Platos allegory of the cave free#

That one prisoner who freed himself and realized this? That dude's a philosopher. We think the real world around us is the cat's pajamas, but we are oh so wrong. Deets DecodedĪll right, so what's the deal with this wacky story? Well, the prisoners in the cave, we're sad to say, are us: human beings. but the rest choose to remain where they are. He keeps trying to convince them, and he's finally able to persuade a few. and wow, you can imagine how amazing and beautiful the real world looks to him compared to that two-dimensional, dark cave he's spent all his life in.įeeling sorry for all his fellow prisoners, the freed prisoner goes back down and explains to everyone that they're all trapped in this massive cave, and everything they think is real is an illusion. It takes a while for his eyes to adjust, but gradually, he sees that there is a much brighter speck of light at the end of another tunnel.

Platos allegory of the cave free#

So that's how life goes down in the cave until one day, one of the prisoners manages to break free and begins to figure out what's going on. They chat about it, gossip, call people names. Since this show is all these poor people can see, they think it's the best, most awesome reality ever. But they do get a little entertainment: there's a rockin' shadow-puppet show projected on the wall in front of them with a fire burning in the back for light. Imagine a cave with a small tunnel of light leading out and hundreds of human beings tied up so that they can't move-they just stare straight ahead all day long (creepy, we know). 'See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling,' instructs Socrates, 'with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave' (514a). You might even call it downright bleak: it envisions the world as a dark cave, human beings as trapped prisoners, and all of our experiences as nothing but shadows on a wall. The allegory of all allegories, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is not the rosiest take on the reality of human existence.