Allegory Of The Cave

Plato’s Republic takes the form of a series of dialogues between the first-person narrator (Socrates, Plato's teacher) and various real-life figures. “The Allegory of the Cave,” perhaps the most well-known section of The Republic, takes place as a conversation between Socrates and Plato’s brother, Glaucon. In this section, Socrates attempts to illustrate a point about how one can gain knowledge and wisdom and “perceive [...] the Essential Form of Goodness” (paragraph 31, line 10), via a parable.

He asks Glaucon to imagine a set of prisoners trapped in a cave since birth, shrouded in utter darkness, and chained so that they can neither move their bodies nor even their heads to look anywhere other than the wall in front of them, so that this wall is the only thing they know of life. Then, he asks Glaucon to imagine a fire lit behind them, with a sort of puppet stage in front of the fire, so that other people could project shadow figures onto the wall in front of the prisoners, recreating the forms of people and animals and objects from outside of the cave-prison in shadow form.