Plato's Allegory of the Cave uses the metaphor of prisoners chained in a cave to depict humanity's limited understanding of reality. In the allegory, the prisoners only see shadows on the cave wall from objects passing behind them and passing this limited understanding from generation to generation. The allegory suggests that true enlightenment comes from escaping the cave and experiencing the real world, representing the transition from a limited perspective to a broader understanding.

1. The Allegory of the
Cave
Plato

2. Plato
 428-348 BCE
 Athens, Greece
 Student of Socrates
 The Republic
--a dialogue on the
nature of justice,
society, and ethics

3. Socrates
 469-399 BCE
 Athens, Greece
 Socratic Method
--seeking insight
by questioning
 Epistemology
--what is knowledge;
how do we know

4. Allegory = an extended metaphor
 Metaphor
--express one
concept in terms
of another
 One story is
analogous to
another

5. The Cave
 Socrates dialogues with one of his
students, Glaucon, and asks him to imagine
a situation:
“And now…let me show in a figure how far
our nature is enlightened or unenlightened”

7. Symbolism
 Sun
 Cave

8. Enlightenment
 Everyone has experienced
a time in which he or she
was seeing things in one
way and then became
enlightened and began see
or understand things in a
new way. Write an essay
about an experience you
had in which you went
from seeing things in one
way to seeing things in
another way.