***************** http://www.jwlidz.us/cave.html : The Cave image portrays pre-philosophical life as a condition of enslavement: the cave-dwellers are "in bonds".

We can relate this condition of enslavement to Socrates' renowned pronouncement, "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being" (Apology, 38a). This standard translation of seems to me to miss the point. ou biotos can be translated either as "not worth living" or as "not [worthy] to be lived." The fact that Socrates here makes reference to humans (when such is normally implicitly understood) only emphasizes his desire to contrast the properly human (rationaldeliberative) mode of life with the non-human, rather than to contrast a human life which is worth living with another human life which is not.(7) Thus, I suggest that a superior translation would be: "The unexamined life is not worthy of being lived by a human." Bearing in mind the Hellenic contempt for slaves, we can understand why the prephilosophical (enslaved) condition of the cave-dwellers would symbolize a less than fully human condition when contrasted with the philosophical way of life. (In the Sophist [253c], dialectic is described as the episteme of the free man.) The reference to food and its effect on the soul is reminiscent of another soteriological myth, that of Adam and Eve. Eve's attraction to the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil leads her to eat the fruit not out of willfulness--she hadn't even been created at the time God gave Adam the proscription--but because of the fruit's aesthetic, nutritive and intellectual value (Genesis, 3:6). The Primal Pair is then evicted from the Garden, not because of their disobedience, but because of God's concern that his status qua immortal might be usurped by them (3:22), and the price they pay is loss of moral innocence, as well as alienation from God, Nature and each other. But the Eden myth portrays no mere loss of Paradise, but rather presents a gloss on the pains and gains of moving from Nature (symbolized by unabashed nudity) to Culture. The myth of the Cave also presents a transformation which is Janus-faced, for the escapee both gains and loses something as a consequence of his escape. Whereas Eve's failure to keep her soul turned upwards toward the word of the Creator produced a rupture in her being such that she was no longer subordinate only to God, but now subordinate to the relatively inferior Adam, so the failure of those with small souls to keep their souls looking upward toward true beings renders them subject to an inferior mode of being.

******* The Allegory of the Cave http://www.earthharvest.org/en/christian_o nline_bible_apologetics/isthereagod/GodJesus-Christ-Buddhism-World-Religions-Plato-

Greek-Philosophy-1.html When residing the body, Plato maintains, the soul uses the instrumentality of the body for any inquiry, whether through sight or hearing or any other sense because using the body implies using the senses it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled, through contact with things of similar nature (Phaedo 79 c). Sensory input is subjective, imprecise and imperfect. In a court of law different individuals have different recollections of the same incident. Individuals see colors differently. A green to one person may be brown to another or even a shade of grey. Some people are enraptured by exultant symphonies while others are tone deaf. Some people spend hundreds of dollars for bottles of exotic wines, while others prefer the drug store variety. For them the taste is the same. With age the body withers and the senses fail. As Solomon observes in Ecclesiastes 12:1-5 (Contemporary English Version):Keep your Creator in mind while you are young! In years to come, you will be burdened down with troubles and say, "I don't enjoy life anymore." Someday the light of the sun and the moon and the stars will all seem dim to you. Rain clouds will remain over your head. Your body

will grow feeble, your teeth will decay, and your eyesight fail. The noisy grinding of grain will be shut out by your own deaf ears, but even the song of a bird will keep you awake. You will be afraid to climb up a hill or walk down a road. Your hair will turn as white as almond blossoms. You will feel lifeless and drag along like an old grasshopper. With age reliance on the senses or empiricism diminishes as the body as our instruments for sense perception become less reliable. Plato uses the allegory of the cave to illustrate the deception of matter, the unreliability of the senses, and his philosophy on reality (Republic VII, 514 a- 517 a). He asks us to envision men who have lived all their lives in a subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width at one end. The legs and necks of these men are chained from childhood, so they remain in the same spot. They are able to only look forward at the cave wall and cannot turn their heads. At a distance behind them is a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners is a walkway on which men, like puppeteers, carry human images and shapes of animals made out of wood and stone. Some of these men are silent while others are speaking, their voices echoing in the cave. The puppets and shapes of animals and

