Name: TED-ED】プラトンの洞窟の寓話-アレックス・ゲンドラー (【TED-Ed】Plato’s Allegory of the Cave - Alex Gendler)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:26:07.000Z
Duration: 4 min 33 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

What is reality, knowledge, the meaning of life?

法助動詞 B1

explaining existence as a journey  down a road or across an ocean,

a climb, a war, a book, a thread, a game, a window of opportunity,

or an all-too-short-lived  flicker of flame.

one of history's most famous thinkers said life is like being chained up in a cave,

forced to watch shadows  flitting across a stone wall.

That's actually what Plato suggested in his Allegory of the Cave,

in which the Greek philosopher envisioned the ideal society

by examining concepts like justice, truth and beauty.

In the allegory, a group of prisoners have been confined in a cavern since birth

They are chained, facing a wall, unable to turn their heads,

while a fire behind them gives off a faint light.

Occasionally, people pass by the fire, carrying figures of animals and other objects that cast shadows on the wall.

The prisoners name and classify these illusions,

believing they're perceiving actual entities.

Suddenly, one prisoner is freed and brought outside for the first time.

The light hurts his eyes and he finds the new environment disorienting.

When told that the things  around him are real,

while the shadows were mere reflections, he cannot believe it.

The shadows appeared much clearer to him.

until he can look  at reflections in the water,

whose light is the ultimate source of everything he has seen.

The prisoner returns to the cave to share his discovery,

but he is no longer used to the darkness,

and has a hard time  seeing the shadows on the wall.

The other prisoners think the journey has made him stupid and blind,

and violently resist  any attempts to free them.

Plato introduces this passage as an analogy

of what it's like to be a philosopher trying to educate the public.

Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance

In fact, the real life Socrates was sentenced to death

by the Athenian government  for disrupting the social order,

and his student Plato  spends much of "The Republic"

while promoting rule by philosopher kings.

Plato may be arguing that the masses are too stubborn and ignorant

But the allegory has captured imaginations for 2,400 years

Importantly, the allegory is connected to the theory of forms,

which holds that  like the shadows on the wall,

things in the physical world are flawed reflections of ideal forms,

In this way, the cave leads to many fundamental questions,

For theologians, the ideal forms exist in the mind of a creator.

For philosophers of language viewing the forms as linguistic concepts,

the theory illustrates the problem of grouping concrete things

And others still wonder whether we can really know

that the things outside the cave are any more real than the shadows.

can we be confident  in what we think we know?

a glimmer of light may punch a hole in your most basic assumptions.

Will you break free to struggle towards the light,

even if it costs you  your friends and family,

or stick with comfortable and familiar illusions?

Hard choices, but if it's any consolation, you're not alone.