As is often true, the viewer is given the experience, but knowledge is shaped by attitudes and not by true interpretation.
The gap that can develop between experience and knowledge has long been embodied in art as the ambiguity that exists between reality and illusion. Plato indicated how we may fool ourselves into perceiving a reality that is not knowledge in his Allegory of the Cave from The Republic. Plato's conception of reality as a reflection of the ideal is embodied in the Allegory of the Cave, and Plato emphasizes that the philosopher must return to the cave to understand the relationship between the ideal and its projection in this world. The allegory also relates to issues of epistemology as to what we can know and how we can know it. The cave becomes the touchstone, the example that serves to demonstrate the relationship between the idea and the reality, between perception and reality, between the perfection of the idea and the imperfection of the reality. Perceiving reality and developing knowledge is a painful
...