Explain Plato's Use of the Metaphor of the Shadows in His Allegory of the Cave.

Explain Plato’s use of the metaphor of the shadows in his allegory of the cave.

In Plato’s analogy of the cave, he divulges that there are three men trapped, only able to see shadows cast on the wall by puppets in front of a fire behind them.   They cannot turn their heads, therefore they cannot see that in actual fact, the puppets are reality and the shadows are not.   They believe that the shadows are true reality, since this is all they have ever seen from birth.   However, one day one of the prisoners is set free and turns to see that the shadows are cast by the puppets.   The fire light hurts his eyes, due to the fact that all he has ever seen was darkness.   He makes his way up the staircase and into the real world, where the sun light hurts his eyes even more than the fire light did.   When his eyes adjust, he perceives the true reality – the real animals and plants and the sun.   Excited with his discovery, he goes back to the cave to tell his imprisoned friends.   Yet they do not believe him – and threaten him with death.   They have been living falsely under the impression that the shadows are what is real, and do not like being told that their entire belief is a lie.   The analogy opens up a path to many different interpretations, for example, the shadows.

One interpretation could be that the shadows are a metaphor for the ignorance of people, and how they are so wrapped up in their beliefs that they cannot even comprehend that they could possibly be wrong.   The shadows represent their narrow-mindedness.   The prisoner that escapes sees the truth, but when he tries to convince his fellow companions otherwise, they turn against him completely.   This belief that the shadows are what is real could be religion, a particular world view, an idea etcetera.

Another idea of what the shadows represent could be that – using Plato’s idea of the Forms - because the prisoners in the cave were deceived by their senses, they are a metaphor for life itself.   Perhaps the...