Zouheir Boussaid
Serena Reavis
ENG 111-0003S
22 June 2013,

In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato presents his abstract view of human nature and truth, whereas Douglass presents his personal journal in “Learning to Read and Write.” Compare and contrast Plato and Douglass' essays and ideas. How might Douglass view Plato's allegory based on his experience?
The most basic question that we can ask ourselves is: who and what am I? Moreover, the answer to this question about human nature (what a human being is) will greatly affect how we see ourselves.
In Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”, he managed to let us visualize people living in a big cave, where these people were chained by the leg and by the neck and they couldn’t move. They can only see what is in front of them. He explains to us how the “The Allegory of the Cave” is the education of the soul toward enlightenment. According to Plato, the chains that bind the prisoners are the senses and the prisoners symbolize ignorant people, the raised wall symbolizes the limitation of our thinking.
The idea of Plato’s essay describes how most people are trapped in their own world, unaware of what is happening around them. According to Plato the “The Allegory of the Cave” is the common man and it represents all people before they are fully educated. The common person sees nothing but the shadows on the wall of the cave.
In Plato’s essay, the fire has a significant meaning to the common man; it is the source of light and the only reality he can see as it sheds light into the cave. Then comes the ascending man and he is the only one who managed to emerge from the cave that shelters the common man. Once he comes out, he then understands the forms and becomes fully educated. The ascending man realizes that the “fire” can give you a vague idea of what reality really is, but until you surface, the only thing you see is shadows.
In the “Learning to Read and Write”, Frederick Douglass uses diverse techniques to get us to understand how much he went through in order for him to learn how to read and write. After being born a slave, he could not go to school, as it was illegal to for slaves to get education back in the 1800. He showed how learning to read has subjected him to knowing more about the situation he is in. He writes, “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed my self, or done something for which I should have been killed.” (7).
At the time Douglass was writing, many people assumed that slavery was a natural state of being. They believed that blacks were born only to serve the whites, and they are incapable of participating in civil society and therefore should be kept as workers their entire lives.
So based on Douglass experience he might see that Plato’s allegory as an experience that he went through while he was a slave, he was at some point in chains latterly and figuratively, those chains that got him to push for more and do what no slave at the time dare to do. Douglass can be compared to the ascending man in Plato’s allegory, because he defy all the rules, and put his life in jeopardy just to learn how to read and right and educate himself because he realize that education is the bulb that lighten the path ahead.

Work cited.

Douglass, Frederick. “Learning to Read and Write” The McGraw-Hill Reader: Issues across the Disciplines. Ed. Gilbert H. Muller. 11th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 258-262. Print
Plato. “The Allegory of the Cave” The McGraw-Hill Reader: Issues across the Disciplines. Ed. Gilbert H. Muller. 11th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 656-660. Print