Worthy Life and Worthy Death in Plato’s Allegory of The Cave Essay Sample

In Plato’s Allegory of The Cave, Socrates compares the human condition to prisoners chained in a cave who can only see shadows of the real world. Those who have never seen the real world are ignorant of its existence, and the prisoner who is freed from his chains and ventures outside the cave is ridiculed and scorned by the other prisoners upon his return. In a similar way, Socrates was executed by the Athenian intellectuals for his teachings which ran counter to their rational knowledge. Plato’s Allegory of The Cave is an illustration of the limitations of human understanding and the need for questioning conventional wisdom.