[POL200Y1] - Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam (103 pages long!)
Document Summary
The allegory of the cave: the prisoners of the cave are like us, without education. We are meant to find the condition of the prisoners pitiful. They are not mean to be seen as having lives worth living. The idea is that we are imprisoned by ignorance. We receive images and sounds from puppeteers and we wrongly think that we are receiving truth, when in reality the truth is outside of our prison and into the sun. The puppeteers in this case are unquestioned authority figures (our parents for example, teachers, schools, religions, cultures, media). If you think about it, we have inherited many more ideas and we keep them far further into adult life than we are conscious of. We take conventions much further than we may realize. Like the prisoners in the cave, we might dogmatically resist enlightenment. The light blinds the eyes of the prisoners, they want to return to their old certainties.
