Passage The Allegory Of The Cave example essay topic

The Allegory of Truth The general human can easily fall victim of greed, power, ignorance and hate. I have discovered, from the readings in this class, this situation has existed for many centuries. Allegory is defined as the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence (web). The article The Allegory of the Cave is a perfect example of what happens when human intelligence is put to the test.

Human beings are generally driven by influences that truly have no bearing on the meaning of life. When shopping, people will thrive on the adrenaline they receive when purchasing materialistic items that will bring no true enthusiasm. These people are actually very deeply depressed individuals who seek happiness from inanimate objects that will not give back the warm response the human soul desires. The truly happy humans are the ones who give as much love as they possibly can and they receive love and affection many times over in return.

These are the people who possess true happiness because their driving force in life is love. Another driving force that must be mentioned is the need for power. There are many individuals who live their lives wishing to be in authority. They will go as far as to enslave their fellow man to achieve their bidding. These people are not the friendliest sort, but they believe they do not need companions to become leaders.

The friendlier, less authoritarian variety of mankind have many different traditions to achieving goals than the power-hungry mongrels previously mentioned. In the passage The Allegory of the Cave, it is discussed what could happen when a man is kept all his life without any influence, other than a few shadows dancing on the wall. A person kept away from human contact would have no insight on true reality. Without an examination of the concrete world, a child will definitely grow with a warped sense of reality. In the passage, the men were unaware of their true surroundings, all they ever knew was what they were allowed to see with their eyes.

If they were to become rescued from the cave, I believe the minds of those men would begin to grow and develop every second from the flood of information they would receive of what their true surroundings consisted. But they would still possess lack of comprehension of the newly acquired facts. We can also come to the conclusion that mankind can use this article as an example of the passage from illusion to reality as the passage from evil to good. People are sometimes cruel and uncaring towards one another. Presume this article can be a good education tool to help educate our children against prejudice.

The mention of the head being restrained can symbolize the one sided view of a man taught to hate. The chains and the forceful entrapment of the prejudice man can be cut away to bring the rays of peace and harmony to shine down on his soul. Many times throughout history we have witnessed the battles being raged to help change the views of fellow mankind. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. are examples of people who showed their fellow citizens that they would stand up and defend themselves against discrimination. From birth, parents educate their children according to a set schedule of discipline and teachings.

Some parents may discipline with what may seem as harsh reactions, yet others use a more relaxed method of teaching right from wrong. As with discipline, parents may possess different methods to express religious beliefs. Some of these religions do not allow their followers to seek additional knowledge about the teachings from other faiths. They wish only that their disciples follow the path to salvation that they have laid out for their congregation. A few of the followers may break free from the clutches of their church while on their quest for more knowledge. Not all churches forbid this practice among their congregations, but those who do remind me of those poor, enslaved people in the article.

Many times, if the churches would become too strict with these regulations, the churches may have been considered as being cults. The chains on the men, who were trapped in the cave, forcibly kept the men from moving about so they were unable to study their surroundings. This can be compared to the invisible chains of some religions holding back their followers. The congregation is not allowed to study their surroundings in the religious world due to the narrow minded leaders of their church. In the passage, Oedipus the King, a young man was informed he was not the natural son of his father and that he would later murder his birth father.

When he was informed of the truth surrounding his childhood, he responded negatively and wound up in exile. I cannot imagine living without the knowledge of my true self. But I could not be able to exile myself to escape my mistakes, even if I had committed the horrible sins without knowledge of truth. When the man in the cave is set free to discover the truth, of his surroundings, it was debated what form of reaction to the lightning fast education that he would receive to find that everything he had known about his life to that point was nothing more than a mimic of reality, not actual fact. The distress caused by a too sudden passage from darkness to light (Plato, 227).

From this sentence, we can conclude that the darkness can be a metaphor for the ignorance of the prisoner about reality while the light can be the simile of the gain of knowledge. The emotions the enslaved man must have felt when he was released should have bordered on anger. I would be angry if I was forbidden to view the beauty the world has to offer instead of a cold, dark cave. If I only knew the cave from birth, I might be shocked or enraged after discovering that the shadows were not objects, just merely reflections of the objects. In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects (Plato, 229). Human beings are very difficult creatures to understand.

Scientists have spent many lifetimes dedicated to the study of these masterly crafted animals. With the many different types of personalities and responses to stimuli, I believe the answers my be many more lifetimes ahead.