THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

NOTES

Prisoners chained in a cave were unable to look behind them or to the side; they had to face the wall in front of them. A fire burned behind them and in between that puppeteers could pass through and they had to make shadow puppets which were meant to frighten the prisons.

This is when Plato’s theories come into play. Plato suggests that the terms in which they describe /say what they can see, the shadow. It is merely what their language refers to as the shadow, that passes before their very eyes. Rather than (what is correct in plato’s view) to the real things that cast the shadow.

So what he is really trying to say is that the shadow is not a book, the shadow is of a book or from the book.

The general terms of our language are not “names” of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually the names of things we can only grasp with the mind.