In Plato's Cave, the prisoners are in a permanent trance of privation (PD); namely, a curious privation of reality. The reality they know, of moving shadows, is in fact not representative of reality whatsoever, so while the prisoners may come to excel over the others in mastering this reality by predicting what shadow comes next, they are in fact deluded. Thus, Plato proposes a dichotomy (DJ) where the prisoners, those who devote themselves to empirical evidence, are in darkness (literal and figurative), whereas the people of the outside world, who represent the philosophers, have been enlightened.
