Sherisse Iraheta

English 1

Professor J Casem

3 October 2018

Rough Draft

In today’s contemporary society, the fundamentals regarding human perception and reality

have become a complex issue because the modern world radically live in a world full of illusions.

In context of three philosophers, Francis Bacon who authored “ The Four Idols, “ Plato in

“Allegory in the Cave, “ and lastly, Carl Jung in “The Personal and Collective Unconscious ,” have

all associated their written disclosures stating that humanity live in a state of dreamlike illusions

that has been constructed through our social hyperreality and misinterpret the ethical ideals of

reality and self-actualization.

“The human understanding of its own nature prone to abstractions and gives substance and reality

to things in which are fleeting. But to resolve nature into abstractions is less to our purpose than to

dissect her parts “ (886 or 131).

Bacon emphasizes that the human mind distorts reality with illusions and don’t use their

capabilities to reason and seek knowledge with their sensory perception in order to establish what

is truly real. In other words, human nature is ignorant and aren’t enlightened to grow or justify the

truth of what is real and fake. Therefore, the post-modern culture is relevant to the prisoners of the

Allegory of the Cave by perceiving complex cultural dimensions in variety of fields such as

materislitc transcendence within the globalized mass media, the effect of the American collegiate
educational system, communication systems, and forms of political government. As the prominent

philosopher Plato puts “the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just

as they was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so to the instrument of

knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming

into that of being” (872 or 124). In other words, he states that the prisoner needs to turn more than

just their head but the whole body, the whole soul, and the whole desire to learn. Plato uses

symbolic metaphors and use the prisoner turning his body to look at the fire as a representation of

enlightment and further escapes the cave into the sunlight as a form of awareness to a different

state of understanding in spite of knowledge. As he explores he feels pity for the other prisoners

and returns to the cave and informs them of this new reality outside the cave. However, the

prisoners reacted impulsively and terrorized him because of their ignorance. They lacked liberal

education and were indenial to process the truth of this new reality due to comfortablility of their

scenario. Plato’s concept reflects a highly sophiscatred universal truth in which human nature take

place in todays contemporary.

In the educational atmosphere, platos ideal can be imposed on college students as the forms

of being prisoners in the cave.