Plato

Charlotte Jimenez Prof. Marasco
Political Science 201October 2011
Ancient Political History



In Plato’s Allegory of the cave, he emphasizes that philosophers must be made to return to the cave even if they rathernot. I believe that theoretically speaking that should be the right thing to do if philosophers were more interested in sharing their knowledge than on loving the arts, the sun, and the outsideworld. However, the philosophers’ greatest passion is in contemplating the nature of things. Therefore they would not be reliable teachers of new things if made to return to the obscurity of the cave.
Onthe other hand, I believe that Plato uses the cave and prisoners as metaphor to the city and its citizens and how the philosophers would be those who see everything clear and the citizens choose whatto believe is real to them. The live in the cave is full of shadows and its unreal, the way some people perceive the city. Thus, Plato wants to bring in the philosophers to teach a differentperspective to those who believe live to be obscure and monotonous, as in the cave. But philosophers do not want to return to the cave because it would be like denying all the goodness they know from theworld above, and such idea goes against their nature. “The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun” (book vii, 517b). Platoinsists that the life inside the cave is representing the life of those in the cities who do not know better and do not want to know any better, and are quick to judge anyone who try to impose anythingdifferent.
In 518a, Plato implies that ones’ vision could be affected in two ways, when coming from light to dark (world of light and knowledge to cave), and from dark to light (cave to world of...