| abstract | - An allegory is similar to a metaphor, in that something abstract is spoken of in terms of something that is concrete. It is often used in poetry and related to religion.
- Allegory is a device in which characters or events represent or symbolize ideas and concepts. Allegory has been used widely throughout the history of art, and in all forms of artwork. A reason for this is that allegory has an immense power of illustrating complex ideas and concepts in a digestable, concrete way. In allegory a message is communicated by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken. As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. Plato wrote an allegory called "The Cave Allegory", and as literary allegories go, possibly none have been more influential on Western philosophy. A group of men are chained up in a cave, facing the wall, unable to turn around and look behind them. Behind them, in the middle of the cave, is a roaring fire, and when things move in front of the fire shadows are projected onto the wall in front of their faces, and the men see these shadows, but, ignorant as they are, take the shadows for reality, and go about their lives in a fool's paradise. But one day, one of the men frees himself from his chains, and sees that the shadows are not real but are only substanceless representations of the real things. Plato had an idea called the "Theory of Forms". The basic idea is: the world that we know is a shadow of something else. This "something else" is the form of the world, or the essence of the world, or the world in its purest form. Not just anyone can know or understand forms, only philosophers could, according to Plato. The path to becoming a philosopher was one of illumination, quite literally, if we remember the Cave Allegory. The cave is ignorance, the shadows are the world that "ordinary men" perceive, and the free-man is the philosopher who has found true knowledge by seeing the fire and by stepping into the light outside. Plato has used allegory to illustrate a very complex philosophical idea.
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