Essay
Plato's allegory of the cave is incoherent. Discuss
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This was written in year 12 as my first philosophy essay, it acheived an A+ and argues that Plato's allegory is incoherent.
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‘Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Is Incoherent - Discuss’The Allegory of the Cave is a theory devised by the philosopher Plato, concerning human perception.
Plato claimed that knowledge which is gained through the senses is something that is no more than
opinion, a subjective matter. Instead, he argues that in order to have real knowledge, this must be
gained through philosophical reasoning. The question as to whether this concept is coherent is a great
debate, with the theory providing both strengths and weaknesses. However, this essay will support the
statement ‘Plato’s allegory of the cave is incoherent’ as well as including the scholars Plato, Aristotle
and Dawkins.
In this analogy, Plato likens people to prisoners chained in a cave, their heads are unable to turn due to
the fact they are directly facing a wall. A fire is lit behind them, which projects those who walk
behind the cave, casting shadows on the wall. To the prisoners, these shadows are ‘real objects’.
When one of the prisoners is set free, he is exposed to the outside world, and realises that what he has
seen up to this point in the cave, is not reality, but a shadow. Plato’s analogy of the cave therefore
emphasises the difference between the appearance of the world, which is inside the cave, and the
reality behind this appearance, which is the outside world. This can be corroborated by when Plato
wrote in the Republic “How could they see anything but shadows if they were never allowed to move
their heads?” The moral of this analogy is that it encourages people to not accept things at face value,
to question everything. However, the entirety of this allegory focuses on life outside of the cave, in
this case what Plato is referencing to is the World of Forms, not our present physical world. If we
were to further this argument, the allegory of the cave is ultimately flawed as it devalues the physical
world and enforces this notion that nothing in the physical world is perfect. Additionally, Plato creates
a gloomy reality within his analogy. The cave is supposed to be the physical realm, however is this
therefore a fair representation of our physical world? It therefore can be concluded that the allegory of
the cave must be incoherent, due to the fact it does not address and thus help us understand the world
we live in, rather focusing on Plato’s ‘real world’.
Plato’s analogy of the cave supports his argument that our senses deceive us and do not provide us
with real knowledge. For example, when a straight pencil is placed into a glass of water, it appears
bent even though it is not. This concept can be linked to the prisoners in the cave - what we
experience or observe is only partial reality. The shadows which were therefore seen by the prisoners
are inferior to the real world outside of the cave. When the released prisoner struggles out of the cave,
he sees things as what they really are. From this example, this illustrates that true reality is only
accessible by philosophers who use reason and are not deceived by senses. This argument can be
supported by when Plato wrote in the Republic “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing
but the shadows of the images. That is certain”. However, to contradict this, relying on our senses is
important, with Aristotle being the scholar who believes that our knowledge comes from these senses.
An aristotelian approach to this argument would be to say we use our five senses in order to work out
what the world is like and ultimately for our survival. Therefore in Plato’s theory, the cave represents
people who believe that knowledge derives from our senses - empirical evidence. The cave shows that
believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a ‘cave’ of misunderstanding. However, it is our
sense experience that gives us data to help us make our way through life, even Plato in his teaching
used the auditory sense, where would he have been without it? Therefore, this argument shows the
allegory of the cave is incoherent because senses play too big a role in our lives and are key for
survival, contradicting the whole analogy.
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