Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

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My Philosophy text says it's a famous passage in literature!! ! I understand the context to an extent. One is locked up in a cave them comes out to the light but am confused by something. It says it takes all this time for vision to kick in to see the sun light and such but in my eyes major injury not withstanding I feel vision is instant. You know how to get around your house even walking in the dark since you know pretty much where everything is. The only case of visual confusion I see is if you wake up in the hopsital have to learn to see again walk/talk etc. Visually though I don't see it taking that long. Am I lost??? Thanks. (I couldn't even finish my chapter 3 since the story bugged me so much!)

It's an allegory regarding the unfolding of understanding.. so, even if literally our vision is instant and we understand our surroundings, Plato's was all into the idea that our material surroundings are not really the entirety of reality.. more like, material surroundings (what you see when you wake up in the dark in your house) are signposts guiding us to the realm of ideas and free thoughts. So for example, you wake up at home, and you know you're at home, in the dark, because it's familiar to you.. but maybe that idea of Home is something other than your things, your bed, your family, your dog.. maybe it's the feeling that you get from being Home. When you move to a new house you might not instantly recognize your surroundings, it might take you awhile to ascribe the feeling of Home to this new place.

I am not really doing an adequate job of describing this. Basically, Plato's saying it takes awhile for us to really understand the greater implications behind what we see, and for the most part, people are only seeing shadows of pure ideas (think of the religious allegories written into media like TV shows that you might not necessarily pick up on directly but are still included).

Someone else could do a much better job of making this clear.

It seems basically people just see a basic idea and not the bigger picture of things. The basic idea is that the Wii with motion controls will fail and the 3DS will not do well due to 3-D when Nintendo looked at the bigger picture of trying to attract those who don't play games and also Nintendo understood the 3-D Boom we are in and I feel are capatilizing on it with the 3DS. (kind of off probably sorry) You did help me make better since of it though. Thanks.

Yes, I think something like that. Larger business strategies and not focusing in on details (both one of my strengths and one of my weaknesses!).

Oh wow, it's been ages since I thought about this stuff. Let me try to remember those lessons from the youth philosophy school. I may very well mess this up with something else, haven't read that stuff since I was 12. It relates to the perception of reality as opposed to reality itself and our ability to change and grow. To transcend what we perceive as the boundaries of our world view so that we can see more of the world, and in doing so gain greater truths and understanding. But also speaks of the difficulties involved in seeing more of a thing than those he used to share his world with. Outgrowing their limitations if you will.

While our perception may be perfectly valid from our point of view and to us what we see is absolute reality... it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the absolute immutable truth about what we see. Plato is pointing out that the prisoners in the cave have spent their life seeing only a part of the world, that part was all they knew, thus it was the whole of their existence. To them, that is the world. To the people outside the cave is only one small part of the world. The blinding the free man experiences in this sense can be seen to represent the lack of understanding we have when confronted with something new and our fear of this how we often respond to such things by going back to what we find familiar. With time he comes to understand and begins to see his new world clearly. He argues that the role of the philosopher is to expand our caves, that our view of our world as it is does not have to be unchanging and that the purpose of philosophy is to help us always move out of our cave to find a greater truth of which our old cave is but a small part and through philosophy explain it. And not just the world of the philosopher, but of those left in the cave, the philosopher's task is to help enlighten them as well.

But he also points out that to those who haven't grown as much, who haven't gone through the acclimation of understanding this greater world the man who returns will seem strange, perhaps even evil or frightening. His actions easily interpreted as an attempt to destroy the only world known to his former comrades. Which is after a fashion true, if he succeeds... once they have seen and understood what causes the shadows on their cave wall, how could they ever successfully return to that world for good? Once you've gained a greater understanding of the nature of a thing, it's almost impossible to go back to only the small portion you knew before. You can't choose to not understand any more what you've learned. I think this is something most of us can relate to in an old special interest, as you master it, you can never go back to that time when you knew nothing of it. The knowledge gained has changed us in that regard if nothing else.

Or I'm thinking of something completely different and confusing both stories and classes. Also a valid possibility.

I'm just here to express my dislike for this analogy.
This analogy alone dominated both my religious studies and philosophy classes in college...granted it's important, but my god did it annoy me that something this simple in terms of philosophy was covered so extensively in both classes.

if i remember correctly the people in the cave were seeing shadows and hearing echoes and thought those to be actual people and actual voices. the point is that you don't know what is real until you see something that is real. like when you're dreaming you might not be sure whether you are dreaming or it's real, but when you're awake you know you are not dreaming. (hopefully)

Enlightenment, epiphany, peak experience, in cartoons the little light bulb above the head, the many blind men describing an elephant: all better than that involved stuff.
That Greek stuff is always so filled with self importance but at the same time, dumbed down/patronizing IMO, that the writing itself is the "cave", like some kind of kindergardener's guide to "deep thinking".

Now days, if that were written on a forum, it would be considered attention seeking BS.

The allegory of the cave is a metaphor. Although, we can consider it as a metaphor for many things, Plato uses it as a metaphor to describe his theory of the forms.

Prisoners in a cave can only see shadows conclude that is reality and there is nothing more to life. Once they escape the prison, they see the real world.

Plato has a divided line of knowledge. At the bottom, is our visual perception of the physical materials of the earth, which he compares to prisoners in a cave seeing shadows. At the top of the line, is mathematics and forms.

The forms are intangible qualities such as roundness, liberty, perfection. Everybody in the world may become no longer happy, but that does not destroy the concept of happiness, for example.