Suggestion: Platonic Cave

Here's a drawing of Plato's allegory that I think still works at wiki size.

I like it.

I always liked that drawing.

Honestly, i don't really get what this trope is about but i like the drawing.

As I understand it, it's about people defining "reality" by the circumstances and boundaries of their existence, with the possibility of escaping that "reality" and realizing that there's a much larger world/universe/whatever than their former boundaries.

The short version is that Plato's general philosophy was that humans are generally limited by their own perceptions of the world and don't naturally see the reality behind things. His famous image explaining this was the Cave: He compared humanity's natural state to some people who lived their whole life in a cave only able to see a series of shadows cast on the wall, but never seeing the real things that cast the shadows. His idea was that we're like the people in the cave and only perceive shadows of reality, and that the point of philosophy was to try to "escape the cave" and be able to perceive reality as it is rather than simply accepting it as we see it now.

Considering the concept is kind of complex, the drawing works well enough.

Works for me.

Works for me, too.

Any copyright issues to worry about?

I believe it's originally from a textbook◊, so using a single-drawing excerpt from that would presumably count as fair use.

Screw platonic, I want romanitc!

for 10.

That's enough for consensus, so it's up and tagged. I don't think a witty caption would add much, so I'll vote no caption.

"Free your mind." is the only thing that comes to mind.

That works.

^^ That's appropriate.

I've added the caption since there's a bit of consensus behind it but haven't tagged the page. Locking up.