RESPONSE TO "THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE" The faith most people have in their individual perceptions of reality is brought into question upon reading Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this excerpt from The Republic, Plato questions the validity of our perceptions by using the analogy of the cave, where prisoners are kept underground and forced to look upon the shadows of "real" objects. Kept there since birth, they have taken the shadows to be …showed first 75 words of 312 total…

…showed last 75 words of 312 total…reality except in perception. Which stands to reason, perhaps there is no reality, only our individual perceptions. So then is wisdom indeed nonexistent, or is it merely in accepting that perception is not necessarily reality and vice versa? Or maybe we need only to be open to the idea of our reality being false; and that to accept the possibility that we ourselves are chained in place and shown mere shadows of reality is enough.