Plato allegory of the cave movie#

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.Īnd now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. True, he said how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?Īnd of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?Īnd if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?Īnd suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? Like ourselves, I replied and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. 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.Īnd do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. Is a resident of the cave (a prisoner, as it were) likely to want to make the ascent to the outer world? Why or why not? What does the sun symbolize in the allegory? And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:–Behold! human beings living in an 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. Judging by this passage, why do you think many people in the democracy of Athens might have been antagonistic to Plato’s ideas? What does the sun symbolize in the allegory? This notion that truth is somehow embedded in our minds was also powerfully influential for many centuries.

At the end of the passage, Plato expresses another of his favorite ideas: that education is not a process of putting knowledge into empty minds, but of making people realize that which they already know. But those who can achieve enlightenment deserve to be the leaders and rulers of all the rest. Used to the world of illusion in the cave, the prisoners at first resist enlightenment, as students resist education. The importance of the allegory lies in Plato’s belief that there are invisible truths lying under the apparent surface of things which only the most enlightened can grasp. The essential point is that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy representation of it.

Plato allegory of the cave movie#

If he were living today, Plato might replace his rather awkward cave metaphor with a movie theater, with the projector replacing the fire, the film replacing the objects which cast shadows, the shadows on the cave wall with the projected movie on the screen, and the echo with the loudspeakers behind the screen. Such a person is then the best equipped to govern in society, having a knowledge of what is ultimately most worthwhile in life and not just a knowledge of techniques but that person will frequently be misunderstood by those ordinary folks back in the cave who haven’t shared in the intellectual insight. The rare individual escapes the limitations of that cave and, through a long, tortuous intellectual journey, discovers a higher realm, a true reality, with a final, almost mystical awareness of Goodness as the origin of everything that exists.

In “The Republic,” Plato sums up his views in an image of ignorant humanity, trapped in the depths and not even aware of its own limited perspective. Plato, the most creative and influential of Socrates’ disciples, wrote dialogues, in which he frequently used the figure of Socrates to espouse his own (Plato’s) full-fledged philosophy.