Plato's Allegory of Cave

1.     1.   According to Socrates, what does the Allegory of the Cave represent?

            - The "Allegory of the Cave" represents the imaginations we create in our minds. The people in the cave are taught to believe the things we see with our eyes. Socrates uses the people who are chained be unable to see the real animal passing by. The fire projects the shadows of the creatures, using our imaginative minds, we create our own names, characterizations, and etc from what we know.

2. What are the key elements in the imagery used in the allegory?

- The cave represents prisoners who are innocent, the shadows are the imagination and false realities, the sunlight represents the intellectual world and reality, the prisoner who walked out the cave represents the philosophers like Plato.

3. What are some things the allegory suggests about the process of enlightenment or education?

                -  The education and enlightenment are learned from the images we are given. The images set our imaginations to a reality. Plato believes people are enlightened by education, for example, in the cave, every time an unknown specie came up and projected on to the wall of the cave, the prisoners were enlightened.

4. What do the imagery of "shackles" and the "cave" suggest about the perspective of the cave dwellers or prisoners?

                -   The cave is represented by the world of imagination. Since they are so limited with their knowledge, the cave dwells on the prisoners from being educated. The “shackles” represents the prisoners limitation and inescapable from the darkness and flickering lights.

5. In society today or in your own life, what sorts of things shackle the mind?

                - In society today, I believe shackles are for people who have done the wrong things, committing sins, etc. Everyday people try and do the right things, innocent people get involved with people who should be prisoners. People in shackles are meant to suffer.

6. Compare the perspective of the freed prisoner with the cave prisoners?

                -   The freed prisoner has an emotional state of being able to see what’s real and what wasn’t. The images we create in our minds are different from reality. The freed prisoner was able to taste, touch, and ultimately see the reality.

7. According to the allegory, lack of clarity or intellectual confusion can occur in two distinct ways or contexts. What are they?

                - The prisoners that were restricted to only the views of what the shadows confusion and lack of clarity happens in two distinct ways which were that they were unable to express the shadows in to words because they didn’t understand what it was, and the confusion was how the shadow expressed on the wall of the cave.

8. According to the allegory, how do cave prisoners get free? What does this suggest about intellectual freedom?

                - The prisoners were let go in to the real world, it’s basically an intellectual freedom because they were in the cave seeing shadows but when the prisoners were released, they were able to actually see what they saw on to the shadows.                 

9. The allegory presupposes that there is a distinction between appearances and reality. Do you agree? Why or why not?

                - Yes, there is a huge difference between appearances and reality because it may seem like something is real, such as a dream but in reality it may seem like that was real. In the cave, the prisoners were able to only see shadows, no color, texture, or anything. It’s difficult to wrap around a concept with only an imaginations and nothing else.

10. If Socrates is incorrect in his assumption that there is a distinction between reality and appearances, what are the two alternative metaphysical assumptions?

                - People will only believe what they see because that’s the only knowledge they have, and people would have extremely narrow and boring minds because a shadow doesn’t give you much information.