What are some of the practical applications of different kinds of knowledge, you ask? Well, we need knowledge to do anything, and when I mean anything, I mean anything. Take breathing for example, we know how to breath, because we learned it when we were born, and we have the knowledge of breathing. Now we breathe all the time. Same with walking, eating, and seeing. We learned these things to survive, I would count that as practical, wouldn’t you? Newman and Plato both agree that knowledge is important, but they have different applications for it.
I think Newman doesn’t want us to learn just to be popular at the Sunday morning book club meetings, but just because we can. In Plato’s allusion we need to find knowledge for ourselves, to become enlightened, or to overcome a task; such as leaving a “cave”. We all learn things, but we need the “want to learn” instead of the “It’s cool to learn” is what I believe the message is here.
Posting 2-Newman
Posting 1-Plato A)
The allegory of the cave is a story about the human race captured and held prisoners in this cave. The catch is that these people don’t really know that they are captured. These humans are chained to walls and they see this “Puppet show” and take that as the “real” world. One man questions this and with the help of a prisoner who is already free is released to the upper world so that he too could be free.
When you grow up in a world of shadows, and that’s all you see, that is your reality. You just take the world for granted, you accept anything someone tells you as the truth. The people who stay in the cave and continue to accept the “puppet show” as a reality are basically those who refuse to accept the truth, or those who don’t want to seek a higher knowledge. Galucon on the other hand is someone who questions the truth, and meet Socrates and he lets him free. Galucon is seeking a higher education, and is taught by Socrates. When he leaves the cave to see the world, he pities the other people in the cave for they don’t know the things that he knows. Whereas on the other hand they say that he is foolish for leaving the safety of the cave thus proving their ignorance.
