What is the Allegory of the cave about?

Answer 1

Short version.... Plato was pointing out that our individual universe is limited to what we can perceive. The cave represents our mind and the shadows are our brain's representation of events that cast the shadows onto the walls of our mind.

Answer 2

Considering what everyone else has answered, I would like to add the following:

What impacted me most about Plato's allegory of the cave, was the contrast between the impression that those in the cave were your average typical persons who were limited by their circumstances and presumptions about those circumstances. As a result they could not see "beyond the cave and shadows". Plato was big into reality actually being made up of symbols and idealized concepts - which we see as reality. But in the cave, the people are being manipulated, intentionally deceived. As best I recall, Plato brings one of the chained prisoners out of the cave into the "real" sun filled world of actual, real objects. As a result the prisoner's perceptions are (or may then be) vastly expanded.

Here's a quote from the end of Plato's story:

"Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good." [from: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/plato.html]

It seems to me the main point of Plato's Allegory of the Cave is that expanding your understanding of the world, beyond our the shadow cave (in which we allow ourselves to be chained) should be the truly intelligent person's goal - or, "the good".

Answer 3

Plato told this story: People are confined in a cave, chained in such a way that they can't turn fully around to look behind them. On the wall in front of them, they see shapes and forms moving around. They think these are the whole of reality, and they talk about them and come up with explanations of the world, based on their limited view. What they don't know is that they are only looking at shadows. The real objects which are casting the shadows are behind them. They are models, manipulated by puppeteers, using the light of a fire to cast the shadows. From the puppeteers' point of view, it is these objects, not the shadows, which are real. But, in fact, these objects are only models of other, more real things. The really real things are outside the cave altogether. The models are only copies of those real things, and the fire is only a substitute for the sunlight.

The meaning of this story has to do with true reality being larger and fuller than our understanding of it. Most of us go through daily life interacting with the most superficial part of reality, the part right in front of our noses. We think these shadowy approximations are the whole show. (Do we really think about what is going on when we type into a computer?) Some people, like the pupetteers, have a more complete view of the picture. They see the models which lie behind the shadows. (They can draw you flow charts of exactly what's going on with a circuit board, or exactly what's happenning in a cancer cell.) But remember, that the models themselves are only approximations of reality. They are explanations of the universe, but they are not actually the universe itself. Like the world outside the cave, the real universe is bigger and more complex and more real than all the scholarly models which explain it. (We can map genes, but we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking we know all there is to know about them.)

The last step in the picture is to ask ourselves this question: Is there yet another reality, beyond the one outside the cave? Is the whole universe only a model of something even bigger and more complex and more real than the whole universe? I don't know whether the asker of this question is religious, but the answer of religious people is that the whole of everything is itself only a model, cast by the mind of the creator, who we call God.

Even if you are not able to take that last step, even if you can't accept the idea of God, the allegory of the cave can still have meaning for you. It can be a reminder not to think we know it all, when we are looking at less than the full real picture. Even a secular mind can admit that much of our understanding of the universe is based on shadows or models, and that the real thing is bigger and stranger than we can completely grasp.

Answer 4

In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see.

Answer 5

In tha allegory of the cave Plato was attempting to tell us that the perception we see as the thing that guides us through life, can more logically be seen as a limitation because of its selective nature.

All sensory interpretations are restricted to a small segment of the pie of reality.

Plato was just pointing this out. I am by no means an expert but the way I have come to understand this is, This physical reality seems to be our true or primary reality only because it is supported by sensory data that we interpret as being our reality.

This data is always restricted to the physical reality that is governed by the laws of time space and mass. Because this is all of the information available to us, it seems as though this reality that is painted for us by the sensory data is the sum of reality.

Much like the farmer in the middle ages who lived in a mountain valley. His world was limited to what he was able to see from the farm he lived on. Ideas that he heard about other lands that existed beyond the valley were interesting but did not have any supporting perceptual data to back them up like the valley he was familiar with did.

Plato saw perception more as a limitation on our ability to understand reality, than he saw it as a way of ascertaining what reality actually was.

I feel Plato was telling us that he saw this physical reality as more of a temporary or secondary reality. With our primary or true reality blocked from us by the limited vantage point that perception allows us.


Love and blessings

Answer 6

It has been many years since I read Plato's allegory of the cave but, in general, my take on it now is this:

That which we perceive, that which we think is real, is actually only an illusion. Our perceptions are not reality, only an interpretation of it. The "truth" may be something altogether different from our inidividual perceptions.