What is reality? How can we tell truth from untruth? People's willingness to comprehend these concepts has been reflected in the discussions of different philosophers. These discussions have not always developed in the same direction, although they sometimes had common points as well. Such a pattern can be seen between the arguments of Nietzsche and Plato. They both argue that people live in some kind of a deception, or an illusion, but they differ in their opinions about what the reality and the truth are. While Plato defends that the visible world is constituted of appearances and that truth and reality belong to the intelligible realm, Nietzsche does not make such a distinction. Since they have similarities as well as differences, reconstructing Plato's allegory of the cave from Nietzsche's view would be helpful in understanding both of these philosophers well. In this paper, I will proceed in a comparative approach for showing the main points, and then I will conclude with their sum-up.
             The main points in evaluating the allegory of the cave are deception (or the illusion), real versus appearance and truth versus untruth. Although Plato and Nietzsche are similar in their opinions about the deception, I would first like to focus on the other issues, because they explain how and why there is deception. First of all, how Plato distinguishes real being from the appearance is very well expressed in this allegory. For Plato, the shadows on the walls of the cave are nothing but appearances of the real beings that pass in front of the fire.(241) This is a symbolism for the visible world. What people see in the visible, material world is only the appearances of the real beings, the real forms. Therefore, although the appearances may seem to hold within all the reality, they are actually less real and less accurate than the forms, as symbolized by the objects passing in front of the fire, in the allegory. Plato also argues that seeing th...