The Allegory of the cave, or Plato's Cave,
is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature".

In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

Borges' "mirror" metaphor leads us to Plato's cave theory:

The world is the shadow cast on the stone wall seen by the person sitting in the cave. We think we are facing the real world, but in fact we are only facing the "mirror". It is nothing but a parody of God. Here we clearly feel a kind of "reality", which comes from the fictional nature of the world. The mirror is like the world. It constructs and deconstructs you, turning you into fragments, into infinity, and into light in time.

“世界不外在于表达它的主体，然而，它是作为本质而被表达的，此种本质不是主体的本质，而是存在的本质，或那种在主体之中呈现的存在领域的本质。"

"The world is nothing more than the subject that expresses it. However, it is expressed as the essence. This essence is not the essence of the subject, but the essence of existence, or the essence of the realm of existence presented in the subject."

Plato’s Cave may strike us as very familiar to the modern cinema – we sit in the dark watching projected images play out the drama on the screen before us. Consider Maxim Gorky’s reflections upon attending the Lumiere cinematograph in 1896:

‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre’