[quote name='prmononoke']I don't think so. Maybe. Care to remind (or tell for the first time ever!) me what it is?[/QUOTE]
PlumeNoir knows more about philo than me, and it's been a while since I took a class, but small rundown:
Plato's Allegory of the cave is that you would be in a cave, chained to the wall, forced to look forward. In front of you in a screen (think like a movie screen). Light shines down from a hole at the top of the cave onto the screen. All the shapes that walk by outside the cave project their shadows onto the screen. You, being chained to the wall, can only look forward at these shapes, and you assume the world is exactly like that.
One day you manage to break free, and you wander out of the cave. The sunlight would blind you for a while, until you gradually managed to adjust and see the world for what it is.
You could even then go back to the cave and tell everyone about the magnificent world, but they would not understand you, wouldn't want to understand, and would choose not to. Only by dragging them out into the light could you change their minds.
That's the gist of it - it's all a metaphor about knowledge and how we learn things. Once you discover something "true," we may have not been able to immediately recognize it.
This goes hand in the hand with his Theory of the Hierarchy of the Forms, which basically said that everything that exists is only an imitation of something perfect somewhere, and thus we cannot ever fully understand something. I.e., for every chair in the world, there's this idea of a chair floating around somewhere, and it is all possible chairs at all possible times. We can only conceive of this meta-chair, but we can never fully see/understand/imitate it.
So if we ever got out of the cave and found the meta-chair, for example, even that is only an imitation of something far more perfect that we cannot ever hope to comprehend.
Kinda trippy if you think about it too long.