This refraction of knowledge – the idea that the world as we experience it is somehow second-hand – is most famously illustrated in Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’. In this story from The Republic, human existence is compared to a person chained inside a cavern, with a flickering fire behind them and restraints that stop them turning around. As objects pass in front of the fire, their shadows are projected on to the wall in front of the chained person. These shadows are all they can see – not the objects creating them. The objects represent the immaterial forms that comprise reality, while the
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