Allegory Of The Cave

The Allegory of the Cave How does Plato’s allegory represents the activity of philosophy? 9/23/2010 HZT4Ua Diana MS. The Allegory of the Cave The Allegory of the Cave is a metaphor that can be seen to describe many aspects and situations in life that one had no control or choice over. The reason Plato uses many metaphors in his allegory is to think or ‘philosophize’ about the world around us because in fact our understanding of the world is very limited.

This is due to the fact that we live in a world of shadows and not reality to whom very little is actually known about by everyone. The metaphors are seen to actually represent a society with all its people, truths, hidden meanings, problems, solutions etc… The meanings transferred in the allegory of the cave apply to philosophy because it shows the philosophers position in society. It gives the philosopher the opportunity to philosophize/think about what exists/reality and what does not exist in our surrounding environment.

To society, the allegory of the cave contemplates many issues related to man in his society. Such issues include human’s ability to be ignorant or knowledgeable, free or imprisoned, stubborn, lazy, active, etc… by choosing either to or not to search for answers to many of the issues that arise continuously. Moreover, The Allegory of the Cave is about ignorance and learning because the men in the cave are ignorant or unaware of the outside world that exists except for the shadows that they saw passing by on the walls.

The man who is freed engages in the process of learning from the moment he is released from the cave and is forced to adapt to the new conditions and situations that now surround him. In addition, the chains are used to symbolize the limited amount of information that a person has about reality. For whatever reason, this limited amount of information can be considered to be a type of ignorance.

Last but not least, as humans in this world, many of us are really ignorant about many important issues that surround us in or everyday lives. We are unfamiliar of many things in life and are either unaware of it or simply choose not to bother with it. The world that many of us choose to live in is in fact very different from reality itself. However, many of us choose to live in such ignorance or denial when it comes to certain issues and this is due to many factors.

In “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato explains that if you chain a man to a wall where he can’t move his head or any other part of his body while there is a fire behind him with people walking around holding things, he will eventually start to believe the shadows are reality instead of a falsehood. He then continues to explain that if you turn the man around and show him what was really behind him, he will not believe the reality but instead believe the falsehood of the shadows which he convinced himself to be reality, this being called fallibility.

Fallibility is defined as being able to be misled. Plato further explains that if you take the guy out of the cave and into the real world, the reality of the world will slowly and with great difficulty hit him, but he will slowly accept reality instead of the shadows he had taken to be the true forms of life. What if he would go back in the cave then and try to explain that the shadows are not a reality but instead a falsehood.

Fallibility also shows up in 12 Angry Men when the prosecutors try to form the evidence and testimonies into making it seem like the young boy was guilty of murdering his father when he really wasn’t. In 12 Angry Men, a group of jurors are presented with a case in which a child is accused of murdering his father, and all evidence presented seems to indicate this to be true. It seems the jurors are set on deciding him to be guilty, but one juror does not give consent, and questions the case. Through deliberation, the jurors change mindset and see that the child could easily be not guilty.

Only after much deliberation and argument, they all decide him not to be guilty. Had that one juror not stuck with his gut feeling and voted not guilty, causing the rest of them to deliberate, that young boy would’ve been sent off to die. This issue of deliberation also pops up in “Allegory of the Cave” when the man would go back into the cave and try to explain to the others that the shadows are not reality. They would not deliberate with him about it and in turn believe the fallibility of the shadows being their reality.

The movie Pleasantville is very symbolic. It is a movie that could be interpreted a number of different ways. Most will agree, however, that the basic point of the movie concerns the subject of change. But we can also see the movie as a modern version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. From this point of view, Pleasantville depicted in black and white represents the cave, while color represents the world of enlightenment beyond the cave. Before David and Jennifer become Bud and Mary Sue, everything in Pleasantville is apparently perfect. Everyone lives their day-to-day lives without any problems.

Pleasantville seems to be a place of perfect bliss. Everyone in the little town lives a life of safety, happiness, but also ignorance. Outside of Pleasantville, there is disorder and unhappiness. At the beginning of the movie, David is the typical “loser” at school; he is unhappy with his life. His sister, Jennifer, is a promiscuous teen. All of these scenes are in color. In Pleasantville, however, before the town is ruined, everything appears in black and white, and all the people are apparently content with their lives. For example, nothing here can catch fire, and the firefighters only have to rescue cats out of trees.

The basketball team always wins and players on the team make every single shot. After David and Jennifer are introduced to the peaceful, harmonious town of Pleasantville, however, the flawless, isolated, but ignorant community is turned upside down and ruined. When Bud tells Skip that his sister wouldn’t want to go out with him, for example, Skip suddenly can’t make a shot, and is thus unhappy for the first time. When Betty Parker learns about sex, a tree catches fire, and funnily the firemen do not know what to do, and only respond when they think that there is a cat stuck in a tree. Towards the end of the movie, people start to riot.

They destroy the burger place, and they burn piles of books. There is total chaos and disorder. The original peaceful community is lost when the contagious disease of enlightenment, represented by color in this movie, is introduced. One could argue that this movie portrays change and enlightenment as a good thing, but there is also substantial evidence that this movie is showing change as a bad thing. The laws of entropy apply in this movie. Pleasantville exists in a delicate balance of perfect order, but when new things are introduced to throw off the balance, everything naturally turns to chaos and disorder.