philo essa

Explain and assess the usefulness of the two images: line, cave. [30]

The allegory of the cave is this: Plato describes, through his character of Socrates, a group of people, chained to a wall in a cave. There is a fire behind them, with people passing in front of it, creating shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. They have been chained to the wall all of their life, so the closest thing they have to reality is the shadows on the wall. So these people are experiencing things that they think to be real but are actually illusions. Socrates goes on to explain that one prisoner gets up and leaves the cave, realising the illusion is not representative of reality at all, as he can see ‘true’ reality.
The allegory of the cave is Plato’s way of showing that the form’s are the most fundamentally important type of reality, with the reality in the allegory representative of the forms, and the illusions in the allegory the prisoners perceive as reality representative of what we perceive as reality. When the prisoner steps out of the cave and looks into the sun he truly perceives the ‘form of the good!’
The Allegory’s purpose isn’t to only show us our misconceptions, but also to show us what a good leader should be. The escaped prisoner is expected to return to the cave and live with his former prisoners as someone whom can lead better than the rest because he knows what true ‘morality’ and ‘justice’ are. He is expected to protect and look after his fellow prisoners/citizens, “…you have been better and more thoroughly educated than those others and hence you are more capable of playing your part both as men of thought and as men of action.” Plato is telling us that a good leader constitutes as someone who has realized the true forms of the goodness. The allegory is almost a life model, a metaphor for the stages of becoming a public leader.

Plato has another allegory: the allegory of the divided line. The divided line is used to teach basic philosophical ideas about the four levels of existence, and how we come to know about what exists. At the top of the line is ‘philosophical knowledge’ (knowledge) and ‘Forms, especially the form of the good’ (object). Next is ‘mathematical knowledge’, and ‘mathematical objects’, then ‘beliefs about physical things and scientific knowledge, and ‘phyiscal objects’, then finally at the bottom of the divided line is ‘opinions and illusions’, and ‘shadows and things that do not actually exist’.
In comparing the line to the cave allegory, the lowest rung on the line would correspond to the chained prisoners, who can only see shadows and things that do not actually exist. The second rung would be when the prisoner stands up and sees the cave: he will believe these things to be the most real things. When he goes outside the cave, he has reached the third rung: he can see the forms but only has unproven assumptions about them. But when the prisoner looks into the sun, he has reached the fourth rung: he has seen the form of goodness, the ultimate form.

A criticism of the two allegory’s is that Plato cannot give a direct explanation as to what the form of goodness is, he simply compares it to the sun. This doesn’t give a straightforward answer, but we infer what the form of goodness is by thinking about what the sun could represent: the sun makes sight possible, so perhaps the form of the good is responsible for making ‘knowledge’ possible?