Amy Lu - Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave proposes a way to find salvation for the human kind using an analogy of a cave with a freed prisoner finding the light and the sun and eventually returning for his obligation to better society. He shows that we as a society take reality for granted when all that are seen are shadows of true figures. A freed prisoner can find out the truth, after some physical pain and mental confusion, only after a period of adjustment time to see the fire and put some more effort learn of the good. After finding this out, it is imperative to return to the uneducated and unenlightened in order to be a benefactor of the State and of one another.
The reading raised some questions for me. In talking to friends and looking this up online, a couple of questions were raised for me. A lot of sites compared this to the movie Matrix, where Neo is “reborn” and cannot return to his old like of ignorance. How and who decides to free the “prisoner”? Another way of looking at this is in thinking that what we see now is not what is. That reality is not the solid, we take every day things for granted, maybe all that we are seeing are the shadows. It is just like asking someone to draw a chair and if someone draws a chair differently from yours, how do you decide on who’s chair is most accurate if both think that have drawn his or her version of a chair? What I take from this is to not take things only at face value and that we should continue to strive to become enlightened in our own right.