Humankind is blinded by what they are allowed to see, regardless of what the truth is. We cannot see the truth because of the darkness that we are surrounded by. Although, we believe in whatever is visible to us and what we can sense, we cannot rely on our senses either because, they are imperfect and are based on how we as an individual's see things not how they truly are. In the "Allegory of the Cave," Plato illustrates, how mankind is unable to see the truth and implies that if we rely on our ideas and perceptions to know the truth about existence then we will know very little about it. Also, the "Allegory of the Cave," is a metaphor meant to illustrate the effects of education and knowledge on the human soul and how people cannot and do not want to believe the realty. Thus, this essay will focus of how humankind is surrounded by the darkness of the ignorance and how some of my significant changes in my perception. .
This "Allegory of the Cave" is a dialogue or conversation between Socrates and Glaucan, where Socrates compares the issues appearance vs. reality and education vs. ignorance. The "Allegory of the Cave" Socrates sums up his ideas and puts it into a conversational from between him and his student Glucan. They express how people are in the darkness of ignorance. The cave is a symbolic representation of the world that we live in. Socrates describes a dark scene, a group of people are living in a cave since childhood. They have never seen the light of day and behind them is a fire. In front of the fire is a partial wall next to the wall are people moving puppets and creating a shadow of the puppets, (Plato 211). Which are operated by another group of people, lying out of sight behind the partial wall. They can only see the light of the fire behind them and the shadows of people passing by the fire and they think this is the reality, or this is how the world is, (Plato 211).
