Reality In The Allegory Of The Cave

The Nature of Reality: What Is Versus What Seems? Philosophy is a way of thinking about the world. It is the study of ideas about knowledge, truth, the nature and meaning of life, etc. and it consists of several different sections, one being metaphysics. Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that is concerned with the basic causes and nature of things. It distinguishes between what is and what seems, as seen in Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave.” Metaphysics aims to answer: what, most fundamentally, is real? In the film, The Machinist, I noticed that philosophical theme throughout the movie and as a viewer, I was determined to answer that question. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato, a Greek philosopher, compares the mind to the Realm
We will call him Bert, as we did in class discussion. Bert is a prisoner that has been held captive in a very dark cave for an extremely long period of time, along with a few other prisoners. The prisoners are all chained together in this cave that is set up in a stadium-style fashion. The prisoners are facing a large wall towards the bottom of the cave. On this wall, a shadow of a tree is being displayed. Bert and the prisoners called this shadow of a tree, “tree.” Behind the prisoners is a contained fire and in front of that fire is a figurine of a tree, which casts the shadow. These shadows are being casted by a security guard in the cave. We will call him
Socrates had been to the Realm of the Forms. When he came back to tell other philosophers about it, they didn’t believe him. We, as humans, mislead our bodies and believe things that technically aren’t true. In the text from Western Philosophy: An Anthology, it states “We adopt our opinions second-hand, manipulated and controlled by others… We need to struggle upwards, out of the cave, into the higher world of universals, grasped not by sense but by the intellect” (Cottingham, p. 69). This realm, here and now is full of things that are not real, but seem