Week 1

After re-reading Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we are reminded how easy it is to choose to see only the surface (or shadow) of things. Can you imagine how many people in our society do not even wish to see what is beyond the shadows, but would rather stay in their comfortable, warm caves? Narrow-minded people (or even people that don't care enough to expand their horizons) are prisoners of their own decision to remain in chains. 

When Plato speaks of these "prisoners" he is speaking of people who are not yet (or choose not to be) enlightened by wisdom. Philosophy is represented by the light, color, and dimension of the world just outside the cave walls. Philosophy (allegorically speaking) freed Plato's prisoners from their chains and brought them to the truth. 

Socrates is right to be pessimistic about life without philosophy, because life without philosophy is ignorance. In Plato's writings, the prisoners who had not yet escaped to see the real world denied the new ideas brought into the cave. Even if we do not understand the true shapes of shadows, if we can admit that there is something more than what we have always known, we have already begun the enlightenment process. 

SIDE NOTE: While reading, I had an odd thought. If you think about it, The Wizard of Oz is a sort of variation on the Allegory of the Cave. Kansas is a "cave" in which everyone sees the world in a narrow-minded, dark perspective. Once Dorothy "escapes" she see starts to see things as they actually are, though she has some resistance at the start. She eventually returns to the "cave" because of the guilt she feels for leaving her fellow prisoners (her family) only to be told that what she saw could not possibly be reality. It totally is the Allegory of the Cave!