"The Allegory of the Cave"

"The Allegory of the Cave" shows that in Plato's eyes we are all disillusioned. While we think that we are seeing and experiencing the real world, we are not. We are seeing "shadows" of the real world, and in order to see the "real" world, we need to open ourselves to further questioning and deeper thinking. Parmenides argues that reality is permanent and characterized by unity, whereas Heraclitus believed that reality is constantly changing and that there is no such thing as permanence. Plato reconciles these two by classifying them as levels of reality in which one can experience the different levels and gain understanding like the lucky prisoner in the allegory.