Blog 5 SUMMARIZING WHAT THE ALLEGORY STANDS FOR

In Plato's "The allegory of the cave" Socrates tells a story to his student Glaucon to explain the human nature. Socrates told his student to imagine some prisoners living in a cave. These prisoners since they were born have been chained and unable to move, so that they can only see before them. Behind them there is a fire that illuminate the cave, and between them there is a road. Where on this road there are men passing by, some of them are talking, others carrying statues and other objects. Between these men and prisoners there is a wall, where at the end only the shadows of the objects and the men are projected. After that, a prisoner is freed and forced  to get up and walk to the light, look at the other side of the cave. There he learn a totally different world to the one he knew. Where was what he was taught was real, was not in this world.

When he gets back to the cave with all the wisdom he experienced outside of the cave, he would have his eyes obfuscated for the darkness, and he would be unable to distinguish the shadows and the others would laugh at him. They would say that going up had damaged his eyes and that his trip had been in vain.

My point of view to this allegory is how the human nature respond to our knowledge, our humanity lives just like these men at the darkness. We just see what we have in front of us, we get into our world and we do not see the rest. We interpret things on our own way of thinking. We live in the ignorance when our preoccupations refer to the world that offered to senses, where only the wisdom let us free and get out of our cave to a world of ideas or to a real world.