Plato’s cave was the first-ever philosophical thinking experiment. To demonstrate his theory of Forms, he asked his students to consider a suppository occurrence that could explain his notion. As presented by Plato, the allegory of the cave imagines a group of people chained together inside an underground cave as prisoners. Behind the prisoners, there is a fire, and between the prisoners and the fire are moving puppets and real objects on a raised walkway with a low wall. However, the prisoners are unable to see anything behind them, as they have been chained and stuck looking in one direction – at the cave wall – their whole lives. As they look at the wall before them, they believe the shadows of objects cast by the moving figures are real things—and the only things. Their visible world is their whole world.
The narrative goes on to ponder about what would happen if one of the prisoners were forced to leave. What would they see? The narrative assumes the freed prisoner would return and try to liberate their fellow prisoners, now knowing how much more of the world exists outside the cave. However, in its conclusion, the other prisoners would likely kill those who try to free them, as they would not want to leave the safety and comfort of their known world.
Plato uses the cave as a symbolic representation of how human beings live in the world, contrasting reality versus our interpretation of it. The Ideas we have and the Forms behind them.
