In “The Allegory of the Cave” form book VII of “The Republic” by Plato, Socrates tells a story to his student Glaucon about a group of prisoners that have lived their whole lives in a Cave with “their legs and neck chained so that they cannot move, and they only see before them”, and all they saw before them were shadows of people walking behind them on a raised pathway. Being imprisoned all their lives all they knew was their Cave and the shadows. The shadows became their only reality – “to them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images”.
In reality people are not born chained, so that they cannot move, but everybody is born into a certain culture, religion and society. We are given a specific stereotype to which we have to subordinate. From day one we are being thought by our parents, later on we learn through the media, from friends and other sources how we should live to lead proper lives.
In Socrates’ story one of the prisoners is set free form the Cave, but before he actually leaves the Cave he suffers from sharp pain caused by turning his neck, which he wasn’t able to do before, and from the light hitting his eyes, which he also experienced for the first time.
The purpose of Socrates’ story is to explain that there are two worlds: within the Cave and outside the Cave. Life within the Cave is the life the we are familiar with, accustomed to, the world we were bought up in. It stands for everything we know and even though we might not be a hundred per cent comfortable with it, we try to make it as true and real to ourselves (just like the prisoners did with the shadows) .Living in the Cave limits our life in every aspect of it, emotionally, mentally, socially. On the contrary life outside the Cave represents a new better world, filled with good and many great opportunities. Sharp pains the prisoner suffers from stand for the struggle with adjusting to something we are not familiar with.
The prisoner that left the Cave, after becoming familiar with the outside world, decided to go back to tell other prisoners what he had seen, experienced, he wanted to share what he had learned. The other prisoners started mocking him, because he wasn’t able to recognize the shadows anymore, since his eyes were no longer adjusted to the dark. According to them he didn’t fit in anymore.
People are scared to leave their comfort zone. They worry that if they ever decide to come back from the outside world they will no longer fit in. However, if they are so scared to leave the Cave they will never experience all the good that awaits them in the outside world. As Socrates says: “in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right (…)”.
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