Instead, he suggests, it would be better to accustom the prisoner slowly, by degrees, first viewing “shadows, and then the images of men and things reflected in water, and later on the things themselves” (paragraph 21, line 3). Socrates then draws this freedom a step further, hypothetically bringing the prisoner outside of the cave into broad daylight, which would be even more confusing. He also would find the sight of the fire itself painful and would instinctually turn away, back toward the familiar darkness. He would necessarily “be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see” (paragraph 15, line 5), and would believe the shadows he has seen all his life to be more real than the objects and figures themselves. Socrates then asks what would happen if one of these prisoners were freed and made to turn, finally, toward the light. Glaucon agrees that they must think this way.
The shadows would be the only thing they knew, and thus would be more real than true objects, which they had never seen. Rhetorically, he asks if the prisoners would not then take these shadows as the only true objects in existence, since they could not understand that they were mere shadows of objects. Then, he asks Glaucon to imagine a fire lit behind them, with a sort of puppet stage in front of the fire, so that other people could project shadow figures onto the wall in front of the prisoners, recreating the forms of people and animals and objects from outside of the cave-prison in shadow form. He asks Glaucon to imagine a set of prisoners trapped in a cave since birth, shrouded in utter darkness, and chained so that they can neither move their bodies nor even their heads to look anywhere other than the wall in front of them, so that this wall is the only thing they know of life.
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