Dear Plato,

Upon my recent reading of Allegory of the Cave, I must say that at first I found your argument to be very dark and confusing. I could not comprehend a group of people spending their entire life bound with chains in a dark cave. I believe this to be very similar to your argument. I found myself to be in a false reality. However, now that I have read "Allegory of the Cave," I find it was the absolute truth.

The more I read, the more I realize that you could not be more right. Ironically, yesterday I began watching the theatrical performance of " V for Vendetta." In this movie, the people of London are oppressed by their fascist government. However, there is one man who dares to stand up against them. This man is only known as V. He is a masked vigilante that is a master of combat and deception. In his conquest to take down the corrupt government, he helps other citizen’s question what the government is really doing. He brings a police chief and thousands of other people out of the shadows of a false reality, and into the absolute truth. Although they were reluctant in the beginning, and were eager to name V as a terrorist, in the end they were known as outsiders only to the people who were still in the shadows.

My only question for you is this: why, in the concluding paragraph, do you say it is impossible for professors of education to put knowledge in the soul which was not there before? If it is possible for me to understand Socrates’ analogy as it is explained to Glaucon, and I do. Why is it impossible for a man that is fully capable of reasonably explaining the Theory of Forms, to explain it to another man as long as he is intellectually capable of learning the idea?

Sincerely,

Shannon Adams