Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Often times I hear the media giving praise to Plato's works, describing them as highly logical, legendary, and even entertaining. So many people regard him in the highest esteem, that it seemed a waste not to read at least one of his works, maybe have an epiphany or two, and be entertained as well. After reading through the essay, however, I had realized just how intricate and difficult this analyzation would be. Upon meandering through the tidbit of The Republic that is "The Allegory of the Cave" for the second time, I decided that (I thought that his work was very difficult to understand and hard to follow. Feel free to laugh at me if I get this wrong) Plato was trying to convey that real world things are not to be labeled. For instance, a hand is something that is remembered as a picture, sound, or feeling. However, a hand is so labyrinthine in it’s entirety that you can’t expect your idea of a hand to truly encapsulate the awesome scale that a hand requires. It is therefore important to keep thinking of something as it is, not as you would picture it, so to speak.

Even my obtuse explanation of this allegory you can tell that Plato's generation, or at least Plato himself spoke in tongues that were a cluster**** of analytical gibberish (this was before the age of print, photograph, or telegraph, so things would be communicated differently as stated in Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death) which are most likely not helped by translation into the English language. There are a few major writing styles in his essay that are still employed after all the years since Plato’s time, though. One might take note of the fact that Plato's essay contains, and is based upon, allegory, an explanation of an idea through imagery or a story, to validate his views on human nature. This would be a strange move in the modern world, because we typically go to statistics, facts, and other proofs to explain our ideas. In Plato's world, however, a solid allegory is sufficient to validate most arguments. Also dominating the print of this essay would be Plato’s use of unique rhetoric. In this essay, Plato is trying to persuade his colleague, "Glaucon", to see his way of thinking through thorough explanation and assumption. Plato(Plato's translator more likely") uses a not unheard of, yet sadly unused way of explanation in which a person simply explains in detail the situation or concept; stopping to introduce a new level of detail to his concept. Another interesting writing style demonstrated by Plato is the order in which he chooses to place words in a sentence. For example, on page 285 near the bottom of the page, Plato is showing his colleague how a theoretical epiphany in his allegory is handled by human beings. It says, "...-will he not be perplexed?" Even though this sentence is grammatically correct, it certainly is a strange choice. Why not say, "It'd probably perplex him, right?" as someone from our country and time would say, or at least, "won't he be perplexed?".

While I'll say that it is somewhat of a pointless idea to try to analyze the writing styles of a piece of literature that has been translated into our language and has therefore lost most of the original literary genius of its creator and taken on that of the translator, many of Plato's underlying concepts still shine through. To me, the more important thing is to have read and tried to understand what the author was thinking in this circumstance. One could contest that my work was a complete waste of time because I am looking for the literary styles of great writers, not their translators. To that I will only say that I thought Plato would be an interesting read. It was, and I learned alot about the ways in which communication and education were delt with around the 5th century B.C.; maybe not too much about the actual writing styles of Plato, though.