato’s allegory, he begins with a set of three people, prisoners of the cave that have never seen anything other than what the cave and their binding allows. â€Å"The prisoners are tied to some rocks, their arms and legs bound and their head is tied so that they cannot look at anything but the stonewall in front of them† (The Simile of the Cave. Republic, 1974). What they are able to see is shadows of a fire and those people or animals- free to the†¦show more content†¦His body isn’t ready for the direct sunlight and his mind cannot comprehend the world in comparison to what he felt he knew. In time, the man is able to see that all of the previously â€Å"known† information he had was completely false but also that he must start a different journey in order to find himself as the way of life he was previously use to, in which guessing was the way of judging knowledge, is ineffective and useless to him now. Finally, the prisoner returns to the cave with a new base of knowledge. He tried to share this information with his fellow prisoners but after hearing about his travels and that they were in fact wrong the prisoned men said to him that â€Å"up he went and down he came without eyes, and that it was better to not even think of ascending† (The Simile of the Cave. Republic, 1974) . He is then met with resistance in offering them help and freedom from their binds. They threaten â€Å"if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender and put him to death†, it is as if they feel that his â€Å"loss of sight† is death to them and they are perfectly happy with the information that they know to be true (The Simile of the Cave. Republic, 1974) . As a student, we all have situational trials. When I initially went back to Kaplan for my Medical assistant degree I was also a stay at home mother of two small children. I didn’t get out much and socially was dra wn back as a majority of my