Plato's Allegory

A relatively well-known idea of Plato is his allegory of the cave, which appears in his work Republic. In this allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles to an inner wall, facing the empty outer wall of the cave.

They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people invisible to the chained prisoners, who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall for the prisoners. The object bearers speak the names of the objects, the sounds of which are echoed near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves.

Only the shadows and sounds are the prisoners' reality, which are not accurate representations of the real reality. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of the reality that we can perceive with our senses. The goal, then, is to free yourself from the cave by realizing that the shadows on the wall are not the real reality, but merely a reflection or interpretation.

What Hides Behind the Veil

The allegory is related to Plato's theory of Forms, according to which Forms — and not the material world we know through sensation — possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. According to this theory, Forms are the nonphysical, timeless, absolute and unchangeable essences of all things, which objects and matter in the physical world merely imitate, resemble or participate in.

The Forms are perfect and unchanging representations of objects and qualities. For example, the Form of plants. We can all picture in our minds a plant. However, this picture is far from perfect. It is only through the intelligibility of the Form that we know that this picture is a plant, because this Form is perfect and unchanging.

These Forms are the essence of various objects, they are that without which a thing would not be the kind of thing it is. For example, there are innumerable plants in the world, but the Form of plant-being is the core. It is the essence of them all. Plato claimed that the world of Forms is the essential basis of reality and transcendent to our own world, the world of substances.

Furthermore, he believed that true knowledge and intelligence is the ability to grasp the world of Forms with one's mind. Thus, studying reality itself is like peering through the bars of a prison.