Take Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. This ancient Greek thinker believed that all the objects around us are just shadows (ideas) of forms. This is how he describes our false perception of the world.
In the allegory “The Cave”, Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall.
The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world.
The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.
According to Plato, the objects of experience are imperfect imitations of forms. Let’s say that a mathematical triangle in abstraction looks perfect, but in fact there are no perfect triangles in nature.
Therefore,
those triangles that we deal with in the so-called real world are only
imperfect reflections of the ideal form. And the same with other things.
Even what we perceive as beauty is just a reflection of true beauty....<<<Read More>>>...
