the world beyond the cave. The freed prisoner could not comprehend what he saw. After being distressed by the glare, eventually his eyes could focus on the more real existence outside the cave.

The physical journey into sunlight corresponds to the mental enlightenment of allowing one’s conscious mind to embrace new insights as well as admit the existence of the unknowable. If and when humans can admit to the limits of sensory-based understanding, only then can they begin to comprehend the vast scope of cosmic knowledge—much of which they will not be privileged to access.

I can’t do this assignment for you, but I’m happy to provide you with some main ideas to help get you started! The “Allegory of the Cave” is an extended metaphor of sorts that helps Plato illustrate his theory of the forms and argue that it is only with an application of philosophical reasoning that humans can begin to access truth.

The cave that the prisoners are trapped in represents the superficial material world that human beings are born into. The prisoners assume that the shadows that they see on the walls of the cave are real because they are all they have ever seen. But then when one of the prisoners leaves the cave and sees the sun, he realizes that the prisoners inside the cave are wrong about what is real.

Plato explains the purpose of the allegory when he says that:

if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you’ll grasp what I hope to convey.

He is explaining that a human’s journey towards the realm of higher truth is similar to the experience of the prisoner learning about the sun when he left the cave. Much like that prisoner, Plato is saying that when we study philosophy (“the study of things above”) we begin to understand that what we see around us is but mere superficial imitations of the unchanging perfect forms in the higher realm. This point the root of his theory of forms, also called the theory of ideas, and he is thus trying to articulate it in this Allegory.

In the Republic, Plato describes the allegory of the cave in which people are chained to the wall of a cave so that they only see shadows cast by people passing in front of a fire behind them. They can't escape to the sun outside the cave, so the shadows, rather than the objects themselves, become their reality.

The causes for people's living in ignorance are many. First, people lack education to broaden their horizons, and Plato believed that only philosophers can grasp the reality of the objects, rather than the shadows themselves, because they have additional education about the world around them. In addition, people are limited by their preconceived notions or prejudices and by their senses, which can't always take in complete information. The effect, or result, is that people have a limited sense of reality and even of their own limitations. Until they face the sun, they don't know the full truth about their reality.

In this allegory, people are in a cave, chained to a wall in such a way that they can only face one way and essentially have no knowledge that there is anything behind them. But behind them are puppet performers and behind the performers there is a fire. Further behind this is a passage that leads outside the cave to the sunlight. The people in the cave only see the shadows on the wall the face. The shadows are created by the performers. So, the chained people only see a semblance of the truth. The absolute Truth lies outside the cave in the sunlight. So, the people in the cave are thrice removed from absolute Truth: Sun/Truth - Performers/Fire - Shadows. 

This allegory shows that there is more to truth or "reality" than what we see and experience. In Plato's Idealist philosophy, the allegory is meant to show how his abstract Forms (Ideal ideas of things in their perfect form of Truth) are three times removed from our normal experience. The allegory also suggests that philosophers or the philosopher-king rulers he talks about in The Republic, should (after they become enlightened in seeing the Truth/Sun) go back into the cave (back to the city/society) in order to rule and educate the masses. 

This allegory is a classic structural way of presenting the notion of "thinking outside the box." In this case, the box is a cave, but Plato has other applications of the metaphor, as discussed above. 

What causes people to experience things so far from Truth? This is a broad topic, so there is too much to go into here. But consider things like culture, ideology, our fallible senses, and tradition as things which structure our thinking and behavior. Plato was "caused" or motivated to write the allegory to illustrate how people should aspire to greater truths that they should go above and beyond traditional ways of thinking. The hope is that this will create many effects: a more educated public and more particularly, a more educated body of leaders. 

In the history of Western Philosophy, this allegory has had a great effect on subsequent thinkers. Philosophers have debated different interpretations of the allegory but all consider it to be one of the most important allegories of seeking truth and wisdom. 

Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” is found in book VII of Republic. In this section, the character Socrates presents a scenario designed to illustrate Plato's ideas about reality. Socrates begins by setting up a picture of people chained in a cave. They cannot look up into the sunlight but can only see shadowy images on the wall in front of them and hear echoes of people walking about in the sunlight outside the cave.

Yet these chained people know nothing else but these shadowy images and echoes. To them, those shadows and echoes are reality. We realize that there is far more reality outside the cave, but they have no way of knowing that.

Socrates then discusses what would happen if one of the prisoners was set free from his chains and offered a chance to go out of the cave and into the sunlight. At first, that prisoner would not want to go. All he knows is the “reality” of the cave. Those who free him would have to drag him out, and then his eyes would be so blinded by the sunlight that he wouldn't be able to see anything clearly. He would be angry and in pain at the change. He would, however, begin to be able to see more as his eyes adjusted, and he would learn that reality is far more than what he thought it was when he was chained in the cave. He would see the actual people and things that he only saw in shadow before.

Socrates finishes the allegory by reflecting on what would happen if the freed man went back down into the cave and spoke with the people still chained there. He feels sorry for them and wants to tell them that there is so much more to reality than they ever dreamed. But they don't want to hear. They think he is crazy, and if they could get free, they would actually seek to kill the freed man.

This allegory is intended to show us how little we actually know about reality. What we see, Plato believes, are merely shadows compared to the substance that we cannot now see.