humans cast shadows on the wall. The chained prisoners watch these shadows. When the puppeteers talk, it appears the shadows are speaking. Only experiencing this shadow world as reality, the prisoners name the shadows passing by them, in a type of game, giving honor and prizes to one another to the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their sequences, coexistences and order. He asks us to suppose that one of the prisoners is freed from his chains, turns his head suddenly around, and walks away, lifting his eyes to the bright sunlight coming into the cave from its entrance. That prisoner would be pained by the piercing sunlight, no longer able to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw. At this point the prisoner is told that all his previous perceptions in the shadow world arose from illusory tricks, but what he was now seeing was nearer to reality. Being comfortable with his earlier perceptions, he would still regard what he formerly saw as more real than the things which are now being pointed out to him. If the prisoner were to be forcefully dragged up the rough and steep ascent of the cave into sunlight and brought out into blinding sunlight, he would be in pain and chafe at the situation. Initially he would not be able to discern the things that we call real. At first

he would most easily discern the shadows, then the reflections of men and other things in the water, and later the things themselves. From there he would be able to contemplate the heavens, at first more easily at night, but finally he would be able to look upon the sun itself. He would conclude that this is what provides the seasons and presides over all things in the visible region, and is the cause of everything he has seen. He would be happy with the knowledge he has gained and pity his fellow prisoners down in the cave still playing their shadow game. No longer would he want to participate in it, preferring to be a serf or a landless itinerant. He would no longer be able to endure such a life, but if out of pity he were to return, down to the cave, his eyes would take a long time to adjust to the darkness, having suddenly come out of the sunlight. The prisoners would laugh at him, saying that he had returned from his journey with eyes ruined, making the ascent not worthy of attempt. If possible they would try to seize and kill him for trying to release them and lead them out of their imprisonment. From Platos perspective, just like the prisoners in the cave, we live in a world of shadows as long as we depend on our sensory experiences. We are entranced by the fleeting and the impermanent. The physical world which our senses perceive is

analogous to the shadows of humans, animals, and puppets moving on the caves walls. *******

Plato's Allegory Of The Cave Compared To The Human Condition http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Platos-AllegoryCave-Compared-Human-Condition/40950?topic

The Allegory Because of how we live, true reality is not obvious to most of us. However, we mistake what we see and hear for reality and truth. This is the basic premise for Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners sit in a cave, chained down, watching images cast on the wall in front of them. They accept these views as reality and they are unable to grasp their overall situation: the cave and images are a ruse, a mere shadow show orchestrated for them by unseen men. At some point, a prisoner is set free and is forced to see the situation inside the cave. Initially, one does not want to give up the security of his or her familiar reality; the person has to be dragged past the fire and up the entranceway. This is a difficult and painful struggle. When individuals step into the sunshine, their eyes slowly accommodate to the light and their fundamental view of the world, of reality, is transformed. They come to see a deeper, more genuine, authentic reality: a reality marked by reason. The individual then makes the painful readjustment back into the darkness of the cave to free the prisoners. However, because he now seems mad -describing a new strange reality - they reject him to the point of threatening to kill him. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a direct representation of the human condition, the circumstances we as humans presently encounter, circumstances such as conceptual frameworks, or basic beliefs, and our typical behaviors in society. The allegory metaphorically describes our situation as human beings in the world today. In his story, Plato utilizes several key elements to portray his metaphor of the human condition. Plato's image contains pertinent ideas about society that are relevant to my everyday life. Through his reading, I have begun to discover the ideal form, the use of reason over perception to approach, view, and judge all things. Prisoners, watching life unfold on the cave wall in front of them, accepting what they see.......... *******************