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0 pointskoheripbal6y ago0 comments

Plato's allegory of the Cave is about the liberation provided by education, and self-awareness.

How gaining understanding of your environment freed you from the limited reality it presented you.

The initial usage of the story was to illustrate how political indoctrination could present a false reality to ardent followers "the shadows of cave fire for those raised in the cave", and how education could "open the eyes and show them the true light" (the fire in the sky/sun vs the fire in the cave). "...even if one was dragged out of the cave".

This was later extended to demonstrate that if humans learned about their own emotions, they could learn to reason decisions, rather than allow emotions to guide them exclusively.

Tangentially, this rough concept in early western philosophy evolved into the religion of the Sun, and had significant influence on early Christianity.

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kerkeslager6y ago

I would caution you on ever thinking that allegories or analogies "demonstrate" anything. Analogies can be used to explain a model of a system, but they can't be use to prove that that model is accurate.

Consider the analogy "arms are like wings". That's actually true in a lot of ways, but we can't simply assume that arms have all the properties of wings by analogy, otherwise we'd conclude that arms allow us to fly.

That education improves our capabilities is fairly well proven via other means.

mcguire6y ago

Are you saying that two thousand years of nominalism vs. realism are based on a misunderstanding of Plato?

(And, doesn't sun worship predate philosophy by a good bit?)

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