Platos Cave
In: 6
What you are referring to is an allegory to explain humanity’s relationship to knowledge of the world.
His allegory asks you to imagine a cave where some people have been chained since childhood. They are restrained such that they can only look at a wall, not the rest of the cave, each other, etc. On this wall they can see only shadows of various things moving past on a walkway, behind which is a fire creating the light. The sounds that come from these things echo off the wall and the prisoners believe they come from the shadows.
To the prisoners the shadows are reality. They are all they can sense and they become comfortable; even if you release the prisoners Socrates would argue they would turn away from the fire (that which is real) towards the shadows (their comfortable illusions). The prisoner would “return to the cave”, turning away from uncomfortable and difficult to understand truth, or decide to “leave the cave” in pursuit of truth.
You can view this as a greater allegory though for how humanity interacts with reality. Our senses are flawed, only providing impressions of what is true. We are seemingly inextricably stuck “in the cave”.
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