Image Essay

Ive just started to look at the text to make my image essay from. Ive decided to use the peice of text from the book The Republic. The peice is called "The Allegory of the cave" written by Plato.

Plot Summary for
Allegory of the Cave

Deep inside a cave a group of prisoners are chained to a wall since their childhood. Not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains but their heads are also chained so that their eyes are fixed on a wall and can only see the shadows that are projected in front of them. These shadows are what they believe is the truth. Then one of the prisoners escapes the darkness of the cave into the light of a new world and realizes that the truth lies beyond his chains. However, when he returns to the cave to free his peers with his new found truth, the other prisoners refuse to believe him.


After reading the story and browsing the net I have begun to get quite interested in this allegory. In the most simple terms Plato is talking about waking up to the truth of reality about us. He is questioning the very nature of reality. The Allegory presents, in brief form, most of Plato's major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; his idea that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to student, but rather that education consists in directing student's minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves; his faith that the universe ultimately is good; his conviction that enlightened individuals have an obligation to the rest of society, and that a good society must be one in which the truly wise (the Philosopher-King) are the rulers.

I also found great parallels to the movie "The Matrix"

the website bellow points out many of the connections between the two.

Matrix and the allegory of the cave