Oh, For the Love of Thought :: Philosophy Plato The Allegory of the Cave Essays

Oh, For the Love of Thought Many thinkers have existed throughout history. These thinkers were called philosophers because they literally loved knowledge. In fact, the root phil means love, and the root soph means knowledge. These lovers of knowledge have always looked for ways to spread both their knowledge and their way of constantly thinking to other people. One of these attempts was Plato's The Allegory of the Cave. Plato's The Allegory of the Cave describes, through a conversation between Socrates and his student Glaucon, cave dwellers who see only shadows of puppets on a wall. Socrates emphasizes to Glaucon: To them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. Socrates continues his supposition by rhetorically asking: What will follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error?. It turns out, says Socrates, that the experience will be painful at first. Once a liberated cave dweller leaves the cave and goes to see the sun, he will see a greater truth than those in the cave. Socrates and Glaucon continue to discuss the cave and determine a set of possibilities: The cave dweller who does not leave the cave will be ignorant; he will not know nor want to know the truth. The cave dweller who leaves the cave and returns will be considered heretical; while he knows a greater truth, he must suffer for it. The cave dweller who leaves the cave and does not return w ill be cause for the cave dwellers to consider the sun, enlightenment, or the ultimate truth to be dangerous; it will be reason for the cave dweller not to leave the cave. The allegory, continued in a reader's mind to a deeper level at which visible reality is an unraveling ball of infinite size with ultimate truth at its core and layers of illusion surrounding it, shows that there will always be a deeper truth. No one person can be fully enlightened and see ultimate truth just as no one person can see the whole of a sphere. It takes the perspectives of all to even begin to see the ultimate truth. Plato begs man in general not to consider the ideas of other men to be heretical because the ideas force people out of their comfort zone and do not make immediate sense to them. People must be continually open-minded. Man may find a new insight into something shedding a layer from the aforementioned ball of reality, but that just means that there are infinitely more insights to gain before the layers of illusion are shed.