Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Allegory of the Cave
Plato packed a lot of information into this story. He examines what humans view as the truth and why that it so. The philosophical nature of the piece forced me to reread certain sentences and passages several times in order to follow his train of thought and grasp the concepts he is referring to. One claim he makes that strikes me as truthful is that whatever you are exposed to is your definition of reality. The people stuck in the cave viewed the shadows of the objects passing by as real objects, not the shadow of objects. Since they had no knowledge of the actual physical object, the shadow was more real for them than the actual object itself. I think this applies to a variety of things, one being stereotypes. For Example: If you are only exposed to one Native-American in your school, his actions, thoughts, words, behaviors, and being becomes the reality of all Native-Americans, simply because that is what you are exposed to. Once you meet another American-Indian who doesn't possess the same qualities an lives a different lifestyle, you may think of him as an exception, but he may in fact be more consistent with contemporary Native Americans. I feel that this is how the people who were brought out of the cave felt when they saw the objects in "reality." I'm sure that they considered these objects strange and exceptions, because for them, the reality was that most objects look like the shadows on the wall. This is essentially how stereotypes are built, a few peoples' experiences with a group becomes "reality" to them.
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