Next Plato asks us to imagine if one of the prisoners was removed from the cave, when they get up from their shackles and turn to face the fire, they will be in great pain, first from the ache of moving muscles they have not used and then from the glare of the fire. He will come face to face with the objects they first saw as shadows, however his eyesight will not have adjusted to light and the real objects will appear less real than the shadows he originally knew, this will confuse the prisoners, why has he been released to experience pain and puzzlement? This represents the confusion people feel when they first open their minds to new philosophical ideas, the ideas may be more complicated, so seem less favourable to their original ideas and thus cause confusion and maybe distress as the person has been forced to examine what they thought was reality.
The prisoner is then forced up a steep and rocky incline to the daylight outside, it is bright and his eyes are still not adjusted, the journey will be painful. His journey upwards is very symbolic of the journey we go on in our minds when we start to ask philosophical questions, the fact that it is not an easy journey shows how you cannot go from ignorance to wisdom is one step, but that it will take a while and the path their may not be easy.
Once the prisoner is outside he will not be able to take in everything he sees, much like a person receiving a wealth of knew information, it will take him a while to ‘digest’ his surroundings and make sense of them. Plato’s point here is that this world of truth and real reality is so different it takes us time to adjust from our previous mistaken existence. In time the prisoner will be able to look at the ground, trees, objects and see himself in water. Eventually he will be able to look at the sun and see it as the basis for all life. Here Plato is using the sun as a metaphor for wisdom, and enlightenment or even God. The prisoner is like us, experiencing all these new things, which eventually lead him to the sun, we experience new thoughts and grasp a new understand of the world.
With his knew found knowledge the prisoner feels sorry for the others in the cave, he knows now that their skills and perceptions are useless in the real world. He decides to go back down and tell them what he has learned, much like when some one learns something that will benefit others they want to ‘spread the news’. The prisoners in the cave have a game; naming the shadows that go past and seeing who is quickest to name the next shadow. When the prisoner who has been outside returns he will not be used to darkness, his skill at this game will have worsened and he will not be very good at it. He knows this does not matter as he has seen what is beyond this cave, the other prisoners however will see him as useless; he has left them and is now worse off, in their eyes, than before. He cannot play their game properly and given their lack of awareness this is all that is of value in the cave. If the prisoner tries to tell the rest what he has seen they won’t believe him, they will see his journey as a waste of time as they do not understand what he’s speaking about and he has lost his cave skills. The prisoners are in a state of ignorance, and do not want to improve their present state. It is suggested that in the end they will kill him.
Plato’s allegory works on many levels; it can be seen as a criticism of those who revel in ignorance and do not try to extend themselves as well as an example of how critical people can be to new ideas. The chained prisoners personify the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’ and it could be said that their chains are influences of society which stop us from questioning but also represents that people are scared of big changes. The cave could also be a useful allegory to explain Plato’s world of Forms; the shadows of the cave represent the falsities of this world, the imperfect, transient and changing qualities, whereas the outside and daylight are the perfect Forms of justice, truth, beauty etc which are unchanging. People think that what they can see visually is reality when in fact it is, according to Plato, what they cannot see that is actually reality. The fact that the prisoner who has been outside cannot convey what he has experienced to the others shows how we can only describe through experience and that you have to go on the long, arduous journey yourself The prisoner who is freed could also represent Socrates, who tried to inspire thought among the people of Athens but was killed for turning people against the ideas of the normal Greek gods and corrupting the young. Nowadays we could compare the cave to technology and the media, many peoples opinion’s are narrowed by what they see on T.V or read on the internet, and so they do not look ‘outside’ to find knowledge themselves but accept what they read on a screen, like shadows on a wall.
