![]() And so he’d cling to them and doubt the existence of all these other forms. After all, he would have spent his whole life until now believing that the shadows on the wall were real. And, to make things worse, he’d be perplexed by all the new forms he would come to see. If he were to make it to the cave’s entrance, the light flooding in from the outside would blind him. His body would ache and his eyes would be strained when looking at the fire. Now suppose one of these cave dwellers were to somehow break free of his chains. The Allegory of the Cave by Anton Dymtchenko, 2016, via Anton Dymtchenko Art ![]() Escape from the Cave: Moving toward enlightenment And, for this reason, it’s an unenlightened state. This is a state that accepts images and other sense perceived things wholly as reality. ![]() The shackled cave dwellers, for example, represent humankind’s lowest form of cognition, which Plato calls imagining. And the concepts being investigated here are the four states of human cognition, which are intelligence, thinking, belief, and imagining. Remember Plato’s Cave is an allegory, which means everything represents a concept, an ideal, or a principle. Sounds like a strange scenario on its face, right? Here, only a faint stream of light filters in from the outside world. ![]() Outside the chamber where the cave dwellers and puppet masters reside is a long corridor that leads to the cave’s opening. And behind the puppet masters is a fire that illuminates the room and creates the shadows. Their only notions of reality are the shadows that pass on the wall before them.īehind these prisoners are the puppet masters, the ones who broadcast images onto the wall. They’ve been in shackles like this since childhood, and so they don’t even know they’re prisoners. All they can do is stare directly forward at a wall on which shadows move this way and that. These men have chains around their legs that hold their bodies in place, as well as chains around their necks to prevent them from rotating their heads. Imagine, if you will, a chamber beneath the ground in which a group of men are held as captives. Visual illustration of the allegory of the cave ![]()
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