Blog 2

Allegory of The Cave

Allegory of The Cave is a fictional dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, told by Plato. In the dialogue Plato’s actual teacher, Socrates and Plato’s actual brother, Glaucon, discuss how people acquire knowledge and perceive the knowledge that is given to them.

The discussion is expressed through a story about prisoners bound from head to toe in a cave from their birth to their adult lives, and force fed to believe that shadows and sounds made by people behind the prisoners, who they couldn't see, were reality; their reality. One of the prisoners manages to be freed and ventures out out into the real world. This prisoner experiences the real world for the first time; experiencing the bright light of the Sun, and learning about the real world around him. He goes back to the cave to share with the prisoners still in the cave his new discovery and introduce them to his experiences. The prisoners don't take to what he says and dismiss what he says.

Through this analogy Socrates is sharing the idea that the reality that most everyone knows to be true may not be true, and that they, we, need to step away from what we believe and seek knowledge beyond what we believe and even question what we believe. I do agree with Socrates to a moderate extent. I am still someone who is cautious about questioning what I know, but as I learn and discover more I expand my mind to question more about the world around me.