Plato and the Little Prince Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Little Prince of Antoine de Saint Exuprey

Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Book Seven of The Republic portrays a world in darkness, the darkness of a cavern. Individuals in the darkness of the cavern of the lived texture of reality, of a daily existence of neckties and golf as Antoine de Saint Exuprey might say, sit around a burning fire. This image represents human beings the world. The fire the human beings gaze at is the fire of the enlightenment the philosophers of humanity, are seeking, often in vain. Occasionally, the humans at the fire catch glimpses of a higher form of reality upon the walls of the cave in the form of shadows. The shadows, which represent how most human beings see reality, are really only dimly filtered versions of the true nature of the forms, or the most pure aspect of every lived substance -- for every object in the world, there is a more perfect version of it...

Thus the author De Saint Exuprey dedicates the book to "the child from whom this grown-up grew," the Platonic form of the adult whom is now seen by all in the world as a shadow upon the cave, for "all grown-ups were once children -- although few of them remember it," the author notes, the "forgetting" of an adulthood of childhood being a reference to the Platonic false consciousness of what we perceive as reality, but is merely the shadowy world of the forms. Childhood is purity and…