Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, in the metaphor of the cave and its dwellers, Plato states that the world as human perceive it is like a dark cave, where all human beings sit around a fire, staring into the light; they cannot see one another, the nature of reality, or the heavens with any great understanding in such a dark and cloistered environment. The author points out that any individual who dwells in "real life" can have some inkling of the use of the metaphor, separating the gesture of goodness in name or in physical action alone from the actual, meaningful gesture of either selfless love that does not demand a reward or enact a real, physical result in the world, rather than simply obey a social code. The paper concludes that Plato's metaphor is a positive and active approach for human philosophy because it suggests that a complete form of understanding is possible, despite the pain it may cause.

From the Paper:

"The reason that human beings do not have a full sense of a real and a complete life is because the world, as we cave dwellers see it, is not experienced fully and in the flesh of the present moment. Rather, it is only experienced in a shadowy and inconsequential fashion. Because human beings are distanced, because of a poor philosophical education, from the nature of the world's reality, the fire blinds us, or we mistake the shadows we see for truth. The heavenly philosophical apprehension of a greater truth that is more fully conceived and more intellectually substantive than the life on earthly is much better than what we actually pass our day to day existence in, which are simply copies of "the real"."

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