His theory begins by talking about prisoners, who have been chained all their life deep inside a cave, their heads are chained in one direction so that their gaze is fixed on a wall. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a wall, along which puppets of various animals, plants, and other things are played with by puppeteers. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. The prisoners name the shapes as they come by. This, is because it is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images. He then talks about how a prisoner is released and forced to stand up and turn around. At that moment his eyes were blinded by the light coming from a large fire, and the puppets dancing by will appear more real than their shadows. The last object he would be able to see is the sun, which, in time, he would learn to see as the object that provides life, and of course all other things in his vision. Once enlightened, the freed prisoner would want to return to the cave to free "his fellow friends. Another problem lies in the other prisoners not wanting to be freed: descending back into the cave would require the freed prisoner's eyes too adjust again, and for a time, he would stumble and fall into the surroundings. His eyes would be swamped by the darkness, therefore, he would not be able to identify the shapes on the wall as the other prisoners would, making it seem as if his being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight. He tries to explain his enlightenment but they are ignorant and don’t want to listen. They threaten to kill him if he continues speaking this ‘nonsense’.
As this theory is a metaphor all of the subjects involved in the story have a hidden meaning:
- The cave represents the prisoner’s world. It is all they have ever known, although logically there is a way to escape. In reality this is our world, it is all that we have ever known.
- The shadows represent what we assume to be reality. We go through life looking only at shadows we know nothing about reality but only these materialistic visions we see.
- The chains represent the constraints in society. How we are never advised to look beyond what we presume to be reality or in this case ‘look behind’.
- The escapee is a representation of someone who sees the truth or someone who is ‘enlightened’. This person has seen beyond the shadows, they are a philosopher.
- The fire gives us a glimpse of the truth, it is seen as giving us the first steps to enlightenment.
- The sun represents the absolute good, it reveals the truth to the prisoner, it is what life is created from. It reveals the world of the forms. The sun is the ultimate form, the ‘form of the good’. It gives purpose and meaning to the world of forms.
- The blindness of the prisoner represents the pain (emotionally and physically) and enlightenment felt by the prisoner. He has been shown the ‘world of forms’ which he is astonished to discover.
To a certain extent the cave analogy is a true representation of the way things are. Usually people don’t want to listen or observe what isn’t yet an accepted part of society or hasn’t yet been proved. They prefer to behave and accept how they have been brought up and what they have been told by authority or consecutives. There are many things that keep us in chains ourselves. Our ignorance to not want to see the truth or what is beyond our shadowed life, our family and friends influence us too not venture out of our very own ‘shadowed cave’.
Plato was a dualist, he believed in rationalism which explains his theory of the forms. He believes we live in a world of appearances, a world we understand using our senses (touch, see, smell, taste, hearing) using posteriori knowledge but, Plato believed these senses mislead and deceived us. He spoke of how we based a lot of our knowledge on opinion which is largely susceptible to flux and change which evidently is an unreliable source of ‘true’ knowledge. Because everything in our world is made of matter and is materialistic it is also prone to flux and change, so how can we possibly base true knowledge upon what is always changing? Plato believed there was a world of forms. In this world of forms lie ideas. Ideas of everything that exists in our world, only unlike our world everything in the world of forms is a perfect example of the imperfect copies that remain in our world – the world of appearances. Because these ideas are not made of matter they cannot change they remain the same throughout time, everything we have ever discovered or will discover is already in the world of forms we just haven’t remembered it yet (Plato believed that we had souls. He believed that our souls once were in the world of forms and then somehow got caught in the world of appearances. These souls remember through time the perfect example of what we saw within the world of forms. When humans philosophise and eventually become philosophers, once we have died our souls return to the world of forms. Unfortunately those souls who haven’t discovered the truth remain in the world of appearances keeping the ‘reason’ part of our soul, moving on to alternate bodies until eventually that soul philosophises.
