Plato's Allegory of the Cave

See Questions Here.

1.  According to Socrates, the Allegory of the Cave represents the enlightenment and unenlightenment present in human nature.

2.  The prisoners in the cave can only see the shadows on the wall in front of them.  There is a fire which fuels their ignorance of the real world by helping to create the shadows, the only world the prisoners know.

The setting of a cave represents confinement; it could be paralleled to confinement to a certain set of beliefs or the limitations to one's knowledge.

3.  The allegory suggests that education is the process of enlightening an individual to what they didn't know they didn't know.  The allegory suggests that metaphorically, education is the process of bringing a person out of a dark cave, where they were prisoner to their own ignorance, and showing them the rest of the world that they never knew existed or that they thought existed in a different form.

4.  I accidentally answered this in the second half of number two.  The "shackles" and the "cave" represent the limited and confined knowledge of the prisoners; with the cave, the allegory portrays the prisoners as literally "in the dark" about reality and what life is like outside of their field of vision.

5.  Television is the main thing that shackles the minds of my generation.  Most television shows are purely for entertainment, and watching them keeps us from time when we could be expanding our knowledge.  It is like the dancing on the walls in front of the prisoners; to them, it is entertaining, but it isn't allowing them to learn any additional truths about life.

6.  The freed prisoner's perspective is that the world which he has know seen is the real world, and he pities those prisoners that are still stuck in darkness about life is really like and how their world, in the freed prisoner's new world, consists only of shadows on a wall.  To the prisoners, however, who have never known the difference between a shadow and the object it outlines, they don't know what the freed prisoner's "real world" is.

7.  Intellectual confusion in the allegory occurs when the freed prisoner is thrown into the light outside the cave, and sees everything in a new light, and it is when that same freed prisoner returns to the cave to share what he's learned, but his eyes take a long time to adjust to the dark; he has to become accustomed to being "in the dark" about the world, now that he has experienced what is beyond the cave.

8.  Cave prisoners are freed through either self-enlightenment, thinking that there is something more to what they can see in front of them, or through a freed prisoner, a teacher, returning from outside the cave to explain to them that there's more, or help them escape their bonds.  This suggests that intellectual freedom can occur in two ways: you can have an epiphany yourself about how your perspective of the world may not be the truth, or you can be enlightened to this concept by a teacher who already has this knowledge, like Socrates was to Glaucon.

9.  Yes, I agree that their is a distinction between appearances and reality.  The appearance of the shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners, wasn't reality because they hadn't seen the whole world.  Often we will interpret situations uniquely because of our unique backgrounds so how a situation appears to me may not be the reality.  No human will ever be able to see a situation and observe it completely objectively; we will all have our own versions of it because we all have our own minds and lives.

10.  If we assume Socrates distinction between appearances and reality is incorrect, it is because the appearance of a situation to each person is their own reality.  It is the only way they can perceive that situation.  Appearances meld with realities in respect to individual people.  In respect to the world, their is most likely a reality that no one can understand because it will always be a unique mixture of how it appears to others.