The Philosophy of BONDAGE

I’m not going to lie; these readings were extremely difficult to understand. But my little summary of this is going to be (just to keep my understanding straight) that there are prisoners who live underground and are chained to be immobile and face a blank wall. There is a fire positioned behind them and it produces shadows on the wall and it is the only thing that they can see. There is an upper ledge that people walk on and carry things past the fire and the prisoners see the shadows and associate the voices they hear with the shadows. Socrates asks that if one of these people were to be able to stand up and see the sources of these shadows that they wouldn’t believe these people to be more real to them than the shadows that they had seen and that they wouldn’t be able to call them by name. He goes even further to say that if one of these people were to go outside the cave and see the world that it would take time to adjust and when he does that he would look at the sun and realize that it is the source of light and everything around us. And that if he were to look back on his previous life, that he would assume that he is happy now and have pity on those back in the cave. After that, he asks what it would be like for them to go back into the cave after being outside. The person would still have to get readjusted to the dark; meanwhile everyone on the inside would say that the outside had corrupted his vision and that there is no use in wanting to go out there.

“Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that Forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. The Forms are the only true objects of study that can provide us with genuine knowledge.”(http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/platform.htm). That pretty much sums up the entire philosophy spoken throughout the entire allegory, that what we perceive around us is what gives us our sense of reality, which is the case with the servant underground and aboveground, each one of them believes what they see is real, but when given the chance to experience something completely different, they seem more enlightened, and when returned to what they had previously considered reality, they are rejected by all the people there and accused of being corrupted.

I believe that Plato believed that some supernatural or divine craftsman created the universe and that there is a lack of balance between the elements (fire, earth, air, and water). The creator decided also to make the bulk of the universe out of the four elements, in order to make it proportional. In addition to fire and earth, which make the world visible and solid, a third element was required as a union of the two of them, and a fourth element was needed to reach harmony so, the creator placed water and air between fire and earth. "And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion".

I found how the elements being composed of triangles and being these polyhedrons and how all this was a primitive form or precursor to alchemy by having the elements be able to transform. I have always been fascinated by geometry and chemistry, and I found it very interesting and wondered how he would have come to think about these elements having these qualities.